Bob Plankers

Bob Plankers is a man who wears many hats. In his professional career he has spent three decades leading teams that design, build, operate, and talk about reliable, secure, and compliant IT infrastructures, both in the public sector and in the high tech industry. He currently focuses on applied security, compliance, and operational resilience for virtualization and cloud platforms.

Career Objective?

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Why do people think that a resumé should have a career objective? Is it just because people keep saying it should? I haven’t ever had a career objective on my resumé. Why? Most recruiters and managers I know don’t ever read it, so I think it’s generally a waste of my time to put one on there. It’s also another way for me to turn someone off to me by saying something dumb. Less is more, right? I also have no idea what I’d say. What is my career objective? To help whatever company I am working for make a bazillion dollars, get them to give me some of it, and retire ASAP. Why would I put that on my …

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Taking The Day Off

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I took today off to catch up on my personal life, pay bills, and do some yard work. Boy, has it been nice. I bought a new lawn mower. I got my old one from a friend three years ago who wanted it out of his back yard, but it’s needed repair just about every time I’ve used it for the last year. This time one of the drive wheels’ height adjustment levers broke, and it was going to be a pain to fix. I’ve always been a Briggs & Stratton fan but this new mower has a Tecumseh engine. We’ll see how it goes. There’s a fungus (among us) growing in my front yard that nobody can identify (well, …

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How A Sysadmin Got His Email Under Control

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All of this discussion about declaring email bankruptcy got me thinking about what I did last year to deal with my email. I was sorting through 400 new messages a day, and it was overwhelming. I would delete most of the messages without reading them, because they were: – Mailing list traffic that I never read. Even when I filtered the mail to another folder some would leak through because lots of n00bs just cannot resist bcc’ing the list. – Automated messages from systems, bereft of actual content. As a system administrator I get all sorts of useless messages from devices and systems. – Spam. Lots of spam was leaking through my filters. So beginning in November, I started a …

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Try It First, Then Do It Again

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Every project to implement a specific application or technology should be at least two phases: 1. Get it working for the first time. Check it out and learn about it, with the intention of throwing this copy away. 2. Get it working in production. Do it for real. You cannot plan out how you are going to support something in production until you know something about the application. You won’t know anything about the application until you’ve tried using it once. Therefore the first steps of a project should be to check it out first. Then do it again for real later. This goes for small applications and projects, too. Sure, you might be tempted to just start using that …

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links for 2007-04-28

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Hacking Your Body’s Bacteria for Better Health – It’s awesome to see an article confirming what I’ve been saying for many years — sterile environments are not healthy for us, and especially detrimental to kids. I, Cringely . The Pulpit . Mean Time Between Failures | PBS Great, so now when an overzealous algorithm by some CS dropout dubs me “angry” or “disturbed” my insurance rates will go up, my life insurance policies will get canceled, and I’ll lose my job. No thanks. Edmunds.com – Maintenance Popup Check the maintenance bulletins on your vehicle. My Jeep has 159 of them. It’s just like patching an OS, except it costs more. This is going to be BIG! – Top Ten Reasons …

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links for 2007-04-25

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Anil Dash: Cats Can Has Grammar » why I will read your blog but not watch your video | Vanessa Fox. Nude.

links for 2007-04-24

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Google Operating System: Google Ads Used as Malware Warnings Panic – Coda – One-Window Web Development for Mac OS X Props to the Panic guys for releasing Coda. On my list of things to try tomorrow.

links for 2007-04-23

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WorldNetDaily: 25 years murder-free in ‘Gun Town USA’ Sun SPARC Enterprise M9000 Server – Overview It took Sun 25 years to compete with IBM. I completely agree with Jonathan Schwartz, though, there are some problems that are better solved with just a single big machine. Matasano Chargen » BMC Response To ZDI: It’s Magically Litigious! Well, I guess if I get to decide, I won’t ever buy anything from BMC. jwz – main screen turn on Glad to see people in the U.K. being sheep. How long until they have a little revolution of their own? Seth’s Blog: Carefully designed to make you look stupid “That’s the primary function of the apostrophe–to expose apostrophe ignorance.” Apostrophe ignorance drives me nuts. …

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links for 2007-04-21

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Jeff Boulter’s Blog » The Name Game Naming a kid has got to be tough. It’s hard enough to name a computer.

Beautiful Day

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It’s a beautiful day in Madison, WI. I hope it is everywhere else. Have a great weekend everybody!

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