The Lone Sysadmin

T-12 days until I’m in New Orleans.

T-15 days until I roll as part of the Krewe of King Arthur.

Any of you going to be in New Orleans for Mardi Gras? I’ll be down there through Fat Tuesday. We should have a beer or two.

Popularity: 5% [?]

• U.S. Retail Gasoline Prices
  The DOE spreadsheet with historical data is great for figuring out my out-of-pocket expenses related to all the driving I do for my non-profit theater company. I can look up the weeks we were running and compute it for my tax returns.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Matt Simmons over at Standalone Sysadmin is on vacation, and apparently has made the mistake of letting me write an article for his blog. :-)

Thanks Matt!

Popularity: 4% [?]

• Mirror, Mirror on the Wall – Errol Morris Blog – NYTimes.com
  Excellent photos, excellent article.

Popularity: 3% [?]

When asked about making our data center a green data center, my friend and coworker Terry Bradshaw always responds with:

“Sea foam or forest, you can have it in any color green you want.”

There really isn’t a way to make a data center green beyond painting it. Your corporation, your organization can go green. Your data center can’t. You can certainly make it more green (or, rather, less not-green) by making it more efficient. But no matter how efficient it is it’ll still be a power-hungry room stacked full of metal boxes made via environmentally-unfriendly techniques, each filled with toxic chemicals and requiring hazardous waste disposal techniques when their lives are over every few years.

Virtualization can certainly improve things, by making a bad situation into one less bad by reducing the amount of machines. In turn that reduces all the rest of the problems. It also reduces the need for a different kind of green: money. Which is really the reason organizations “go green” with technologies like virtualization. They may say that they want to have a green data center but they really just want to spend less money — a perfectly good reason all by itself. And unlike many other ways a corporation can choose to spend less money, virtualization actually does do some good in the end, beyond the bottom line.

Popularity: 5% [?]

• YouTube – The Count Censored
  ROFL — selectively censoring the Count from Sesame Street. Safe for work.
• Quantum teleportation between distant matter qubits | Science Blog
  I wonder when we'll get ansibles. :-) This is pretty cool, transmitting data via quantum entanglement over a meter with 90% precision.

Popularity: 3% [?]

After seeing this I’ve decided I need a tilt-shift lens:

In case an aggregator is stripping the object out it’s Helpless from Keith Loutit — he’s got several other videos up there. “Metal Heart” is pretty sweet, too.

Popularity: 3% [?]

• The Survivor – December 1, 2004
  Seems like Carol Bartz is a good pick for Yahoo. Plus she's a UW CS grad, rock on.

Popularity: 3% [?]