The Lone Sysadmin

Hey, what’s this? It’s a blog… and I seem to have a login to it. :-)

Some of you have emailed me, wondering where in the heck I’ve gone. It’s not a long story:

1. Work has been nutty lately. I can safely summarize it by saying “be careful what you wish for.” For a long time I’ve wanted to get more involved with project management and higher-level decision making in my organization. Now I long for the days when it was just me, vi, and a dark room.

2. My hobbies have been nutty lately. I decided about a year ago that I’d like to try producing a play with my theater company, Strollers Theatre. I’ve done that now. There’s really no way to describe how difficult it is to start from nothing and build a show that people will want to attend. I can say that it’s a lot easier when you get the right people on your team. Someone who is on top of their game makes everything more enjoyable. It’s finding those people that’s tough (and then not burning them out).

On top of it all, where I’ve had some personal time it’s been consumed with weddings, funerals, births, emergencies, illnesses, my desire to sleep, and occasionally some escape back into World of Warcraft (yeah, I started playing again — a guy needs at least one fun hobby). :-) At any rate, this week is different. I’m getting back on the horse here, catching up on my blog reading, and going to start writing again. Yeehah!

I didn’t want to do this, but like many other bloggers I’ve been finding my content appearing in other places. Some places do a nice job of quoting it and linking back, but a couple sites have blatantly hijacked my content for use on their own blog. That annoys me a lot, especially when they’re making money from my content, or competing with me with my own content. Like WTF. This makes me grumpy.

As a result I’ve changed my license to the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license. I’ve given this some thought, and I hope it doesn’t get in anybody’s way. I am a huge fan of fair use, and the Creative Commons license says that this license should not interfere with that, which makes me happy. The Share-Alike clause will continue to let people use and build on anything I post (code snippets, firewall rules, etc.), and the non-commercial part solves my other problems. Coupled with fair use it should still permit quoting, etc., which is exactly what I like. If any of this does interfere with something you’re doing let me know what you’re up to and I’ll get you written permission.

Thanks. As always I really appreciate everybody who reads, comments, and generally gives me hell around here. It isn’t worth writing here if nobody reads, and I’m really lucky to have a lot of you out there that have stuck with me. Thanks folks.

Now, maybe I can get to writing some *actual* content… :-)

It’s going to be even slower than usual around here for the next couple of weeks.[0] I’m out of here for Munich and surrounding cities! I look forward to adventuring in the land of my ancestors, while drinking their beer.

I thought about scheduling some posts for when I’m gone, but nothing I want to post is completely free of controversy. :-) Since I like the discussion that’s been happening here and want to be part of it I’m just going to let it be a little quiet for a while.

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[0] It’s been slow recently because, as much as I love vacation, I hate going on vacation. I get incredibly busy ramping up to leave. Ugh.

On August 8th, 2005 I started this blog. It is almost three years later and this is my 1001th post.

Of those 1001 posts, 364 of them were auto-posted from my del.icio.us bookmarks.

There have been 994 comments so far (thank you!) though some of those are my own replies, too. There have been 127,622 spam comments (no thank you), mostly all of them caught by Akismet (thank you).

I have uploaded 95 things to the blog, whether they’re photos or something else.

This blog is #1 in Google searches for “esxcfg vswitch,” and #2 in searches for “when you do things right people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.” I occasionally search for things in Google and get my own site as a result (four times). Better is when a coworker searches for something and gets my site (twice). Best is when a customer searches for something and finds my site, then sends me the URL as something I should read. Heh. It takes four minutes for posts here to appear in the Google search results.

According to FeedBurner I hit a consistent 2^9 readers, via RSS, a few weeks back (hello there!). I consistently get another 2^9 folks coming straight into the site from other sites and search engines, many from the VMTN and Planet Sysadmin aggregators. Exactly 50% of my readers use Google Reader.

So in conclusion, dear readers, thank you. I’ve really enjoyed this blog so far, and it’s really because of all you folks that read it, comment on it, tell me I’m wrong, tell me I’m right, tell me I’m nuts, invite me to conferences, drink beer with me, and basically make me glad I’m not just talking to myself. :-)

Hmm, I don’t seem to be getting any del.icio.us link posts nightly anymore. Looking into it.

Recent links include:

• One of the Meerkat Manor meerkats got run over by a truck. DOH. (has spoilers)
• Russian long-exposure photos make people look like smoke. Cool.
• Getty Images has released Moodstream, which is neat for evoking thoughts. Too bad they don’t have video of IT guys stomping the crap out of computer hardware, Office Space-style.
• Google has a project called Obfuscated TCP, to defeat wiretapping. It’s pretty sad it’s coming to this. How long will we put up with the Big Brother crap before we rise up and smite our government?
• Raymond Chen has an interesting story about letting the native speaker win. I find it interesting that instead of being pleased that someone has bothered to learn their language, the Japanese basically try to prove you suck at it. Whatever.
• Jeremy Zawodny is leaving Yahoo!. Good for him, bad for Yahoo!, but Yahoo has no idea what it’s doing anymore.
• Metallica is a bunch of chodes. Again.
• In honor of Metallica being stupid, again, we should all watch the original Napster Bad video.

There. Excitement, through and through. Now get back to work (mainly talking to myself).

I’ve had a couple of questions lately about whether people can redistribute things I post to coworkers, or quote me in articles. Um, yes! These questions have pointed out to me that I didn’t really have any sort of license assigned to my work… until now.

I’ve always liked the concept of the Creative Commons license, so I’ve chosen the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, and I put up a Terms of Use page with all the information, including attribution information.

I am always thrilled to see people doing stuff with my work, because it means I’m writing things that are useful to people, and writing in a way people seem to like. So thank you! And thanks again to all you readers out there. More and more every day, which is really cool. :-)

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. :-)

Hey all,

First of all I have to say thanks for another great year. I really enjoy writing here, and you folks have been great to me, encouraging me, and generally making me believe that I’m not just writing for myself. Not that I’d stop, of course, but it’s nice when someone is listening. :-) So thank you!

I’m off for the holidays. As with most vacations for me the lead-up to them is terrible, with the nailing down of loose ends being the key time sink. I’ve also had a couple of big presentations & proposals to make, so I haven’t been as attentive as I should be to my email. I know a few of you have emailed me, I’ll catch you sometime after Christmas.

So whatever holidays you’re in to, whether it’s Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, that old standby Christmas, or something else, please have fun and be safe.

…Bob