The Lone Sysadmin

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

I hope everybody had a wonderful week last week, holidays or not. I was off doing my yearly tramping around in the Wisconsin woods looking for deer[0]. And eating. It seems like I spent Wednesday through Sunday eating. Ugh.

The nice thing about sitting in the woods waiting for animals to show up is a lot of time to think. Once I’m through with the 1000 messages in my INBOX and voice mail[1] I have a whole bunch of new stuff to write about. It is sort of strange to think about computers when you’re in the middle of a national forest, but nature has long been a muse for artists, philosophers, and soldiers. Why can’t it do the same for an IT guy? :-)

[0] Don’t worry, they’re safe with me around.

[1] A lot of it is automated mail, but despite that if you emailed me or called me I’ll get back to you in the next three days.

A big thanks to the VMware Communities folks for picking my virtualization feed up on Planet V12n. Anything I put in the “Virtualization” category will appear over there now, too.

I can usually tell when something like this happens, because my per-day comment spam totals jump. Akismet rules.

Some of you may have seen the VMware referral program pilot mentioned a few days ago on the VMTN Blog. You may have also seen the announcements that Fusion 1.1 is out. With all this news it’s a great time for me to announce that I’m part of the referral program pilot.

If you are thinking about buying a copy of Workstation or Fusion please consider using my referral links. Not only are you getting excellent workstation virtualization products but you are also helping VMware test their referral program while helping me defray my hosting costs.

As always, thank you for reading, commenting, linking to me, and overall making it fun to write on this blog.