The Lone Sysadmin

“All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection…
Except for the problem of too many layers of indirection.”

- David Wheeler, though often attributed to Butler Lampson, who has some great quotes, too:

“When in doubt, use brute force.”
“In handling resources, strive to avoid disaster rather than to attain an optimum.”

Lots of good stuff if you read his “Hints for Computer System Design.”

“If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less.” – General Eric Shinseki, former United States Army Chief of Staff.

“I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.”  — Robert McCloskey

“An architect knows something about everything. An engineer knows everything about one thing.”

- Matthew Frederick, “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School”

“No one wants to learn by mistakes, but we cannot learn enough from successes to go beyond the state of the art.” – Henry Petroski, “To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design”

My friend Jon has a script to randomize quotes in his email signature, and this came through yesterday. I’ve always enjoyed Henry Petroski’s books, and though he’s a civil engineer most of the lessons are ones IT professionals can learn from, too.

Luckily, most of our mistakes don’t involve buildings collapsing, though.[0]

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[0] Which reminds me of another thing a former boss of mine used to say during crisis situations: “Calm down, nobody is dying here.”

“A man’s troubles can be measured by the number of keys in his pocket.” – David Plankers

“After an access cover has been secured by 16 hold-down screws, it will be discovered that the gasket has been omitted.” – De la Lastra’s Corollary

There’s probably a linear relationship between the work needed to secure said access cover and the likelihood of omitting the gasket. As usual, from Michael Moncur’s Cynical Quote Collection over at QOTD.

“Even though I’m a man, I don’t like beer. I prefer appletinis. They make me feel fancy.” – J.D., on Scrubs.

Boy I’m glad Scrubs is back.