Monday, June 29, 2009

Breach

I am an IT Consultant. Exactly what I do depends on who I'm working for because I'm capable of doing many things. The reason I'm being explicit about being a consultant is because I want you to understand that I don't have a single employer. I have clients, and depending on the contract sometimes their problems become my problem. This weekend was one of those times.

A system was compromised and for a brief period of time bad things may have happened in a client's name. Though the process of identifying, diagnosing, and fixing the problem took me less than an hour the ramifications were more far reaching than I could have imagined. It could have been a Titanic moment.

I really want to write about the who, what, where, when, and why of this experience but I'm not at liberty to do so. But one day I will be, so I'm putting this out there now as a reminder to myself to finish this conversation.

Monday, June 22, 2009

Eli's Dirty Jokes

The, Eli's Dirty Jokes, videos on YouTube are absolutely hilarious.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Stuck!

Even though the bulk of my professional writing is technical, meaning the data is mostly available I just need to put it into a format understandable by my audience (aka, the people writing the check), I still sometimes encounter writer's block. Like right now. What the hell does that mean exactly? Because here I am writing this blog entry and I'm not having any trouble finding the words to express my frustration. Maybe I'm just naive in my understanding of what technical writing demands of an author. Maybe it requires the same level of access to the creative mind as a non technical work? Who knows? Today I'm not offering answers. I'm just putting pen to paper in an attempt to find my way.

Thursday, June 04, 2009

Quote of the Day, 4 June 2009

Me? I'm going back to running the browser on my UNIX box. It's way too frustrating trying to be a UNIX Engineer via the Windows platform.

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

PGCon2009 Summary

I'm back from PGCon2009. No, I didn't just get back. I've been back for a smidgen over a week now. When I first got there I decided I would blog daily about it, but time didn't permit me to write in any detail. So I decided I would make notes and summarize it all when I got back. The notes thing didn't pan out thanks to twitter. It was simply easier to tweet my thoughts as I thought them than collecting them in little text files and revisiting them later. The summary idea didn't work out either because (a) I didn't have any notes, and (b) all the good stuff was already said on Planet PostgreSQL. But it's been more than a week since the conference and people are still posting summaries so now I feel like I have to say something. Here goes!

Great conference, awesome people, awesome community, and PostgreSQL is really cool technology that I'm confident in trusting my [clients'] data with.

My only gripe with the conference was the keynote address. It's nobody's fault really. The original speaker couldn't make it so they had to slap something together at the last minute. It showed. At the time, my thought was, if the rest of the conference is like this it's going to suck!

...

As I write this I've just realized that the keynote incident is a metaphor for the larger PostgreSQL project. If you attended or watched the "How to Get Your Patch Accepted" talk, it is apparent that quickly slapping something together is not how the PostgreSQL code base is developed or maintained. So I shouldn't have been surprised that the keynote was not a valid indicator about the rest of the conference. I hope I haven't disparaged any of the speakers. They did their best and everyone else in the auditorium enjoyed their keynote.