Speak English and STFU

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Yesterday I wrote about Guy Kawasaki’s list of steps to brand your products and yourself. Some of those ideas are directly applicable to a system administrator. Like speaking English. There are two unforgivable curses that will damn any techie that uses them: speaking in tongues, and always getting the last word in. Tongues? Yes, tongues. Marketing Droid: Why didn’t the new web site go up last night? Sysadmin: Well, the problem was that the DNS zone file didn’t get a new serial number, so the changes we made last night to the A records didn’t propagate out to the slave name servers. By now the marketing droid is twitching and going insane, and there is a 100% chance that they’re …

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Themes, Privacy, FLAC

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It’s been a productive day, here at home on MLK, Jr. day. I finally found a theme worth a damn. The name wp-andreas09 isn’t very sexy, but the theme looks good. Mad props to Andreas Viklund and Ainslie Johnson for creating, maintaining, and giving their themes away so that clowns like me can have a purdy site. Plus it also has prominent RSS feed links, so you don’t have to go find the bottom of the page anymore. I also took the opportunity to crawl out of my hole and introduce myself, though not extensively, and add a privacy policy. I didn’t need to do that quite yet, but as I experiment with Google AdSense I’ll need one. And I …

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System Administration By Walking Around

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Hot damn, Guy Kawasaki has a blog. If you aren’t familiar with him, good. That’s one more reason why your kind will never rule the Earth. I was reading his post on the art of branding and it got me thinking that system administration teams never act like they have a product they’re selling. Time after time I’ve listened to non-sysadmin friends and relatives bitch about their local IT guys, how system X sucks, how the IT guy messed up all their stuff, etc. Why? Why don’t sysadmins act like they have a product they’re trying to sell? Sure, it’s not a product in the traditional consumer sense, but the people in your organization are the people that pay your …

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Naming Schemes

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The best compliment for a web site is the knowledge that I was thinking about building one just like it. In this case, a wiki full of computer naming schemes. Hell yeah.

OpenOffice, Round One

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I’m at T+3 days now with OpenOffice. Apparently 2.0.1 “has issues” including the lack of help files for Calc. Once I found the forum post on how to fix that we’re in business. You know, I’m not a big-time software developer but if I made a release that had some stupid errors that were easily correctable I’d fix ’em and quickly release a version 2.0.2 or something. That’s just me, though. You’ll only annoy a few thousand potential users between the December release and March, when the fix is scheduled. The lack of active tooltips is annoying. I liked when MS Office would pop up a little function reference as I was trying to use the function. I have enough …

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OpenOffice, StarOffice, Microsoft Office Oh My!

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The last time I looked at either OpenOffice or StarOffice they weren’t impressive. Microsoft Office has been my standard for a long time, but with the release of the first beta of MS Office 12 I’ve decided to see where these other office suites are in comparison, to help me answer the question “should I upgrade to MS Office 12 when it comes out?.” I do a lot of writing in Word, mostly because it’s easy to spell check things, and I use Excel as a lazy way to do some basic text manipulation. As of right now I’ve installed OpenOffice 2.0.1 on all three of my PCs. My plan is to use OpenOffice for two weeks, then use StarOffice …

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DND

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When I was in the Twin Cities over Christmas my friend Nate pointed out The Current, which is a listener-sponsored popular music station run by Minnesota Public Radio. I had been bitching about my old favorite, Cities 97.1, going all Clear Channel. F’in Clear Channel, making everybody conform. When I say “popular music” I mean they play music that normal people like listening to, including all the weird tracks on discs that people like but aren’t Clear Channel-approved. Lots of requests, and good taste on the part of the DJs. They have a CD-quality stream along with the more standard 32k mono crap that every other station broadcasts. Aside from that, though, the one feature I absolutely require in a …

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Icons and Ms. Woolf

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Matt Brett, http://feedicons.com is a great idea. It ain’t a standard until everybody is using it, and if it’s easy to use and easy to get the graphics people will just do it. Even though you didn’t create the icon, nobody at the Mozilla Foundation was making it easy (or hard, for that matter) to get a copy. In unrelated news Google Book Search sucks (I know it’s a “beta,” and I did submit feedback). They’ve got some sort of error and I cannot search Oswald Spengler’s “Decline of the West” part 2. I need to find the reference that Edward Albee makes in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and while I can search Part 1, um, the “encumbered with …

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STFU, OS bigot

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I have one thing to say to the people that attempt to belittle or berate me because I run Microsoft Windows on my desktops: I don’t care what you think, so please STFU. I don’t tell you what to run on your desktop, and what I run on mine is not up for debate. The shock of your learning about my desktop/laptop/home PC OS choice inevitably leads to you trying to enlighten my heathen mind. Mistakenly, I humor you. And my response goes like this: When applications like Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and games like Civilization 4, SimCity 4, and GTA: San Andreas run under Linux I’ll switch. No, vi is not equivalent to Dreamweaver. You’re joking? Ha ha, screw yourself. You …

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Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.

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I have been working at the theatre all afternoon hanging lights for “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Specifically, instead of hanging instruments I spent the afternoon repairing them for the guys on the ladders. I don’t know what it is, but people just cannot seem to handle doing the right thing when it comes to fixing things. Why do something right when you can do a hack job of it, and then have to fix it again later? Arggh! It’s easy to say that it’s because people don’t care, that they conciously think “I’ll do just enough so that my show is good, and who cares about anyone else.” I don’t believe that. It’s more likely that they think they …

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