The Lone Sysadmin

“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.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke

“Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” – Gray’s Law

(hat tip to Joshua Brauer at Adding Understanding for calling my attention to Gray’s Law)

“A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.” – Saki

(hat tip to QOTD as usual, best quote feed ever)

“To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three men, two of whom are absent.”

- Robert Copeland

“It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.”

- William G. McAdoo