If you were a reader of my tales I thank you. If not, then thank yourself.

I leave you with the lyrics from Society by Eddie Vedder from the Into The Wild movie.

This is about as accurate of a statement that I can think when comparing something to Twitter. I’m not sure what gets covered more these days…pig flu or twitter. I actually read some tweets tonight from that article and I was disgusted with myself. Shit like this is supposed to make me want to join Twitter?

“‘Who’s the boss’ was such a great show.”

“I’m eating a bowl of oatmeal that never ends. It’s not going anywhere and I’ve been eating it for a solid 15 minutes.”

“Sometimes, out of a sense of almost curious contempt, I’ll point my space heater at my refrigerator.” (in all honesty I do find this kind of funny)

“too much junk food last night. it’s worst than post-porn guilt. i just sit in front of my pantry and say “why?”"

What a waste of my time. And shame on me for even taking the time to write about this crap after not writing for so long. If I ever sign up for twitter and you see me on the street, please punch me in the ear.

Big decisions.  They’re a real bitch.  You can only hear marketing pitches so much.  You can only look at data sheets so much.  You can only read reviews, SPC-1 benchmark results and blogs so much.  The difference between the best and very good are miniscule these days.  Hardware has gotten to the point where it will never get to the point of stressing the infrastructure in the vast majority of environments.  In my world Its pull the trigger time on a storage decision that is closer to seven figures than it is to five figures.  I’ve listened to all the vendor speak that I can stand and have looked at data until my eyes bleed. 

In the last year I was part of another significat infrastructure decision that taxed heavily on the mental strings.  In that one I didn’t trust my gut and I’ve regretted it quite often here in the last few months.  I bought into the sales pitch more than I should have and now we are paying for it to a certain extent.  I’m not doing that on this one.  My gut is making the call on this one…at least for as much influence as it can which may not be a whole lot.

Idol pick…I’d send Gokey home.  He’s as boring as a sermon.  But my gut doesn’t think that will happen.  Lil’ Round…this was your last round.

How much of life’s experiences revolve around timing?  A damn good number of them do.  Timing can be a sexy mistress or a back alley hooker with VD.  On April 1st I woke up to discover I’d come down with clamydia (metaphorically speaking of course!).  And no, it was not Conflicker!  We are in the middle of a proof of concept with an RSA enVIsion appliance.  We had a guy coming on site to install and configure the appliance on 4/1.  On 3/31 I spent the day preparing & testing our Nevis NAC solution by creating the necessary user and access rules so he could get in and do his job while not having access to our network.  It wasn’t a lot of work but that’s not the point.  I woke up to find an email in my inbox about an SSL certificate used in the Client Endpoint Integrity client being expired.  Luckily, this would only affect endpoints that had not installed the previous version of the client…like a consultant coming on site to install an RSA enVision appliance!  How’s that for timing?  Nothing a little penicilin couldn’t clear up!!

I was reading Mitchell Ashley’s latest post over at NetworkWorld tonight and was a taken aback by something he wrote in regards to the level of nerdery you keep in your home.  I guess in the “real world” its frowned upon if you don’t have a handful of servers at home running different hypervisor flavors tied to a dumpy old switch that sits powered up doing absolutely nothing all day.  If its estimated that enterprises utilize somewhere between 5% and 25% of server capacity, what does the “home” network utilize?  Somewhere less than 5% I’m guessing which seems like a tremendous waste of resources.

I guess I fall in the “Boo” category.  I have a simple, single core, self built PC at home with just an internet connection.  I do have a wireless router though.  Is that worth something in Nerdville?  Guess that wouldn’t get me very far should I be in an interview these days.

Did I mention that at work I have access to a half dozen retired Cisco routers, two big 4500 Catalyst switches, two retired Nokia firewall appliances, a retired fiber switch, iSCSI SANs, a stack of retired & unused servers bigger than a lot of environments have in production (not to mention the 6 foot stack of retired 1U servers), ESX Virtual Infrastructure and enough storage to spin up anything and everything I could ever want to learn without ever affecting a production network?

BOO!

I was free.  I had done my changes for the night and was getting ready to shutdown and take my sorry ass home.   Life was good at 6:38 PM.  Then one minute later it all changed.  I get the following email from Rainman about an ESX problem:

I have to go to the school and play the Easter bunny.  Yes I am a 6’ bunny.  Call me Harvey.

I need to reregister the SQL boxes.  They are not happy after the reboot. 

Can you bring those up so I can run to the School?

Okay…not a big deal.  This is a two minute process.  Remove the guest from inventory, from the command line run vmware-cmd -s register “/path to vmx file/file.vmx”  and go about your day.  Wrong-o.  Its now three hours later and I’m on the phone with support.

It doesn’t end there.  Rainman made a fatal mistake in emailing me some videos of his activities tonight.  I suggest you kick back and enjoy the show.  Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids!

Last week I said I’d do an American Idol pick weekly.  I got it wrong last week.  Let’s get some redemption.  I’m gonna go with last weeks pick again.  Michael Sarver, good bye.

Like I said…we’ve all had it happen.  Translate that to nerdery and it comes out as an impacting event at work.  I mentioned it a few posts ago about a new person starting in our department.  Well we actually had two people join our department in the last few weeks.  One of them, who will be referred to as “Caddyshack” from here on out, got the first “scratch” on her car today.  Luckily it was a very superficial sratch that nobody even notices but the person that did it.  She took the approach of “bite the bullet” and just get the first scratch out of the way because its gonna happen eventually so now is as good of time as any.  That’s admirable.

This brings us to our second player, Angry B.  Angry B appears to be the type to protect his investment as long as possible.  But its coming.  The unfortunate part of sitting on an investment to long is that you usually end up losing more than you’d like had you just cut the ties and walked away sooner.  That pretty much equates to Angry B having a major impact down the road.  Time will tell if this philosphy holds true.

That’s enough of poking fun at other people.  Its time to poke fun at myself which is about the easiest thing to do in the world.  I’m gonna start a new ritual of mentioning my opinions on American Idol.  Yeah, that’s right.  I’m a grown man and I watch American Idol.  Poke fun all you want because I can take it.  I’m a music lover and American Idol is one of my “guilty pleasures” even though guilt is not an emotion that I feel!  So here’s this weeks synops:  The first guy tonight, Michael Sarver, is a dead man walking and better pack his bags.  My favorite to win it all is Danny Gokey but I have a dark horse in Matt Giraud.

I have to give a congrats to the Missouri Tigers on their Big 12 Tournament championship.  I argued that Kansas was the best team in the conference most of conference play but their youth proved me wrong in the last two weeks.  If anyone wants to claim that the Tigers are the best team in the conference they will likely get a nod in agreement from me.