I don't hate people

For anyone who might possibly be reading the notes on my Shared Items Google reader page you might think that I hate people. That's not true. Part of it is that I've been in a less than great mood this week for various personal reasons. Chief among them is that I seem to have caught a cold.

Another big part though is that I am continually annoyed at how technology is marketed. We continue to push forward the myth that "computers make things easier" and continue to foist metaphors of technology with meatspace equivalents. The thing is computers don't make things easier, they make things faster and more widely available. Where things start to break down is when the metaphors we use fail to address the issues of speed and availability. I think when that happens for non-techy people they just give up and figure out a way to muddle though. I think that's where we're at now: the majority of people muddling though a day full of computing by blasting email out on a near continual basis because they know it sorta works for everything they need. That frustrates me because I can see their frustration.

IMHO, the fix is not to simply show a person how to use Word. Instead we need to educate with information and time management skills and work harder to make the tools they use simpler. People shouldn't need training on how to use a pile of software, but people do need training on how to deal with the junk that software creates.

Carpet Fresh and Assumptions

Martha Stewart believes you should clean your dishwasher. If you have dogs, you also know that even that spendy Dyson Animal needs a good cleaning once in a while because, frankly, dogs are damn gross. This is mainly because even though we assume our cleaning tools are by nature clean, it's a wrong assumption.

We recently moved into a new apartment which has wall-to-wall carpeting. The previous residents used Carpet Fresh. How do I know? Because today I went to empty the bin on our new vacuum cleaner it was full of carpet fresh like stuff. But we've been sucking it up since we moved in, it hangs around in your carpet forever and starts to stink after a while. That there was funk in the bin didn't surprise me. I also noticed that there was some dog fuzz in the part of the bin that caused the dirt to spin around. I popped it out to unwrap the hair and *plonk* out came a giant mess of dog fuzz bound with a huge amount of Carpet Fresh. Dust flew everywhere causing me to get insanely pissed. It also made me think "Huh, that's why every time we vacuum it smells worse.. I just assumed we were kicking up leftover Carpet Fresh from the carpet." I took everything apart, cleaned it, and put it back together. Now things work better. I knew that this was something I really should do once a week, but I got lazy and assumed that my shiny new cleaning tool was by nature, clean.

So how does this relate to system administration? We assume a lot in our line of work. We assume (or perhaps "believe") that things break in the same way, that data formats are correct, that things that do have inter-relations don't, that someone else hasn't changed that script in the past year. That cleaning tools don't also need a good cleaning once in a while. When we don't check what we definitively don't know about a system or process before we build upon those assumptions, we'll get bitten at some point.

identi.ca

So, I figured since keeping up with being articulate here is only working so well, I'd also try easing into it with some microblogging at identi.ca also.

Install Fest at Milwaukee LUG!

Advance warning that the Milwaukee Area LUG is having an Install Fest on Sept. 13th. More info can be found in the wiki. I'm going to try to be there with my laptop and a copy of liveusb-creator to make some USB Fedora keys for folks who want them as well as lend a hand.

If I have extra time, I'll try to setup DHCP on my laptop to run as an option server to present PXE'able images for various installers. This will require a bunch of downloading across my poor little cable-modem to get said images, so that might not happen, unless of course I travel to $hq and can co-opt their link.

If you're in Milwaukee, drop by and say "Hi" or bring a machine to install Linux on!

I hate interviews, interviewing, resumes and cover letters

Ahem. yep. That's it. The job search and interview process scares the crap out of me and I hate it.

I shake when writing cover letters. I've lost jobs because I got nervous during on-site interviews and babbled the first thing that sprang into my head. So much so that one recruiter even asked me flat out "What the hell happened in there?" It's worse now that I've learned how to keep calm during phone interviews, because my inability to sound intelligent during an on-site generally rings bullshit alarms even louder now.

So to all of you who will have to interview me, read my resume or cover letter, or generally deal with me on the applicant end of a hiring process: I apologize. I'm smart, I can do the job, I just evidently have some sort of emotional interview baggage I haven't fully realized yet.

Or something. Maybe airing my issues publicly is the first step to fixing them, I dunno.

CAR-MAX Sucks

So we're moving and the place we're moving to only has a 1 car garage. Since I'll be telecommuting for the near future, we figured we'd ditch one of the cars because we wouldn't need it. To do so we sold the car to Car-Max on Tuesday.

It's now Saturday and they have not paid off the loan I had on the car as they said they would. After several phones calls trying to talk to their business office (several times I was sent to voice-mail for some other random department and had to call back) I finally got someone. They claim their check-scanner was broken and so, everything needed to be hand-entered. That wasn't the case on Tuesday and I know it doesn't take the better part of a week to get a scanner fixed or do hand entry.

Their suggestion? "Call back on Tuesday if it doesn't post on your account, kthxbai!"

Bimbos.

If it doesn't post by Tuesday I'm reporting the vehicle stolen.

UPDATE: Aug 17, 2008: Car-Max figured their stuff out by Wednesday, but still, please.

Please leave a message at the sound of the tone....

I'm quiet not because I'm lazy but because I'm moving. More on the move, and the destination at some point.

Things that are interesting to me, that I'd like to write about in the near future:
- http://lopsa.org/pipermail/discuss/2008-July/003730.html
- http://times.usefulinc.com/2008/06/16-ops-now
- http://nasrat.livejournal.com/52943.html

Enjoy!