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.

My Questions About Project Blackbox

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I got to see Sun’s Project Blackbox today, over at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. First impression: interesting idea, obvious that it’s the first attempt at implementation. Now, my questions: 1. What would the money spent on a Blackbox get you in offsite hosting? 2. If you have the space to store a 20 foot shipping container and a chiller could you not just build a new data center in that space? 3. What keeps vandals and competitors from hijacking or severing the power, cooling, and external network connections? Is a whole new industry going to sprout up for data center trailer parks, with armed guards? It’s just a colocation facility writ large. 4. When Sun says that these …

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Hello Again

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Well, hello there y’all. I’m sorry my writing has been lame lately. It’s been pretty darn busy around me. We’re a little understaffed at work, and I’ve been spending a lot of time doing lighting design work for community theater shows. Spring is wonderful, but it also means I can see all the stuff on the ground that I didn’t get to last year, so fixing that has been in competition for time, too. Anyhow, I just wanted to say thank you for sticking around. Thanks for all the comments, too, you guys. It’s awesome to know that people are out there, real humans reading this instead of search bots hammering this blog.

Hearing God Laugh

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“Announcing your plans is a good way to hear God laugh.” – Al Swearengen, “Deadwood“

links for 2007-03-24

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courant.com | Man Gets Probation for Dead Deer Sex Not sure why he is a sex offender, since no humans are involved, but still weird. Man Arrested for Beheading Dog A follow-up to that post I made the other day. Seth’s Blog: Purple Cow Redux AdultSheepFinder – The Worlds #1 Sheep Sex and Dating Personals Site (tags: funny) Yahoo Still Using Red Hat – Technology – RedOrbit Yeah, because you can switch between OSes in seconds… NOT.

Move Forward a Baby Step at a Time

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You cannot get something right the first time you try. Put another way, your first time is always flawed. Version 1.0 != perfect. Realize this. Realize that getting something right is iterative. Realize that you don’t really know how to do something until you have done it at least once. Start small and move forward a baby step at a time. So many organizations follow the process of “discuss, discuss, discuss, discuss, implement” when they should really be doing “discuss, implement, discuss, implement.” Shorter cycles means a better end result.

Flying Pants

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I always wondered when I’d get to see something strange happen during a show. Turns out that last night, during the “Black Boys/White Boys” part of the production of “Hair” we’re doing, an actor threw his pants into the lights, over one of the pipes that the lights attach to. They didn’t come back down. The audience went nuts, as did the cast. The assistant stage manager ran in back, grabbed a pole with a paint roller on it and tried hooking them. No go, but the audience was laughing harder, and the cast was improvising some stuff around it. The actor eventually hustled backstage and put his own jeans on. The nice thing, though, is that the stage and …

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Talking

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“You don’t learn very much when you yourself are talking.” – Eric Schmidt

links for 2007-03-22

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Veeam Reporter for Virtual Infrastructure 3 How to Change the World: Founders at Work (tags: revisit) Download Sort | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die | by Chip and Dan Heath (tags: revisit)

Telling Me How To Do My Job

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I have a nasty habit of replying to the statement “I don’t want to tell you how to do your job” with: “Then don’t.” It catches people off guard. It’s fine if you don’t like something I’m doing or something I’ve built. Let’s talk about it, because I doubt I’m intentionally trying to annoy you. Introducing the topic as telling me how to do my job, though, is a hostile way to start a conversation. It guarantees that your message to me will be lost in me thinking about how much you suck, too. Is that what you wanted to happen? You wanted us to be adversaries instead of teammates? Moral of the story: learn how to tell someone about …

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