Tue, 15 Feb 2005
Taking Advice
Tonight I was told, "learn to let things go, take a step back and
don't get involved in everything. Not everything has to be fixed by
you." There is one small problem, in general I'm shite at
listening to advice like this. If I see something that's broken I have
to try and fix it. While I've gotten damn good at suppressing my urge to
do this with live systems (always do a risk analysis first) I'm
remarkably bad at applying the same approach to dealing with people;
especially at work. If things ain't going well I step in and amble about
looking for a fix.
Well no more! I plan on taking this advice (I reckon I can last about a month) and getting back in to tech while avoiding the wet-ware issues. Fortunately I have a long list of things that need doing (both at work and at home) that I can focus on while I give things a chance to sort themselves out. Now lets see if this does make me "less of a miserable bastard".
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Posted: 2005/02/15 00:45 | /nottech | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Slashdot review of Pragmatic Subversion -- The Aftermath
I was pretty surprised when Slashdot
accepted my submission, a Pragmatic Version control Subversion
book review. I was even more surprised when it hit th front page and
for about twelve minutes my name was one of the first things on
slashdot!
After this short lapse into geek I logged into my bytemark machine and battened down the hatches. I shut down all unneeded daemons and prepared for the server to go down. The only thing that upset my plans was the absence of the Slashdot Effect.
In total I got the best part of 500 new readers when the article hit and then these dropped down by three hundred or so over the next few days. As my record for unixdaemon.net is over 1700 people in a day this isn't exactly a worrying amount. With hind-site (and after restarting a couple of daemons) it is pretty logical, the whole review was on slashdot, there wasn't much of a reason to follow the links back here. Everyone was interested in the review rather than me so the traffic wasn't going to spike as badly as I thought.
The article itself received a lot of interesting comments (which I'm thankful for) and only a couple of little niggles. One reader picked up a mistake in grammar which I'm annoyed I missed. A second one was curious as to how I had a review copy and was paranoid about any back handers I may have received to write the review. If only I was that predictable! All in all it was a pleasant experience that made the extra time spent on the review worth while. And to everyone who commented on the review; thank you.
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Posted: 2005/02/15 00:21 | /meta | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Ideal Environments: Where Would You Like To Work Today?
I heard about a job a couple of days ago that I'd have taken a pretty
big pay cut to get, I won't mention details as the position isn't
formally open yet, but it got me to thinking. While I've been pretty
lucky with my employment over the years (Hi Boss!) there are a couple of
places that I'd pretty much consider my dream job (and that I'd crawl
over most peoples bodies to work), anything in the security, Linux or
Open Source departments in IBM for example.
Imagine a company THAT big that is one of the few places left that actually does innovation and research. I've heard all about the old IBM attitudes back in the mainframe days but the new, gentler, kinder Big Blue is a friend of the penguin. Take a step back and think about where you'd kill to work, and why ain't you there yet?
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Posted: 2005/02/15 00:19 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Wanted: 3VIL L33T hat
Over at MegaTokyo they have an Evil
Leet T-shirt that I think is excellent on a number of levels. I know
it's sad but so what.
I'm not really a T-shirt person (plus I'm not really allowed to wear them in the office) but I do have an OpenBSD baseball cap I've very fond of... So why not combine the two? I now want an Evil Leet baseball cap and after looking around the custom cap printing companies it doesn't look that expensive to do.
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Posted: 2005/02/15 00:17 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
David Black in London
David Black is in London and the London Ruby people (both of them :)) are
planning a meet-up. It's happening on Monday, February 28, 7:00 PM at the
Holiday
Inn near Russell Square
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Posted: 2005/02/15 00:16 | /geekstuff | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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