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.

Asterisks

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“There are no asterisks in this life. Only scoreboards.” – Ari Gold, Entourage

Mankind

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“I love mankind; it’s people I can’t stand.” – Charles Schulz

Ain't Broke

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“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.” That phrase is the mantra of the lazy, indifferent, or ignorant. The next person that tells me that is going to get a full-length Microchannel token ring card shoved up their ass. Just because it isn’t broken doesn’t mean that it is running properly. Just because it’s running at all doesn’t mean it was done properly. You saying it’s fine doesn’t mean that it actually is. Especially when all you did was fumble through the install and then declare it working. The way I see it, all hardware and software is broken. At all times.

Awesome Names

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I’ve been trying to find some new music lately. I’ve managed to find a few things, and I’ve also been exploring the use of last.fm to discover new music. For some reason it insists that I like the Backstreet Boys. No, really, I don’t. Some of the song names I ran into are awesome: “I’ve Got A Dark Alley And A Bad Idea That Says You Should Shut Your Mouth” by Fall Out Boy. It’s off their “From Under the Cork Tree” album, and upon investigation they apparently like “Shawshank Redemption,” too. The other name I found was the band “…And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead.” OMFG, that’s totally the name I wanted.

links for 2006-07-12

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Fireworks Photography: Fireworks Photography Tips from New York Institute of Photography (tags: photography art fireworks)

AL Rules

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Dear National League, Holy crap. You played a good game. Nothing super spectacular, but some good defense. It was looking good for a win, a long overdue win, until that last damn out. But, then, wow. The last time I saw that was the Twins and the Yankees earlier this season. Sorry guys. …Bob P.S. I do think making the All Star game the determining factor in World Series home field advantage was a good idea. P.P.S. The AL 0//n3d j00! Heh, sorry, I’m a Twins fan. And I love l33t sp34k.

Using A Cable Modem to Improve Corporate Security

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Here’s an idea that I ran across about a year ago, and I had occassion to suggest it to another friend: if you want to create a wireless network for anybody to use get a cable modem and a wireless access point. I first saw this at a financial institution that wanted to offer wireless to their customers as they waited in the lobby. However, they didn’t want the wireless access points on their internal networks. So they ordered DSL, bought a Linksys access point, and wrote the WEP key on a white board in the lobby, which they change once a quarter. They installed the equipment near the lobby in an accessible place, so if it stops working (which …

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Using Technology to Torture People

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I was thinking about my post about print Nazis and I thought “boy, printing is a real easy way to screw with people.” What other ways have I seen technology configured to make people’s lives more miserable, and sysadmins busier, all unnecessarily? It’s easy to say that these are caused by management, but in fact it’s caused by the users not speaking up. If you are a user and don’t like something you should say something. It’s more than likely that the people who are doing this to you haven’t even thought about it. Then again, sometimes they have. 1) Labyrinthian print queues with fascist permissions: if you print something by mistake there is no chance you’ll ever be able …

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