The Occasional Blog

Smileys are a decent way to express emotion when communicating in emails or instant messages. However, what do you do when you want to use one in a parenthetical statement? This doesn’t work: (you know what I mean? ;-)) Square brackets? [kinda awkward, huh? :-)] Curley braces? {silly 8^)}.

I’ve ended up using the rather old-school and relatively-unknown <g> because that at-least works (for me, anyway <g>).

What do you do?

Becky gave me a call today at work to let me know that one of our cats, Mocha, was behaving very oddly and had himself ’stuck’ in a corner, crying, panting, and not terribly responsive to any interactions. Fortunately, I had already addressed the most important things to accomplish at work, so I was able to come home early. By the time I arrived, he was clearly not going to rebound so we said our goodbye’s and waited for the inevitable.

He was our first ‘child’ with us adopting him the Summer of ’94 shortly after we got married. He was a member of the family even before there was a family. Both kids grew up with him and we all have fond memories of his endearing style of aloofness. A few years ago, we joked that due to the relative ages, all four of our pets then might die somewhat close together. With our dog, Casey, dying last year on Brian’s birthday, it’s not so funny.

So now, we’re down to two. The big dog is healing and bounding around more than I would be if I had stitches in my butt just a few days ago. The other cat, Bella, is probably happy that there’s less competition.

Thanks, Mocha, for the memories. I’m glad he was able to enjoy one last Christmas (he always loved the tree).

A few days ago we made donuts for the first time. Since those turned out so well, we decided to give old fashioned (my favorite, btw) a try.

They need to be the right thickness otherwise they can be a little doughy in the middle but they were another success.

Good thing that starting tomorrow I’m limiting my daily calories to 1500 and going to the gym five days a week.

While discussing the potential cost of a gift:

Kaelyn: $20 is the generic cost for many gifts

Becky: $20 is the magic number.

Me: I thought 3 was the magic number?

Becky: That was the 70′s. Inflation, baby.

I’ve been doing the GTD things for a few years and am a major fan of OmniFocus by the Omni Group (they got my money for my Mac, my iPhone, and iPad). A similar concept pertains to email and that is of Inbox Zero. The concept is basically keeping your email inbox empty by dealing with or deleting each message.

I’ve longed wanted to get down to an empty inbox. About a year ago, I went from a few hundred down to about 100 but getting past was more difficult than I would have imagined.

The last few weeks, I’ve renewed the effort and today successfully got both my personal and work mailboxes down to zero.

The trick, of course, is keeping it empty. I get enough mail both personally and professionally so I will continue to leverage the power of OmniFocus to capture anything I need to deal with but can’t at that moment.

I like finishing the year with nothing. Merry Christmas.

Two years ago, my daughter spent her own saved money to purchase a Nintendo DS. This past Friday (the Black one), my son similarly used his own hard-earned savings to give money to the competition and purchased a Xbox 360 4G.

Where did I go wrong?

I just finished a book that I would consider a must-read for anyone that works in the IT field. “A Sysadmin’s Guide to Navigating the Business World” by Mark Burgess and Carolyn Rowland. It’s #23 in the USENIX ‘Short Topics in System Administration‘ series (not yet listed at the time of this writing).

It’s a short book (64 pgs) which is good since I’m a slow reader and have a hard time finding time for print books but I’m glad I made the effort as it couldn’t have come at a better time. One of the primary points of the book is to get your IT shop out of the “rocket” mentality (major effort, one shot) and instead work more like a “747″ (reliable, reusable). One of the best ways to do that is to learn more about the business and work to have IT be part of the business rather than just serving it.

Chapters:

1. The Problem
2. The Elements of Business
3. The Science of Value
4. The Key to Communication
5. Building a Trusted Partnership
6. Some Hints and Tips
7. Conclusion

While it’s short, it’s meaty. I’ll be passing it on to others in the group as we all can learn something from it. For me, I’ll likely get my own copy as I’ll be best served by reading it regularly (at least once-a-year).

The family came to a decision this week and we have removed our son from his elementary school and will be homeschooling him along with his older sister.  I wrote about how we came to the decision to bring our daughter home earlier this year and while this situation had many similarities, many aspects were different and the decision had much deliberation and prayer.

Our daughter was failed by the system which no longer actively supports students that aren’t a liability to their precious standardized test scores. In our son’s situation, honestly, he was let down by the other parents. His grade-level, for some unexplained reason, has had discipline and behavior problems since kindergarten. Attempts to correct problems were generally met with disbelieving and ultimately uncommitted parents and by the time the kids go to 5th grade, behaviors were well-solidified. Like our daughter, the problem went on for years but was tolerated until it reached the point it couldn’t be any further.

Brian’s teacher this year, Mr. ‘P’, was excellent which made this decision quite difficult. As we got reports from our son how his class got in trouble again or lectured to again over the dinner table, I couldn’t help but think Mr. P was not being a strong enough disciplinarian (my manager hat must have still been on). Last week, I had the opportunity to volunteer at Brian’s school* and spend some time in his class. Not only did I see first-hand how good Mr. P was but also how frustrating the behavior problem was. The majority of the class was ‘just’ bad enough to be a problem but without clear troublemakers to single out and reprimand though he did several times in the single hour I was there. He simply doesn’t have the bandwidth to discipline a class and try to teach them at the same time.

Brian is also the more social of our kids and the thought of ‘loosing’ his friends was difficult for him but his countenance was clear every day he came home from school. There was a problem that had to be addressed. We decided to do a dry run and kept him home on Tuesday for him to get a taste of what it’s like to be taught by your mother. Of course, she didn’t have all the texts or a full lesson plan but was able to give him a good idea. He liked it but still agonized.

The debate that had gone on for weeks hit high gear. It wasn’t easy, but, thankfully, the Lord did guide us. The decision was made, the dis-enrollment form filled out, and personal belongings collected. Interestingly, there was no resistance and instead complete understanding. There were also many ‘off the record’ comments made about ‘all the good ones are leaving.’ That part really pains me in all of this. The school system is really breaking down both within (testing obsessed admins) and without (nobody ‘parenting’ anymore) and I don’t see that turning around. We’d fight, and we did, but we ultimately need to do right by our kids and not let them loose even if there may be a greater good. That’s why Brian’s new school desk is now five steps from the kitchen.

* If you’re a father of a kid in school, please do yourself a favor and ask if they have a WatchD.O.G.S. program. It’s an awesome way to support your kid and their school.

UPDATED: Fixed a few typos. Maybe I shouldn’t blog at 6 AM.

Friday was the last day for one of the members of the team I manage at work. It was under good circumstances as he’s relocating and moving on to a new opportunity with new challenges to solve. Jokingly, I tweeted about the team now being in a degraded state as one ‘drive’ has been removed. That idea has kept percolating in my head and I’ve realized that rather than just a cute way to refer to an IT team, it really is accurate.

For the uninitiated, RAID, which stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks, is a way to combining multiple disks into a larger collection to present one or more larger volumes, increase the performance, and improve the resiliency should one of the drives fail. Here’s an overview of the three primary RAID levels:

RAID 0 combines two or more disks into a larger volume splitting the contents evenly between them. The benefits are increasing the performance to much more than a single drive as well as increasing the overall capacity. The down-side is that if any single drive fails, all of the data is effectively lost.

RAID 1 combines two disks into a pair where data is written to both drives simultaneously. Capacity is no more than a single drive, but you can lose either drive and still have a complete copy of your data.

RAID 5 combines three or more disks where the data is split between the disks but parity data is calculated and also written to the disk. Performance is good as you can interleave reads between the disks. Resiliency is also good as if any single drive fails, the parity data from the remaining disks can be used to compute the data that is missing.

In any IT shop, you have a collection of skills and backgrounds provided by the members of the team as well as the collection of procedures, resources, and responsibilities that the team must manage. If your team is set up in a RAID 0 configuration, the responsibilities are divided between the members. Each member becomes more and more experienced in the skills they cover but can become more of a liability in the ones they do not. Like in RAID 0, if any one is not available, those responsibilities are gone.

Sure, you could have a team more akin to RAID 1 but I can’t think of any manager that would request (or director that would approve) having two people for every task with one acting as a ‘mirror.’

Personally, I try to strike a balance. Dividing the responsibilities between members, playing on their strengths, but ensuring that everyone is familiar enough with the other things the group-as-a-whole does allows for continuity. Sure, documentation can act as your ‘parity’ but it is exceedingly challenging to maintain complete, accurate, and current documentation.

The group is indeed in a degraded state at the moment, but I am happy to say that nothing should get dropped and it hopefully won’t last long. I’m truly fortunate to manage a group of guys skilled enough to take on almost anything thrown at them.

This past weekend was an opportunity to get to quite a few things that I’ve been neglecting for a bit. One of them was replacing the trim on the door in the downstairs bathroom.

(flashback, for context)

Our dog, Patrick (who we lovingly refer to as “Big, dumb, dork-dog”) likes to chase the cats. Years ago, while we were out, he tried chasing one into the bathroom and ended up closing himself in. Not liking enclosed spaces, he tried to get himself out. Without thumbs, of course, his only option was to scratch his way out. We got home not long after and let him out but only after he chewed up the door frame a considerable amount.

I’ve never done such a repair before so wasn’t in a hurry to try, but try I did. After going at it with a hammer and seeing how it was attached, I went to the hardware store and got the necessary supplies. Having been my first time, I wasn’t paying attention that I had the trim backwards so marked (and subsequently cut) the wrong end.

After coming back from the hardware store a second time, I was far more careful to mark the correct end before doing the 45° cut.

Last week, there was an email exchange that required a last-minute scramble that didn’t have to be last-minute. When one of my guys expressed his frustration to the user, the user’s manager wrote back in a considerably harsh and unnecessary tone. It was learned later, after calming down, that he did not feel quite as he wrote. If he had just taken a moment and considered his words and thoughts, I believe it would have been much more reasonable or may not have been set at all.

In both cases, I was reminded of the old adage “measure twice, cut once.” Please do yourself a favor and heed that in both such situations in the future. Thank you.