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.

Professional Obstacles

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One of the ways I sort people is using the obstruction test. Do they obstruct my efforts, or do they assist me? From now on I’m giving people +2 points if they help me, -1 point if they block me, and +1 point if they just stay out of my way but don’t help me. Nobody remains neutral as there are only two choices: right and wrong. “What exactly do you need that for?” — war cry of obstructionism, -1. “Oh, you’re doing such-and-such. Have you tried blah-blah-blah?” — could go either way, generally helpful, +2 “I need to get this in writing from your boss” — I just asked you to add me to a vendor’s support website so …

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Idiot Trunking

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Idiot Trunking: mashing idiots together in parallel to add idiocy. Idiot Multiplexing: mashing idiots together in a perpendicular fashion to improve, um, their arrangement. It’s one of those days again. 🙂 Props to Jon for helping me define these, and Derick for the song suggestion. The lineup for Coachella looks completely freaking awesome. I’m thinking that this might be the year I’m going to grow a set and go. In the meantime, though, the theme song for the day is the Dead Milkmen, singing “Takin’ Retards to the Zoo.”

links for 2006-02-06

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SmugMug – Chris MacAskill : Calibration prints : Smugmug calibration print CBS | Late Late Show Comedy Craig Ferguson saying goodbye to his father (on the right side). A hell of a eulogy. Intensely personal — my eulogy for my father has seemed to come in bits and pieces over the last five years.

Crazy Chinese Wisdom

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The contents of a fortune cookie at lunch today read: “No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.” If I ever start a campaign against teamwork that’ll be my slogan. Sorry it’s been a little slow around here this week. I’ve been burnt out, and simultaneously working 70 hours. Writing is one of my my creative outlets, and lately I’ve just wanted to go home and sleep.

links for 2006-02-02

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Less signs, less accidents – Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals) System administrators need to think about this, too, in terms of less documentation. If you need a lot of documentation you built it badly. (tags: documentation sysadmin)

Sometimes I Hate Mornings

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Phone ringing… phone ringing… eyes peel open… I fumble through yesterday’s jeans for my cell phone. “Uhhh, hello” “Morning, sunshine. Are we going to do this?” “Do what? Oh, crap, what time is it?” “9:30. Sunday. List server upgrade.” I’m instantly wide awake. “What the hell, my alarm didn’t go off.” “Should I just do this myself?” “Nah, I’m awake now, I’ll help. Freaking alarm.” “It was probably user error.” “Probably. Give me sixty seconds and I’ll be online.” I roll over and grab my laptop. There’s nothing like doing work while you’re still in bed. But then again, there’s nothing like sleeping while you’re in bed, either.

links for 2006-01-29

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Visio Templates for Dells All vendors should provide freely-downloadable templates for their equipment. (tags: visio dell vendors templates) dooce: Bridging the gap between species I feel like I understand this dog. I, too, am often watching and caring, even if it doesn’t seem that way. (tags: dogs personality misunderstood pets) Four things – Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals) Read the comments. Why is it so bad to be negative once in a while? Positive and Negative – yin and yang. (tags: negativity blogs censorship) All-American Rejects – Dirty Little Secret Video I love PostSecret, and it’s awesome that they did a video of it: http://postsecret.blogspot.com/ (tags: bands postsecret video)

links for 2006-01-27

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Free Online Graph Paper / Grid Paper PDFs (tags: gadgets tools technology paper graph free) 4020 Φ NSW Photographer’s Rights (tags: censorship privacy photography)

links for 2006-01-26

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JESUS SWIMMING BY MILTOS MANETAS If you mouseover his feet and hands there’s blood in the water. Um, yeah. (tags: wtf weird flash humor) … Life In Still Mode … New York Damage Caterina.net: Blathering in the Blogosphere Amen. Again, Yahoo! and Google are two different companies, with two different business strategies. Tying the entire post-bubble stock market to them is retarded. Thank you, Caterina. (tags: google yahoo search) Amr Awadallah Blog»Blog Archive » Google will miss 2005-Q4 quarter revenue estimates. (tags: google yahoo) r0ml.net » Blog Archive » What do I do? TheOpenForce.com: InfoWorld runs on LAMP (tags: LAMP linux mysql) Motion Picture Ass. of America makes ass of itself | The Register (tags: censorship MPAA cheating) You still …

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IPv6

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My brain is fried, and I have a total lack of focus today. So I spent the day messing around with IPv6. Our network guys have it enabled, so with the addition of a IPv6 stack to my Windows box all three of my work machines (Mac OS X, Windows 2003, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux) can talk IPv6 to each other. Of course, that also meant I needed AAAA records. And to tell the services on my machines to listen on an IPv6 socket. And to figure out how to replicate things like “nslookup” for IPv6. That’s easy, though, once you learn that everything assumes an A record. Thank god for shell aliases. My problem now is Samba on …

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