Net Neutrality is dead

Wikipedia hosts a great definition of Net Neutrality. In a nutshell, it means: Internet service providers and governments should treat all data on the Internet equally, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, site, platform, application, type of attached equipment, and modes of communication. There has been extensive debate about whether net neutrality should…

Stealth wisdom

I am going to let all five of you who might be reading this in on something: somewhere along the line, without meeting him or seeing this film, I decided to aspire to be like Daryl Zero. I often speak silently to myself, sometimes even out loud to others in silly, seemingly nonsensical phrases that…

Battle of the Bands: Configuration Management

Anyone who works in information technology spends a fair amount of their day automating simple tasks. I always say if it can be done once, twice, in the same way, it can be automated. Technology should do some of our tactical work for us. Configuration Management (CM) is arguably one of the best fits for…

DevOps is TeamOps

No doubt, there are a bazillion new buzzwords every year in technology. I’ve not personally been as excited about one in a long time, though, as I am about DevOps, a long overdue blending and alliance between developers and cloud/network engineers/systems administrators, a multi-disciplinary community movement dedicated to the practice of designing, building, evolving and…

The trade-offs of trading up

This past week alone, two pals of mine, who have historically resisted change, have traded their old-school cell phones (of the Symbian variety) for next-gen SmartPhones. One, an Android, the other, an iPhone. Upon getting home and beginning to introduce themselves to a new paradigm in communication technologies, each contacted me separately to ask what…

Tin Foil

Andrew Bird does Tin Foil even better than the Handsome Family: Late New Years Eve paper hat on your head It was hard to believe that you’d ever be dead And that dream that you’re falling you’ve had since you’re five Is a bird on your shoulder that whispers goodbye What is moving will be…

Give yourself a present [Part III]

Harry, I’m gonna let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it, don’t wait for it, just…let it happen. Could be a new shirt at the men’s store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot, black coffee.

Honey, it really works, honey.

Since becoming a grown-up, there are many things about childhood I remember fondly but one of them I was happy to forget about forever and wasn’t anticipating having to deal with again: allergies. For my entire adult life I was allergy-free living in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. . In Chicago, I have tried over-the-counter…

Improvised Deconstruction

A few clicks is all it takes The kooks you don’t love me From the bottom of my heart from the wasteland you’ve got everything going to plan man De-de-duh-duh-duh-duh-de-de-duh-duh

The blog is back

After a couple of years of just letting Twitter dump schwack into it, only human-considered and hand-written articles will be once again posted into this thing. It’s good to be back to something that is only rarely considered nowadays amidst all the cross-posted, scheduled, or otherwise automated tools. Perhaps, one day our children will revert…

Rules

Bruno Faidutti has written his thoughts about the merits of designing rules simply and with particular clarity: The essence of a game is in its rulebook – the rules of the game are autonomous, complete, finite and known by all players. This may even be what makes games different from most other human activities, whose…