The Lone Sysadmin

“When do you think our servers will ship?”

That’s always the warning shot, fired over my bow. My customer didn’t tell me something, and weeks later they finally got around to listening to me. Now they don’t like something I had to say, after they agreed to all of it.

“If you refer to the timeline I gave you several weeks ago your physical servers will be ready in two more months,” I reply. I always tell customers that it takes at least three months to acquire physical hardware. Two weeks to figure out what to order, by gathering facts, performance data, and sizing information. Two weeks to actually get it through their purchasing people. Four weeks to receive it from the vendor. Two weeks for data center people to get it racked, and two weeks for the sysadmins to get it configured with OSes, storage, etc.

“Well, uh, we talked about that and we think that’s a little long, and we need it to happen faster.”

“I see. What part of it do you think can be shortened?”

“Well, the month it takes for the vendor to ship the server, it doesn’t take a month. We got those other servers in less than a week.”

“The vendor says it could take up to four weeks to ship them, so that’s the figure I pass on to you. While it sometimes takes less time, I try to set people’s expectations based on my experiences. These are custom server builds so they’ll take a bit longer, and those other servers were end-of-quarter specials so they were probably pre-assembled. Plus with a four week estimate we won’t need to panic if one of the machines shows up at three weeks and is dead on arrival or missing a part.”

“So how long do you think it’ll take for them to ship us those servers?”

“Four weeks.”

“You just said it could take less time!”

“I don’t work for the vendor, so I don’t know how much time it will actually take. They say four weeks, so I say four weeks.”

“Can’t you call the vendor and have them do it faster?”

“Listen, if you need this to move faster it’d be easier to have your data center guys and your sysadmins cut you a break and not take a month.”

“Oh, no, those guys won’t budge. When they say it takes two weeks they mean it.”

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OMFG, if it hadn’t been for my friend Maitri I would have completely missed the UNIX timestamp becoming 1234567890.

It isn’t too late, though, to script a recursive:

perl -e 'print time(),"\n"'

and witness computing history. :-) That’s a lot of seconds since midnight on January 1, 1970.

Popularity: 5% [?]

• Will Law – Blog » How to install SBC/ATT Yahoo DSL without the install CD in 5 easy steps
  This guy is my savior. It's been a three week saga to get DSL working at home again after a billing snafu got it disconnected, just to be foiled by some idiot tech who insists I need the setup CD. I don't need the CD, I just need my account set up, but he didn't want to do that with me. AT&T sucks.

Popularity: 4% [?]

My blog, as seen through Wordle. Click on it to see a larger version.

Visualization tools are neat ways to spur new and different thoughts about things. Or point out that I, like, totally sound like a valley girl sometimes. Like like like.

Popularity: 5% [?]

• The Bacon Explosion – Take Bacon. Add Sausage. Blog. – NYTimes.com
  A friend made this for the Super Bowl, I need to find out how it went. I wonder if it'd work in a slow cooker… grilling in mid-winter is sorta cold.
• Targeted nanospheres find, penetrate, then fuel burning of melanoma | Science Blog
  "Hollow gold nanospheres equipped with a targeting peptide find melanoma cells, penetrate them deeply, and then cook the tumor when bathed with near-infrared light." Anthropomorphizing the nanospheres by saying that they 'find' melanoma is ridiculous, and is the sort of inaccuracy that contributes to the decline of our general science knowledge. This isn't some weird version of the movie Innerspace, they just created a compound that gets stuck to certain cancers. Cool, yes, but you can express how cool it is without being completely inaccurate.
• Obama's half-brother arrested on charge of marijuana possession – CNN.com
  Him and Michael Phelps… big deal. The only reason this is news is because his last name is Obama. Big freaking deal.
• Official Google Blog: "This site may harm your computer" on every search result?!?!
  The world would be a better place if more people just assumed that EVERY web site is malware, and acted accordingly.
• PostSecret: Sunday Secrets (2/1/2009)
  If you don't read PostSecret I really suggest it.

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1. I fell asleep with about four minutes left in the first quarter, which just reinforced my suspicions that in good football games the first three quarters only set the stage for an amazing fourth quarter.

2. I didn’t see most of the commercials, but of the ones I did see the Doritos crystal ball one was my favorite. If you didn’t see it, it’s a guy telling a skeptical coworker that his crystal ball (a snow globe) says there will be free Doritos at the office today. He then turns and throws it through the front window of a vending machine. Heh.

Popularity: 4% [?]