BumpInTheWire.com

They say all good things come to an end. All shitty things do as well. I’m writing my final BITW post tonight. I was asked today about how I’m going to make BITW bigger, better, faster, stronger. Like a punch to the throat, what I had been thinking about for a month became crystal clear. I have no desire to write about nerd stuff. As I explained to the person that asked me about BITW, I have much to sharp of a tongue to do this in good conscious anymore. All the self censoring involved in writing about something that my paycheck depends on sucked the fun right out of it. I ran this by Preggars (the pregnant wife incase you’ve forgotten) tonight when I got home and she completely agreed with my reasons to hang it up. She thinks I should start another one not related to geekdom where I can be more liberal with my thoughts and writings. I may just do that. So that’s it.

If you were a reader of my tales I thank you. If not, then thank yourself.

I leave you with the lyrics from Society by Eddie Vedder from the Into The Wild movie.

“Like a bad case of swine flu, the Twitter epidemic continues to spread across Hollywood, and as long as it does, we’ll keep on bringing you the best Tweets ever.”

This is about as accurate of a statement that I can think when comparing something to Twitter. I’m not sure what gets covered more these days…pig flu or twitter. I actually read some tweets tonight from that article and I was disgusted with myself. Shit like this is supposed to make me want to join Twitter?

“‘Who’s the boss’ was such a great show.”

“I’m eating a bowl of oatmeal that never ends. It’s not going anywhere and I’ve been eating it for a solid 15 minutes.”

“Sometimes, out of a sense of almost curious contempt, I’ll point my space heater at my refrigerator.” (in all honesty I do find this kind of funny)

“too much junk food last night. it’s worst than post-porn guilt. i just sit in front of my pantry and say “why?”"

What a waste of my time. And shame on me for even taking the time to write about this crap after not writing for so long. If I ever sign up for twitter and you see me on the street, please punch me in the ear.

Right now my gut tells me I should not be sitting here watching Sex In The City (the movie, not the series).  I really should be watching the Royals game but I’m sucked in now.  Dammit!

Big decisions.  They’re a real bitch.  You can only hear marketing pitches so much.  You can only look at data sheets so much.  You can only read reviews, SPC-1 benchmark results and blogs so much.  The difference between the best and very good are miniscule these days.  Hardware has gotten to the point where it will never get to the point of stressing the infrastructure in the vast majority of environments.  In my world Its pull the trigger time on a storage decision that is closer to seven figures than it is to five figures.  I’ve listened to all the vendor speak that I can stand and have looked at data until my eyes bleed. 

In the last year I was part of another significat infrastructure decision that taxed heavily on the mental strings.  In that one I didn’t trust my gut and I’ve regretted it quite often here in the last few months.  I bought into the sales pitch more than I should have and now we are paying for it to a certain extent.  I’m not doing that on this one.  My gut is making the call on this one…at least for as much influence as it can which may not be a whole lot.

Idol pick…I’d send Gokey home.  He’s as boring as a sermon.  But my gut doesn’t think that will happen.  Lil’ Round…this was your last round.

BITW was O-fer on the Social Security Award nominations.  Congrats to those that got nominated.  I guess the pointless diatribe about the motley crew I work with wasn’t enough to garner a nomination.  Maybe I should consider a format change…scandals and animals comes to mind.

How much of life’s experiences revolve around timing?  A damn good number of them do.  Timing can be a sexy mistress or a back alley hooker with VD.  On April 1st I woke up to discover I’d come down with clamydia (metaphorically speaking of course!).  And no, it was not Conflicker!  We are in the middle of a proof of concept with an RSA enVIsion appliance.  We had a guy coming on site to install and configure the appliance on 4/1.  On 3/31 I spent the day preparing & testing our Nevis NAC solution by creating the necessary user and access rules so he could get in and do his job while not having access to our network.  It wasn’t a lot of work but that’s not the point.  I woke up to find an email in my inbox about an SSL certificate used in the Client Endpoint Integrity client being expired.  Luckily, this would only affect endpoints that had not installed the previous version of the client…like a consultant coming on site to install an RSA enVision appliance!  How’s that for timing?  Nothing a little penicilin couldn’t clear up!!

T-minus two hours until 4/1.  Are you ready for what is bound to be the biggest disappointment since Y2K?  My bet is that midnight rolls around and…nothing.

I was reading Mitchell Ashley’s latest post over at NetworkWorld tonight and was a taken aback by something he wrote in regards to the level of nerdery you keep in your home.  I guess in the “real world” its frowned upon if you don’t have a handful of servers at home running different hypervisor flavors tied to a dumpy old switch that sits powered up doing absolutely nothing all day.  If its estimated that enterprises utilize somewhere between 5% and 25% of server capacity, what does the “home” network utilize?  Somewhere less than 5% I’m guessing which seems like a tremendous waste of resources.

I guess I fall in the “Boo” category.  I have a simple, single core, self built PC at home with just an internet connection.  I do have a wireless router though.  Is that worth something in Nerdville?  Guess that wouldn’t get me very far should I be in an interview these days.

Did I mention that at work I have access to a half dozen retired Cisco routers, two big 4500 Catalyst switches, two retired Nokia firewall appliances, a retired fiber switch, iSCSI SANs, a stack of retired & unused servers bigger than a lot of environments have in production (not to mention the 6 foot stack of retired 1U servers), ESX Virtual Infrastructure and enough storage to spin up anything and everything I could ever want to learn without ever affecting a production network?

BOO!

Coming at you like a tidal wave….BITW is ramping back up.

I was free.  I had done my changes for the night and was getting ready to shutdown and take my sorry ass home.   Life was good at 6:38 PM.  Then one minute later it all changed.  I get the following email from Rainman about an ESX problem:

I have to go to the school and play the Easter bunny.  Yes I am a 6’ bunny.  Call me Harvey.

I need to reregister the SQL boxes.  They are not happy after the reboot. 

Can you bring those up so I can run to the School?

Okay…not a big deal.  This is a two minute process.  Remove the guest from inventory, from the command line run vmware-cmd -s register “/path to vmx file/file.vmx”  and go about your day.  Wrong-o.  Its now three hours later and I’m on the phone with support.

It doesn’t end there.  Rainman made a fatal mistake in emailing me some videos of his activities tonight.  I suggest you kick back and enjoy the show.  Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids!

I had a major breakthrough today on why BITW has more or less gone dark for the last three weeks.  It’s almost been one of those “the day the music died” deals.  The creative inspiration for much of the dribble that made it to a post was some how related to Rainman.  The day he moved to our other office the well dried up.

Last week I said I’d do an American Idol pick weekly.  I got it wrong last week.  Let’s get some redemption.  I’m gonna go with last weeks pick again.  Michael Sarver, good bye.

We’ve all had it happen.  You buy that new car and you protect it for as long as you can but eventually that first scratch is gonna come.  The real question is…is it better to hold off as long as you can for that first scratch or just “bite the bullet” and get it over with?  Its one of those band-aid ripping questions.

Like I said…we’ve all had it happen.  Translate that to nerdery and it comes out as an impacting event at work.  I mentioned it a few posts ago about a new person starting in our department.  Well we actually had two people join our department in the last few weeks.  One of them, who will be referred to as “Caddyshack” from here on out, got the first “scratch” on her car today.  Luckily it was a very superficial sratch that nobody even notices but the person that did it.  She took the approach of “bite the bullet” and just get the first scratch out of the way because its gonna happen eventually so now is as good of time as any.  That’s admirable.

This brings us to our second player, Angry B.  Angry B appears to be the type to protect his investment as long as possible.  But its coming.  The unfortunate part of sitting on an investment to long is that you usually end up losing more than you’d like had you just cut the ties and walked away sooner.  That pretty much equates to Angry B having a major impact down the road.  Time will tell if this philosphy holds true.

That’s enough of poking fun at other people.  Its time to poke fun at myself which is about the easiest thing to do in the world.  I’m gonna start a new ritual of mentioning my opinions on American Idol.  Yeah, that’s right.  I’m a grown man and I watch American Idol.  Poke fun all you want because I can take it.  I’m a music lover and American Idol is one of my “guilty pleasures” even though guilt is not an emotion that I feel!  So here’s this weeks synops:  The first guy tonight, Michael Sarver, is a dead man walking and better pack his bags.  My favorite to win it all is Danny Gokey but I have a dark horse in Matt Giraud.

Have him remove my “missing person” picture from the back of the carton!  I’ve been unusually quiet ’round these parts for not having gone on vacation.  I was eyeball deep in a domain upgrade and was focusing on the task at hand.  Unfortunately for BITW, it was shoved to the side and neglected.  Now that I have that behind me I’ll be back at the keyboard this week writing dribble that adds absolutely nothing to your life.

I have to give a congrats to the Missouri Tigers on their Big 12 Tournament championship.  I argued that Kansas was the best team in the conference most of conference play but their youth proved me wrong in the last two weeks.  If anyone wants to claim that the Tigers are the best team in the conference they will likely get a nod in agreement from me.

Courtesy of Gizmodo…thanks for blinding me with nerdery!