One of the hallmarks of a good manager is the ability to empower the success of her or his people. This morning, I’ve been thinking about one of the best managers for whom I’ve had the privilege to work. In my career, I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work for some amazing managers, and they all… Continue reading IT Crisis Management
Category: Technology
Recovery Test
My company has a policy that we do a full-scale recovery test of the database on our ERP system twice a year. That test was last week. Being a somewhat competent DBA, I should be able do this with half my brain tied behind my back. It wasn’t as easy as it should have been.… Continue reading Recovery Test
Things you Know Now…
I read a blog post from Brent Ozar, talking about lessons learned throughout his career. Here is my take. Consistency is your friend. When I was doing Lotus Notes consulting, I had a client with virtually zero downtime. They never had the connectivity and replication problems I had seen in other environments, including my own.… Continue reading Things you Know Now…
Comcast Routing
I use Comcast for my high speed cable and usually, I don’t complain. Tonight, I was tracing some traffic to see if I could figure out how traffic gets routed, and I was a bit surprised. Look at this trace: 2 46 ms 69 ms 137 ms c-3-0-ubr05.boston.ma.boston.comcast.net [73.168.144.1] 3… Continue reading Comcast Routing
Northwest to Accept PayPal
Northwest Airlines is announcing that they’re now accepting PayPal for customers purchasing tickets on their site. The geek in me thinks this is pretty cool. I use PayPal when I get hotel rooms on Hotwire. Why not airline tickets?
Happy Birthday ATM
Today is the 40th birthday of the ATM. (more)
1600 miles
Reggie and I logged over 1500 miles over the course of four days. Oddly, the only pictures I took were of Reggie in the car. He did really well. Every time I go home, the sleepy little town where I grew up seems to get smaller. For example, a young woman who grew up the… Continue reading 1600 miles
Who is Kyle Söze?
I regularly read a blog called Worse Than Failure: Curious Perversions in Information Technology. This item hit a little close to home. I’ve worked with people like this.
Pearl
I’ve had my Blackberry Pearl for a few weeks now and I simply love it. However, there is so much more I can do with it, I’m sure. When in doubt, RTFM (Read the Fucking Fine Manual). In this case, I bought a book. Borders had all of their Dummies books on sale for 30%… Continue reading Pearl
New Laptop
I got a new laptop at work today. It’s a Lenovo (IBM) ThinkPad T60 with a dual core. It’s got a gig of RAM and a nice, big keyboard. My X41 has been acting funny the past month or so. After replacing the hard drive two weeks ago, the drive started going bad again last… Continue reading New Laptop