Confessions of a SysAdmin

LOPSA Elections next week!

jessetrucks — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:30:49 +0000

The next elections for the LOPSA Board of Directors is next week!

Please review my candidate statement, and please vote for me if you are a current member of LOPSA. At the very least, vote!

Moving along...

jessetrucks — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:03:38 +0000

So, as mentioned in a recent post, I relocated for a job. Well, I relocated for complex reasons, but it was initiated by a job offer. As mentioned in a previous post, I now work for D. E. Shaw Research, LLC in Endicott, NY. We relocated the farm operation to Brackney, PA just over the NY/PA border.

The hauling of stuff, animals, and people is complete, but there is much work left in unpacking and re-organizing everything from normal daily life to animal care-taking.

More on the latest work I can discuss in public (like investigating inventory management systems) and all things LOPSA coming soon in other posts.

Tap... Tap... Is this thing on?

jessetrucks — Wed, 20 May 2009 03:51:37 +0000

I usually use MarsEdit for posting to this and other blogs, but that means I always have to log into the web GUI and manually tell the Drupal Twitter module to send a notice of a new post.

After digging around for a short bit, I discovered that I might be able to automagically do this with Drupal Triggers.

This post is a test of that functionality while posting via the web GUI.

Thank you for reading this non-emergency broadcast test.

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Movin' movin' movin'...

jessetrucks — Tue, 19 May 2009 17:16:03 +0000

For everyone who, like me, got excited that I was actually posting... Okay, for those few who read my recent postings and finally got interested, I am in the process of packing up my farm and moving almost 900 miles. This process will be complete in the first week of June.

Expect topics in June and beyond like how to evaluate inventory management needs and systems for small to mid-size operations, the burdens and costs of frequent travel, and inventing new wheels because there are no wheels that solve a particular problem.

Mind mapping is the new brainstorming

jessetrucks — Thu, 07 May 2009 02:08:24 +0000

I've heard the mind mapping term tossed about here and there for years, but I never really understood how it differed from plain old brainstorming from the days of yore. I felt my storming mind needed a little orderly mapping, and below I outline how that process unfolded.

Recently I needed to use my whiteboard to work out some ideas and how certain concepts were interconnected. The whiteboard was already full of the things I needed to connect, but they weren't written out in a way that made that easy to do. In addition, I really needed to take the contents of this brainstorming on the road with my laptop, and I do not have a tablet for scribbling on a virtual whiteboard on the computer.

I remember a colleague from LOPSA, Bob Apthorpe, telling me that mind mapping software was a way to use a computer to easily brainstorm. He described how it was different from outlining software like OmniOutliner or the outlining tools in Microsoft Word or Apple Pages because outlines require a strict hierarchy and the rigidity of the format limits creativity.

That memory popped to the forefront of my mind when I was looking for a solution to my whiteboard problem. My answer, then, was to investigate my options for mind mapping to see if it would work as effectively for me as it did for Bob.

The easiest and most cross-platform option is FreeMind, and it is Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) as a bonus. Apparently it is an immensely popular option because it is quite good at mind mapping, not just because it is FOSS.

FreeMind's User Interface (UI) is fairly straight forward and rather intuitive. You start a mind map with a central or main idea. From there, you can branch out to either side any number of sub-ideas, each of which can have any number of their own sub-ideas and on until you have your entire tree of related ideas mapped. You must have that central idea and can only tree out from there to the right and left, so there is an inherent limitation of two main types or sides of ideas, though in practice any of the sub-ideas off the central concept are direct children and there is no distinction within the software placed on the right or left sides. You can, also, make multi-colored and shaped pointers from any sub-idea to any other sub-idea to indicate non-linear relationships.

Most mind mapping software I read about or poked at used this basic paradigm or something quite near to it. (I should mention that Tony Buzan lays claim to inventing mind mapping. He has a gallery of mind maps, and he promotes his own software, iMindMap as a solution, as well. I strongly considered it, also, because it is cross-platform and appears quite robust.)

Then someone told me I needed to look at TheBrain's Personal Brain software. At this point I had already decided to just use FreeMind, but I was finding limitations in its paradigm and visualization techniques. PersonalBrain was exactly what I needed.

PersonalBrain uses a fluid paradigm where no one idea (or "thought" as they call them in the context of the software and within the "Brains" it creates) has more importance than any other. All thoughts can link to any other thought as a parent, child, or related on a more peer or distant basis called a jump. Depending on the version you use, you can export your data in different ways, as well.

PersonalBrain has changed the way I capture and document ideas, concepts, and complex relationships. Because I can now use any idea (or thought) as the locus of a view into the data, I can see relationships that aren't linked that should be, streamline cumbersome connections, normalize data using multiple child/parent relationships for any data set, and move through and with large, highly complex structures in whole new ways. I can map out extremely complex data relationships and how those correlate to the real world, such as data points for tracking repair issues, response times, or hardware failures, and how those items relate to locations, inventory, and other processes.

I can take a completed mind map (or brain) using Personal Brain and directly translate those relationships into a fully normalized relational database design to implement those conceptions as hard ideas to improve my work and my business.

Now, if only I could do this with a VR rig.

RSS vs. Productivity: It doesn't have to be winner takes all

jessetrucks — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 16:18:59 +0000

In my Twitter vs. Productivity entry (published mere minutes before this one), I outlined how I tweaked my Twitter usage to use the tool more effectively.

What I didn't mention is that I did the same with my RSS reader, Net News Wire (used in conjunction with the NewsGator Online service). That is, I removed feeds I don't read or that always get backed up because of the overwhelming traffic. I kept the feeds that are of direct professional or personal interest.

Granted, much like with Twitter accounts, I will have some on occasion that I am just testing out, but my new criteria requires that:

I read the entries often.
The post frequency and volume is moderate or low (unless quick to read or sort through).
I read the entries consistently
The information is interesting professionally or personally.
My life improves, either professionally or personally, in some small or large way from the content.

These restrictions don't mean I have a small list of feeds or Twitter accounts I read. On the contrary, it is still time for tough decisions about what feeds or streams to remove. I love learning, and I love learning from other people's perspectives. That makes it hard, but no less important, for me to cull out everything that isn't the most efficient and effective.

Of course, sometimes there are feeds or streams so moving or relevant to the times we live in that they break the rules above. Most rules have exceptions anyway, right?

Twitter vs. Productivity: It doesn't have to be winner takes all

jessetrucks — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 15:55:07 +0000

For five months now I've hardly read the Twitter stream of those I follow on the service. Also, I rarely tweet on anything except when my blog software sends a notice of a new post (via the Drupal Twitter Module), much like the automation on most news service Twitter accounts. I've been enormously productive.

Every time I happen to see an interesting Tweet, I dig around in my stream to see if there were other interesting comments or conversations. Sometimes I find something or learn something new or get a bunch of URLs to investigate. Most of the time it's hard to find anything amidst the noise.

Tom Limoncelli, who I like to quote, recently wrote about the Twitter time sink problem, but his solution was to just stop using it altogether. I like instant, yet still asynchronous communication like SMS, IM, IRCor email. The problem is that the first two are only for private, single person to single person communication media. IRC and email allow for a broadcast to multiple people, but their limitation is that they only send information to those people either on the same IRC channel at the same time as the sending of a message or, in the case of email, to the people on the recipient list. Twitter is both broadcast and public (with the option of locking, or protecting an account to keep non-followers out). By using Twitter, I can be part of a larger, organic conversation, and I can increase the exposure of my message (which, in turn, means increasing exposure to my blog).

I found the cure for this signal-to-noise (SNR) problem while still using Twitter. I stopped following high traffic streams unless it is a stream I am very interested in or it is a close, personal friend. Also, I just removed some more that were geographically pertinent to my previous home in Wisconsin (see my earlier post about job changes and moving on that topic) than my current location in New York. Then, I removed some folks that weren't relevant to my life or work in a direct way. For example, some people I originally followed because I thought they would be helpful or interesting for my professional development or directly related to my profession or industry. Yet, many of those usually tweet more about unrelated matters or their personal lives, which has meaning in the context of being involved with that person on a personal and traditionally social level but does not have meaning in the context of my professional development. I use twitter to be part of the larger socio-economic and political landscape of our time, so unless these tweets are from a personal friend it turns into a time sink and a distraction from my own life, both professionally and personally.

For anyone that I am no longer following, please accept my apologies. It has nothing to do with who you are, your ideas, or anything else about you as a person, both privately and professionally. It just means our use of Twitter differs, and I have a finite amount of time available for reading streams or URLs that come from them.

Transforming Art into Science

jessetrucks — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 03:03:52 +0000

Tom Limoncelli of The Practice of System and Network Administration (TPOSANA) and Time Management for System Administrators (TMfSA) fame recently wrote a provocative blog entry called Transforming Art into Science on his Everything Sysadmin site.

In it, he talks about how not only our profession is growing up from the wild days of yonder where nobody had solutions to the problems that plagued us, but we, as individuals and teams of individuals, grow up from system administration as artful expression and intuitive leaps bringing praise and glory for elegant hacks to a carefully planned, methodical, and scientific approach to managing systems in cold, dispassionately calculating ways.

Please go read his post, as it describes how we should approach system administration and some ideas on how to migrate in that direction for ourselves and our teams.

SCaLE debrief

jessetrucks — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 07:17:38 +0000

LOPSA training classes at SCaLE were a great success!

The Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) in Los Angeles, California was in February, so this commentary is quite tardy.

The opening of the week was quite hectic for me as my wife and I had just been out to Endicott, NY the week before, and I hardly had enough time to prepare.

Once I was at the conference hotel, I met up with some folks I knew, including fellow LOPSA instructor Chris St. Pierre. The evening involved hectic last minute planning. That really meant I wasn't sure what was going on, but everyone else knew things were well in hand with nothing to worry about.

The whole event was run quite professionally by Ilan and crew, and everything we needed was handled quickly and efficiently. I just had to show up and do my classes, as it turns out!

Reference the SCaLE-U schedule at: http://scale7x.socallinuxexpo.org/conference-info/scale-u

My first class, Introduction to Virtualized Storage Management was mostly a new course for me to teach. I took the better part of a previous storage related class I presented at another conference and expanded on it to make a full class about how virtualized storage works.

The second class was a reprise of my Disaster Recovery course. This was originally two separate presentations given at the now defunct local group MAD-SAGE back in October 2001 and May 2002.

Once again, the students really made the class interesting (and entertaining!). The students came from a wide range of experience and organizations, which is usually the case with these courses. The classes went really well, and the students supplied me with great feedback. You know who you are, and I thank you for making my next class better for those students.

If you took either of these classes and are waiting on a copy of the presentation, please remind me via email, and I will now send it to you.

I hope I am fortunate to have the opportunity to do classes or at least attend SCaLE again.

Mr. Trucks Regrets (He's been unable to blog of late.)

jessetrucks — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 06:45:45 +0000

So, you haven't heard from me in a while. Again. Please don't act surprised. We know you'd just be faking to make me feel better.

Excuses? Why, no! So much to read! So much to say! (Really.) So much other stuff to do! Actually, I just haven't built a good blogging habit. Yet. I do have things I want to say, and this time around I actually started a couple blog entries.

The short, and true, story is that I became very busy with a flurry of activity and near-constant travel since my last post in early February. Except for the brief trip to SCaLE (which one of my unfinished posts is related to), I've been back and forth between Wisconsin and New York for my new job. I'm traveling tons during this transition period until we're all settled in a new place out East closer to summer.

I now work at D. E. Shaw Research, LLC at their Endicott, NY datacenter as a member of the Systems team managing large-scale clusters, supercomputers, and the facility housing them.

I am just getting to know the area, which is difficult to do when not around here much. I've met some good folks, including Mary Ann and Coe from L'aveggio Roasteria, who roast and serve the best coffee I've had my entire life, and the friendly and welcoming folks of the Southern Tier of New York Linux Users Group.

If you love coffee, try L'aveggio's, especially their Liga Masiva roast. It is fantastic and supports sustainable coffee farming in the Dominican Republic.

If you happen to in or near New York's Southern Tier, come out and meet us!

Commentary on blogging...

jessetrucks — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 04:15:25 +0000

In his personal blog, Seth Godin writes a short piece about two very different types of blogs.
He explains how there are the big, top ranking blogs "written by teams of people" and there are the small, not as highly ranked blogs he calls "solo blogs" written by individuals. He, also, makes a distinction within the solo blogs between what he calls cat blogs, which are about the blogger, and blogs about the reader. Though I encourage everyone to both go read his post called "Death of the personal blog?" on this topic and to follow his blog, I think the best part of that post is:

The point is not to show up on a list, the point is to start a conversation that spreads, to share ideas and to chronicle your thinking.

What are your favorite blogs about? Are you interested in the blogger, or are you interested in the larger conversation started or continued by the blogger?

LXer Interview

jessetrucks — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 18:18:01 +0000

Scott Ruecker of LXer interviewed me via email about my involvement with LOPSA and the SCaLE U training classes coming up in a couple weeks on February 20 in Los Angeles.

Blog changes...

jessetrucks — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:08:24 +0000

Okay, so a LOPSA colleague of mine,William Bilancio, had some suggestions about improving the interoperability of my blog to encourage other people to use the site interactively, like leaving comments. I followed his advice and went a step further. I enabled OpenID in Drupal as a start. People can now use any valid OpenID account they have to authenticate to my blog. My site will ask to create an account, and it will then tie the OpenID account to the local account so no local authentication is required. You can then leave comments without being bugged or screened. In order to make leaving comments and signing up for accounts more painless, I am testing out Mollom. It is a service for reducing SPAM through a variety of methods, including text analysis and CAPTCHA images. It is accessible friendly, in theory, as well. Commentary or feedback is welcome. This means you can now post comments without signing in, but you have to leave your contact info and pass the Mollom checks.

Phases of becoming a blogger

jessetrucks — Sun, 01 Feb 2009 18:39:33 +0000

So, I'm catching up on neglected blog feeds while taking a break from heavy labor on the farm (for those who don't know: I have a small farm in rural Wisconsin, USA) while I sip coffee and contemplate whether I should really come up with a solid blogging strategy.
The very first blog entry I read is from Jason Warner, who runs the "Learning and Development for Online Sales and Operations at Google, on his meritocracy.net blog, which covers various topics usually related to talent acquisition and retention. His from March 12, 2007 describes The 12 Phases of Becoming a Blogger. They are, in brief:

I can't do a blog. I'm not qualified.
I could do a blog, but no one would read.
If I did do a blog, some people would read.
Once I started a blog, I would run out of things to write about.
I'm going to try blogging, but I don't know how to set it up.
People would probably help me set it up, so I'm going to try and do this.
I now have a blog, and it's hard to fit writing into my life, but I think about things diferently.
I've been writing a little bit, and I'm running out of things to say.
I'm starting to fit blogging into my normal weekly routine.
I have way too much to write about that I no longer have the time to write about everything I want to say.
I've met a few people through my blogging.
Blogging has changed so much about my life.

I think I'm somewhere around item 7 on that list.
Where are you?

LOPSA training classes at SCaLE

jessetrucks — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 19:12:16 +0000

As a followup to its highly successful training programs, LOPSA is partnering with the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) for the second year in a row. The training classes are on Friday, February 20, 2008, and the conference is Saturday and Sunday, February 21 and 22, 2008.

Though I have no first hand knowledge of last year's events, I heard the training was quite successful.

I am teaching two classes at SCaLE - University, and I will be available during all of SCaLE when not teaching. I'll be attending our booth on and off all weekend, as well.

This year at SCaLE I am teaching one of my favorite classes, Disaster Recovery: Will you survive?, and a foundation course on storage, Introduction to Virtualized Storage Management.

The DR class was well received at both LOPSA Sysadmin Days and OLFU 2007. It covers considerations on how to think about DR, what to think about, and how to implement those concepts. My favorite aspect of this class is talking to everyone in the room about how they can take something back to their operation and implement DR for their location. It makes for lively discussion.

The Storage class is more technical in that it talks about how disk storage is access and used on a low level in an OS. Though the class is quite Unix/Linux focused in the examples given, the concepts apply just as well to Windows or other platforms. I hope that everyone who takes it will learn enough to go back to the office (or their own systems!) and implement virtualized storage immediately. It covers how disk storage is presented to an OS, how an OS uses storage, and the limitations of non-virtualized storage that I know have bitten us all! Then it covers how virtualized storage works and how to use it to make everything better.

I feel fortunate to have so many opportunities to attend these various conferences and be an instructor. I love getting out and sharing my experiences and the knowledge I've gathered over the years from mentors and through painful trial and error. I learn from every person in my classes, and that enriches my professional experience - which, in turn, enriches my future classes! I am still in contact with many of my former students, some of which are teaching on their own areas of expertise, too.

I hope to do some networking while at SCaLE, and I hope anyone I haven't met that attends any of the classes - either mine or the great topics taught by veteran instructor Chris St. Pierre - or the conference stops by to introduce themselves! So, don't be afraid to drop me an IM, email, or TXT/call (if you have my cell number, which I seem to give out quite freely) so we can arrange to meet. (NOTE: If you try to contact me via Twitter, please send a direct message as I may not see your comment/query in a timely manner otherwise.)

See y'all at SCaLE in Feb!

Networking of the People Kind

jessetrucks — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 06:34:07 +0000

For a while now I've been observing and partaking in networking. Yes, of course computer based networks, but lately I've been thinking (and working) on human networking. It's been around far longer than computer systems, and most professions are much better at it than IT folks.

We often forget that networking is more than just posting to your favorite tech mailing lists or comments on blogs. Networking involves building relationships. Sure, we do this online a lot - in IRC channels, tech or user group mailing lists. We even do this at conferences and training events. Then we have our various social networks, like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Using any networking system or social media effectively requires care and effort. Too many people are interested in the number of people following them, on their friends list, or in their network on these sites. On one of my favorite sites, RecruiterGuy clearly defines the differences between networking and just building lists of people.

Please read it. Then ask yourself if you are using and contributing to your network or are you just collecting names.

If I am in your network, I will usually do what I can to help you. I know the people in my network usually help me. I used to collect names on the list, but now I actually make use of those contacts. My career and life is better for it, and I'm sure others feel the same with their network.

Drupal 6.x upgrade process is great

jessetrucks — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 07:20:27 +0000

So, I just performed a Drupal 6.4 to 6.6 upgrade, and it not only took a very short amount of time (about 20 minutes start to finish), it worked flawlessly!
I've been a fan of Drupal ever since we launched the LOPSA site in 2005, but the latest incarnation is really well done software.
Hats off to the folks driving Drupal!

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Tumblelogs, Microserfs, and Starbucks water

jessetrucks — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 19:18:38 +0000

So, in the spirit of building the habit of posting, even if it isn't the long, thoughtful, well-researched pieces I so much love to read, as I said in my last post, I bring my stream of consciousness blog entry today.

So, I was suffering from an unusually bad case of exhaustion and sleepiness at work. The solution was to go get a red-eye from the little cafe in the basement of the building. They use Starbucks service. Every time I get handed a cup of freshly brewed Starbucks coffee, even with a little java jacket thing around the cup, it's so hot it burns my fingers.

This reminded me of the 1985 Douglas Coupland novel Microserfs. Everyone in IT or Gen X or younger ought to read it. Coupland's prescient commentary on Microsoft and dot.com life in generally right on. The reason i thought of this novel in particular, though, is the commentary on how hot Starbucks coffee is. I wanted to find the quote from the book that is relevant, so I started googling around to find it. The exact quote is found on the Critical Mass blog entry from May 2006:

From "Microserfs:"

I think Starbucks has patented a new configuration of the water molecule, like in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, or something. This molecule allows their coffee to remain liquid at temperatures over 212 Farenheit. How do they get their coffee so hot? It takes hours to cool off -- it's so hot it's undrinkable -- and by the time it's cool, you're sick of waiting for it to cool and that "coffee moment" has passed.

Of course, while searching for this little gem (and drinking the life sustaining coffee), I stumbled across something new (to me): tumbleblogs. Apparently the term was coined in a Red Handed post back in 2005. That officially puts me more than three years behind the curve on this one.

Back when it was easy to be on the bleeding edge, I was usually there hemorrhaging gleefully with the other early adopters. Now, I'm usually a little behind with the new safety blade version of the cutting edge, right before the blunt edges come out.

Will this become a tumblog? I guess time will tell.

Blogging hurdles

jessetrucks — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 02:29:31 +0000

So, apparently I have to rethink not whether I want to blog, because I think I made that mostly clear in the last post, but I have to rethink my process.

I thought about why I almost never post to this blog.So, apparently I have to rethink not whether I want to blog, because I think I made that mostly clear in the last post, but I have to rethink my process.

I thought about why I almost never post to this blog. My musings resulted in:

I like reading long, thoughtful posts on other blogs.
I always try to write posts that are like the ones I enjoy reading.
Long, thoughtful blog posts, especially with references and links liberally sprinkled about, take a lot of time and effort to be high enough quality worth both posting and, more importantly, reading.
I don't like blogs that are only posts with one or two sentences and a reference to another site.
I need to get into a regular posting habit.

After these thoughts solidified, I suddenly felt the urge to post. So, in the spirit of blogging, I grabbed the iBook and fired up MarsEdit, my blog editing software. Sitting in the Local Drafts folder in MarsEdit were (and still are) four unfinished posts I've started over the last few months. That was the wafer-thin mint.

This all is a culmination of my recent musings on a variety of topics, my recent experience reading several liveblogs during the U.S. presidential candidate debate, and my recent introduction to how people use Twitter (which i'm not sure I understand adequately, yet).

The final result is my decision post a combination of short and quick thoughts or links to things I find thought provoking, critical, or otherwise blogworthy with my preferred format of longer posts with more information, ideas, and references in them, such as I've mostly done in the past.

LOPSA partners with OLF for OLFU 2008!

jessetrucks — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 13:35:25 +0000

LOPSA does training in partnership with conferences throughout the year in addition to the occasional (twice now) Sysadmin Days event. This year David Parter, a Director on the LOPSA Board, and I taught a System Administration Master Class at YAPC::NA 2008 in Chicago. Now LOPSA is partnering with OLF for the second year to bring you OLFU, a day of training.

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Long time no blog...

jessetrucks — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 04:15:20 +0000

So, apparently trying that blogging thing didn't work so well in the last several months of chaos. So, I think we're back to a variation of the same question:

Why blog?

RecruiterGuy says blogging fascinates [him] more because of what he reads rather than what he types. He likes finding the interesting and normal posts about normal and interesting people. My spouse, who is a professional writer, recently started blogging because, with an audience, there is an expectation of content, so she just has to write it. The New York Times says, "Reason No. 92: Book deal," due to some blog authors landing book contracts based on the subject of their blogs. Some time ago when professional blogging wasn't the norm, Fredrik Wackå spent a few months talking about why companies should blog.

As many people know, I am interested in things related to communication, knowledge sharing, and various types of media. Blogging is a natural fit in amongst those topics, as it is a form of sharing knowledge through intentional communication, using various types of media - though all web delivered content. Blogging can be more a conversation with the reader than more traditional forms of written work - even other styles of web/net content. The tools we have today allow us to create blog posts as responses to other web content, especially other blog posts. For example, this post uses trackbacks to the sites it references. That means those sites, if they use trackback technology, now know that this post references them. It is the only way to automatically tell another site that you point at them, and it can be a rather powerful tool in furthering our global conversation. This is what the Blogosphere is all about. Purportedly, Brad L. Graham, on his Must See HTTP:// blog, coined the term Blogosphere in his September 10, 1999 post. Now it is a fairly common word to describe this interactive and sometimes navel gazing nature of blogs that we all seems to love (or hate, depending on the blog's content). In looking at how we can share more knowledge, communicate with more people of both similar and dissimilar viewpoints, and leverage our technology and global community to improve our lives, blogs are the personal conversation compared with the formal discourse of traditional news and industry or trade journals. Instead of responding to an article with an opinion piece in another newspaper or a letter to the editor posted to a web site, we can immediately respond on a personal and/or professional level, with full attribution for any source material as we would in any reputable paper or article. We can even reference less formally, yet more accurately, because we can send our readers directly to the other source, not just describe it so they can find it as we have to do in MLA, APA, and other reference rules.

So, have we answered the question: Why blog?

Yes. No. Maybe.

Yes, because we know that as humans we must converse with others to expand our knowledge and learn from viewpoints we do not already have. A global conversation can be as powerful (or more) than a local or regional conversation. It is certainly more powerful than not even having the first half of the conversation with a blog post.

No, because there are a myriad of personal reasons why people blog, and I've barely even touched on the non-personal and esoteric reasons to blog. There are so many reasons driven by emotion, circumstance, a desire to heal (oneself or others), a need to write, a requirement for employment, or research. There are as many reasons to blog as there are to write in the first place, but there is the added complexity of the asynchronous conversation with complete strangers, colleagues, friends, and family.

Maybe, because not everyone likes writing, or even reading, blogs. I certainly have intimated some reasons I find interesting or compelling for blogging, but have I disclosed why I blog? Not entirely, and certainly not directly.

Perhaps I just want start a conversation and seed it with some musings of mine and others.

Hopefully this won't be a one-sided conversation.

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Jott.com

jessetrucks — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 01:24:16 +0000

So, a while ago I managed to lose the list of news feeds I tracked. As my life finally started winding down to a mellow level of chaos, I recently started playing catchup. The result is that I've been reading either overlooked, forgotten, or simply neglected feeds and posts around the blogosphere.

Tom Limoncelli, author of Time Management for System Administrators, posted Time Management: Need to jott someting down? on Everything Sysadmin.

He writes about a service (in beta) called Jott™, which is a voice to text gateway for sending yourself (or others) text notes using a phone call. I've been looking for ways to better remind myself of things when I'm not in a position to enter a ToDo on my Centro. I've tried several things, but the best yet may be Jott™.

I've now signed up for Jott™, and I'll be testing its usefulness over the next few weeks. I'll do a write-up on my results when I've decided what I think of the service and how it may or may not be useful.

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To Blog or Not To Blog

jessetrucks — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 00:19:59 +0000

Is that really the question?

I've often wondered whether I should maintain a blog, or whether I should rely on others to write about the various topics I'm interested in. Recently I've decided that I should blog for a variety of reasons. Those reasons are...Is that really the question?

If everyone who currently writes about things I'm interested in stopped writing to let someone else do it, I'd be left with nothing to read. Why should I not follow their example and add to the body of knowledge out there?
If I never write down something I'm musing on, I'll rarely remember to ask someone what they think. I'll never get a reality check on what I'm thinking about.
Following the above reasoning, if I don't write it down and share it, I'll never get feedback.
I want there to be a larger discourse among system administration professionals. Therefore, I should contribute if I want this conversation to exist and continue.
Lastly, It is proven over and over that keeping a journal stimulates ideas and creativity. What is a blog but a public journal? Now, I'm not the type of person to burp my whole private life and all my thoughts on the web, so this is most certainly a professional and career focused journal.

So, I will make attempt $largenum at making a habit of posting more regularly. How often? Well, I won't commit to something I know I can't do, so let's settle on "regularly" for a frequency.

For the whole five people who might actually read this, please poke me if I once again become lax in my posting efforts. If for no other reason, for your amusement at my fledgling attempts.

Cheers!

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LOPSA-Madison: Making Effective Presentations

jessetrucks — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 18:50:52 +0000

Despite a fair amount of snow dumping on the Madison, WI, USA streets, we had a half dozen folks show up for my presentation (which really turned into a lively discussion) on making and performing presentations.

The PPT presentation file is attached, but ask permission before using or distributing the presentation file for other than personal viewing.

Comments are welcome!

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Attachment	Size
MakingEffectivePresentations.ppt	105.5 KB

LOPSA Sysadmin Days report

jessetrucks — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 16:10:08 +0000

So, the LOPSA Sysadmin Days 2007 training event is now over. I thought it was a very successful event, and I met many new and interesting people.

I have no information on how the other courses went since I was teaching all four sessions, but anecdotally I heard they went well overall.

When I get caught up I'll provide more details about the event.

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Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day!

jessetrucks — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 14:43:45 +0000

So, it's the 8th annual System Administrator Appreciation Day today!

Every profession has their day, it seems, and this is our day. Please
take a moment today to reflect on the work your fellow system administrators do.

Though many people don't know about SysAdminDay, or effectively
ignore it, those of us in the profession should seek out ways to
bring more attention to the work we do in a positive manner. One
way is to advertise SysAdminDay in some fashion or another. For
example, print out a flyer about the day in advance and put it in
your office/cubicle. Verbally, or in a distribution list, at work thank
another SA for the work they do.

We really should do this every day, but if we start with one day,
we can change our inertia and gather momentum.

To all the SAs out there that make the systems I use go at my
bank, my dry cleaning store, car service station, and everywhere
else, please know I am aware of the work you do, and so are
some others out there.

Thanks SysAdmins!

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LOPSA Sysadmin Days 2007 August 6 - 7

jessetrucks — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:44:58 +0000

LOPSA Sysadmin Days is coming!

Just like last fall in Phoenix, I am teaching all four classes at this year's event.

Those classes are:

Disaster Recovery: Will you survive?
Change Management: Why suffer the paperwork?
Advanced Security: A self-assessment study
Communication for IT: A broad spectrum analysis

I hope attendence is as high in my classes as last year (or higher!). Last year they were the most attendended classes except, of course, for Tom Limoncelli's Time Management for System Administrators, a course based on his popular book of the same name.

We have some top notch instructor's again, and I wish I could take four classes instead of just teach them.

Please register today!

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LOPSA Board of Director Elections for 2007 - 2009 term

jessetrucks — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 15:55:16 +0000

So, the LOPSA Board of Directors election is complete for the 2007 - 2009 term.

There are nine seats on the board, and there were ten candidates. All the candidates were strong in their positions and are all quite capable of taking LOPSA into a better place in the future. Sadly, not all ten could be on the board this time around, but at least we will still have all ten people closely involved with LOPSA programs and plans.

I was one of the people chosen to be a member of the next board term. To see the complete results and the method of voting used, see the LOPSA 2007 Election results page.

Thank you everyone in LOPSA that voted (especially for me!), and I hope we continue to further the state and art of our profession of system administration.

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First impressions count

jessetrucks — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 04:06:22 +0000

So, I'm taking some time to catch up on much neglected feeds in my aggregator, and I am reminded, once again, that there are very smart and perceptive people out there producing great content that more people should read.

RecruiterGuy, on his blog, posted back in February about how people forget that an interview process starts with the first contact with an organization, which is usually a recruiter in today's IT world. Please take a few minutes to see what he has to say on the topic.

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LOPSA elections for the Board of Directors coming!

jessetrucks — Tue, 12 Jun 2007 20:34:15 +0000

The LOPSA Board Elections are coming soon! I am running for a seat on the Board, so please read my Candidate Statement. Then go read the other Candidate Statements. Remember, we use the Meek Single Transferable Vote method, as noted in the LOPSA Bylaws section 4.3.

Please follow the [ELECTION] discussions on the LOPSA-discuss list, as well.

Get involved! Vote! Shape LOPSA with your ballot so it shapes the profession of system administration the way you want it to!

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