The Lone Sysadmin

Do you ever open your desk drawer and find that someone has borrowed your screwdrivers without returning them?

Yeah, me too. I keep a decent set of tools in my office. I got this habit from my father, who basically had three sets of tools: one that went with him in his vehicle, one in the garage workshop, and one in the basement workshop. A good quality tool was never far away from where you needed it.

Everybody knows I have a toolbox at work. I’ve made it clear that people can borrow the tools as long as they return them. It is inevitable, though, that eventually I can’t find my screwdrivers. Screwdrivers are the single most popular item, and they disappear. It isn’t malicious, but if I have nice screwdrivers I want them put back, mainly so they’re there for me to use.

I don’t want to lock my toolbox, because that implies an attitude of mistrust, labeling everybody as thieves. Labeling the tool with my name doesn’t seem to help. The question wasn’t “how do I get my tools back” so much as:

How can I stop caring that my tools are somewhere else?

The answer? Lots of cheap screwdrivers!

I stumbled upon the Northern Tool clearance tent at the Minnesota State Fair last fall and found $0.50 multi-bit screwdrivers, in four different, awful, neon colors. I bought twenty of them and put them in my desk. When someone asks to borrow a screwdriver I give them one and tell them to keep it. If I can’t find my screwdriver I take another one. The $10 I spent has come back to me hundredfold in productivity and goodwill, not to mention that I smile every time I see a coworker using one.

So if this happens to you I suggest going to the Northern Tool or Harbor Freight web sites. Find some screwdrivers under $2 each and order a bunch. Avoid the kits of screwdrivers, just get simple multi-bit drivers with bit storage built right in. Double bonus if you can get torx bits, too. Triple bonus if you use your company credit card to buy them.

Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with Northern Tool or Harbor Freight except as a satisfied customer. Also, I enjoy quality tools, but there’s also a time and place for crappy ones, too. :-)

• Toddler’s Temper Ousts Family From Plane | Chicago Tribune
  Yeah, the kid is an angel according to the parents, who won’t discipline them at all. Seen this before as a Boy Scout Assistant Scoutmaster. Note to parents: your kid is a terror.

I’m tired, as I was up sort of late last night. One of our storage arrays, the kind that is advertised to never fail, failed briefly. It took out our enterprise mail system and a variety of other databases and applications, all of which had been moved to this array because it was supposed to be super reliable. In my queue of things to write about is putting all your eggs in one basket while trusting vendors. “Where Data Lives” is more like “Where Data Dies And Support Shrugs At You Like They Think You Are An Idiot For Believing The Spec Sheet Or The Sales People.”

In the meantime, xkcd has a cartoon today that hits pretty close to home for me.

Is 20,000 spam comments a sign of the apocalypse, or sign of growing popularity?

Well, I finally did it. I added AdSense to the sidebar. Sorry folks.

I did it for a couple of reasons. I really don’t expect to make much money, maybe enough to cover my hosting. I don’t view the blog as a source of revenue but as a way for me to share things with the world. I’ve learned and taken much from people who have published their work. I wanted to give back, and I hope that some people find some of what I write useful.

I do want to find out how AdSense works, though. So many bloggers use it, and some of my clients have asked me about it. I want to have answers for them. What’s the best way to get answers? Do it myself!

Feeds currently don’t have ads. I may do that in the future when AdSense supports it. My goal is to keep it from being intrusive.

With Apache httpd, any requests that come in that don’t match a VirtualHost stanza get serviced by the first VirtualHost available. You can often test this by browsing with your web server’s IP address. What site do you see? Is that what you want people to see when they didn’t know what they wanted to find?

My suggestion: create a “dummy” virtual host that will return a blank page, or redirect to a known place. Put it first in the list of virtual hosts so that visitors get to see what you want them to see, not some other web site.

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  What in the heck is a “private fantasy butler?”
• instructables : A power remote controlled RGB LED mood light.
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  An interesting visualization service

“Hey, a package came for you.”

“Sweet!” I reply.

“Open it because I need one of those cards.”

“These aren’t the fibre channel cards we ordered. It’s my egg cooker from Amazon.”

“You bought an egg cooker?” He is looking at me like I am an alien.

“Yeah. It boils eggs. I love hard boiled eggs but I always screw them up and I’m tired of it. Plus I had a gift certificate I had to use. And it was cheap.”

“Dude, boiling eggs is super easy. Boil water. Insert eggs. Start timer. Maybe just learn to not be an idiot?”

“Do you know how many eggs I’ve wasted? Plus all the power to heat all that water? I’m results-oriented, and I really don’t care how I get good eggs, just that they are cooked properly. A manager-type might say I’m setting myself up for success.”

“Dude…”

“What?”

“Shut the hell up. And figure out where our fibre channel cards are.”