The Lone Sysadmin

Distributed Power Management, the new experimental feature in VMware VI 3.5, seems like a cool idea[0], but it occurs to me that my NOC guys aren’t really going to like the idea of switch ports changing state as machines go to sleep. The current line of thinking is that a port changing state without an entry in our change control system indicates a problem.

Hmmm. I foresee an interesting conversation with them in my future.

[0] Really, no pun intended. Ha!

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• furbo.org · Don’t feed the raccoons
  “There is some good to come out of all of this: I’m reminded that for every idiot on the Internet, there are hundreds of individuals that are kind and supportive.”
• OkCupid.com: The DEATH Test – Online Dating Test
  Well, I’m going to live until 2049. w00t.
• Ross Mayfield’s Weblog: My Dinner with Andrus
  “Every Estonian eID holder (around 80% of Estonian population) has an unique OpenID with the format open.id.ee/[firstname].[lastname](.number) Example: open.id.ee/martin.paljak” Freaking cool. Why can’t the US figure this out?

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• Could Tech Support Undo Palm?
  A tech support person told this guy that she was the CEO of Palm, refusing to transfer him to her manager. Heh. I’ve never been impressed by Palm, and with the iPhone raising the bar I don’t see Palm being relevant for much longer.

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Inspired by the bacon flowchart and the season. If it’s cut off click on it to see a full-sized version.

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I updated a few things around the blog the other day (plugins, etc.) and inadvertently overwrote my theme’s single.php with index.php. My apologies to anyone trying to comment, it wasn’t intentional. It’s fixed now. Feel free to tell me to watch what I’m doing. :-)

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I work in a very relaxed environment. I normally appear at work in jeans, a button-down shirt, and more often than not a Widespread Panic ballcap[0]. Go beyond that with a corduroy blazer, dress pants, and a tie[1], and you hear:

• “Job interview? With us?”
• “Hey, I didn’t know you aren’t bald.”
• “Can I ask if your court appearance was anything serious?”
• “Hey, unclip your tie for a second, we spilled something.”
• “Are you trying to be the PC guy from those Mac commercials?”
• “How long is your mom in town? Will she come over and dress me, too?”
• “I didn’t know they made Garanimals that big.”

And these are people I consider my friends.

[0] I love wearing a cap that just says “Panic” on it.

[1] I had to go to a funeral.

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• The Old New Thing : Microthink: If you can’t measure it, then it doesn’t exist
  “Using a survey to measure the impact of a blog entry is like having somebody fill out a survey after you give them a ride home because you want to determine the impact that one action had on how nice a person they think you are. “
• Althouse: A tiger escaped from its enclosure and roamed around the San Francisco Zoo preying on human beings.
  Great quote at the end, from The Life of Pi, talking about why an animal chooses to escape: “Animals that escape go from the known to the unknown–and if there is one thing an animal hates above all else, it is the unknown.”
• Bacon Flowchart
  Mmm, bacon.
• Bacon Cheese Baconburger
  I don’t know about a burger that is only made of bacon, but shredding bacon in the food processor seems like a good idea for inclusion in a hamburger. Might have to try it.
• Official Google Reader Blog: Managing your shared items
  This does not excuse their behaviour in the least, experimental features which change the basic nature of the product being added without warning. The lesson here continues to be: if you don’t want your data to be public don’t give it to Google.
• WARNING: Google’s GMail security failure leaves my business sabotaged :: David Airey :: Graphic and Logo Designer
  “What if you also discovered that this was happening because of a Google security infection that can affect every GMail user on the planet?” You should check your GMail filters. Yet another thing we won’t hear about from Google.
• » Best picture quality with 6 megapixels!
  The newest 12.1 megapixel cameras do seem like a waste. Get better optics, people!
• OpinionWeb – Ron Paul: Phony Libertarian?
  “As the old joke goes, if you want to find out if someone’s really a libertarian, ask him: Do you think children should be allowed to buy heroin from vending machines? A real libertarian will answer: Only if the vending machines are privately owned.”
• gapingvoid: history of chess pieces
  Heh, cool. Never thought about why chess pieces do what they do.
• Seeking Role Models And Finding Human Beings – New York Times
  “The one part of the steroids scandal that outrages me at this late date is that people still expect sports to be the last outpost of fair play, still want athletes to be different from the rest of us finaglers.”

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I’ve been reading the discussion surrounding Google’s move to make everything you’ve shared in Google Reader shared to your Google Talk contact list. A couple of observations:

A) There wasn’t any notice in the application. I didn’t know this happened until I saw it linked from Daring Fireball. After the fact I went to the home page for Reader and noted a post about “Reader and Talk are Friends!” That isn’t notification, in my book, especially since people like myself who go straight to our new items won’t see it.

B) They should have added features to enable the sharing, if people want it, and not just change the product to do something different. Sure, there wasn’t anything that said that “shared” items were private, but they were only shared to a limited audience which was user-controlled. Making a sweeping change to that is something I consider a privacy issue, especially when you change the basic premise behind the security model.

C) It is incredibly irresponsible to change functionality like this without telling anybody ahead of time. People can cope with a potentially disruptive change like this if they are given some notice.

D) There appear to be two forms of recourse right now: delete all of your contacts or delete all of your shared items. For a lot of people neither option is acceptable.

E) The announcement says “This is still a very experimental feature.” Google Reader is not a “beta” application anymore. Why are they experimenting in a production application?

F) The announcement says “…so we’d love to hear what you think of it.” Google doesn’t appear to be responding to any of these concerns.

In conclusion, this basically says to me that Google doesn’t give a damn about my privacy or how I use their applications. They reserve the right to make big changes without any warning or regard for their customers. And once they’ve made a change they really don’t care what you, the customer, thinks about it. No wonder so many people want to work for Google. You don’t have to care about pesky things like privacy, customers, or feedback.

Lastly, given all of this controversy over a simple RSS reader, why would I use Google Docs? I’d wake up one day to discover they’ve “helped” me share all my data with my competitors. No thanks.

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