Dilbert nails it again. I feel like this conversation happens at least three times a week. One would think that with the “Cloud” being around for a few years, with examples of many failed attempts and lessons learned being in relative abundance — This would start to be an exception rather than the rule. Alas, No. \Mm
The Oasis within is a very quick read and if you really haven’t explored some of these concepts in yourself probably well worth the short time to cover. Think of it as a compact, parent-free, sneaky life lessons delivery system for younger adults.
I was tuning my DNS and SSL configurations this morning when it dawned on me that even though I moved “Loosebolts” over two years ago to my own instances on Amazon (and before the current reboot), I had never bothered to actually say anything on the old site. I had assumed that making all of the basic technical changes (moving DNS, etc.) my long time followers would follow me. And many did. So I logged on to the old WordPress hosted site, just for completeness, and posted a “I’ve Moved” post. I immediately got responses on social media, my email, and other venues letting me know that many folks (especially RSS followers) had lost touch and were happy to reconnect. …
It is an exceptionally handy app that allows you to control up to 4 machines with a single mouse and keyboard. You can still use the directly attached devices but this ultimately allows you to seamlessly move mouse and keyboard across the different machines in one physical work space.
This Inc Article on Elon Musk’s three rules for meetings is a must read. I say that as it is a spiritual companion philosophy to my own meeting rules where a meeting can only be one of three types: Distribute, Discuss, or Decide. Distribute – Usually a town-hall or informational update where the flow of information is one way and specifically topical. Discuss – We are there to deeply go through an issue, item, or effort. Its a time to get the variables on the table, options evaluated and interested parties engaged. Decide – This is not a Discussion. This is a formal, specific decision on something that has already had one or multiple discussions. \Mm
I recently read an interesting blog post by Marc Brooker who is an engineer at Amazon working on Lambda Services. The full post (found here) is worth a read and some real think time for your own environments. It discusses his four rules around when/how to identify if Redundancy actually assists availability. His rules are simply: The complexity added by introducing redundancy mustn’t cost more availability than it adds. The system must be able to run in degraded mode. The system must reliably detect which of the redundant components are healthy and which are unhealthy. The system must be able to return to fully redundant mode. Source: http://brooker.co.za/blog/2019/06/20/redundancy Some might read those and say “Of course. Common sense.” Except that …
Lots of Internship programs promise to give university-going candidates a glimpse of what it is like to work in the real world. Especially in their fields of study. While in many cases they may get to work on real project for their short time partnered with an employee, build spreadsheets, maintain systems or processes that employees have no desire to do, or in the worst cases become glorified gophers – I have a much different view of how these things should go. Every year I sponsor a special program for internships that is aimed at building leadership skills, focuses on self-direction, driving technical depth, and ultimately building actual products or capabilities that will actually be used by the firm itself. …
If you are a long time reader you may be wondering what happened to all of my posts from 2002 through roughly August of 2019 and where they went. The simple answer is this: The posts are still there. All archived off. Including all of the witty and not so witty comments I have collected over almost a decade of running this blog. It is an amazing amount of work to curate such a massive pile of nonsensical ramblings and observations. In my bid to simplify and strive for a new and improved “LooseBolts” I kind of wanted to start with a clean slate. To that end, I will be very happy to re-post any items that you want, but …