mrjatx

"You owe me $20" "Ok, hold on, let me get into my car, drive down the street, look for parking, get out of my car, wait in line, pay an extra $1-4, drive back down the street, look for parking, exit car, then hand you your $20 that just cost me about $30 in time, effort and gas."

But maybe I'm cynical because I'm in Austin and driving anywhere is just miserable.

Army brat, I've been everywhere!

I've worked for several MSPs and yeah, I mostly mean Windows. But we worked on just about everything. Especially Cisco/Dell CLI equipment (routers, switches, etc).

Boy that's interesting, I've never thought about it. I'm an American who grew up in Germany but have an Italian and German family who grew up in the projects of NY (the Love Canal, Niagara Falls). My grandmother (german) and grandfather (italian) married and their families constantly fought and pretty much hated one another.

I remember them fighting (mostly arguing) and the men going "Ey ey, lets keep things copacetic." (They might have said capasetti)

I always thought it was a pretty and a smart sounding word. I guess not.

I'm devops and in my opinion the title infers this; my job is to keep the communication between developers and the operations teams in sync and copacetic. Usually, Ops doesn't know dev and dev doesn't know ops so if there's nobody to translate and explain things in each others technical language things can't be done quickly and reliably. The wrong environments will be configured, things won't have backups, it will be like the wild west and things will be stressful for both sides.

My job, just like it was when I was a sysadmin, is to keep things running smoothly. To optimize both sides of the coin and to take things off their plate that I myself can deal with that might be a blocker to them finishing tasks and to us getting features out or server migrations done.

Some devs know ops and some ops know dev, those guys, more often than not I just check in with and see that things are running smoothly. For the other folk I try to create systems and workflows that get blockers out of their way.

I try to be a useful and reliable tool to both sides as much as I can be.

Hopefully the way I've been doing this for the last two years since I moved into a more Devops related role has been helpful to everyone.

I'm part of the recent sysadmin generation that had no programming skills and grew up doing what I consider more "application administration." Lots of clicking Next with no real understanding of what to do if that Next button quits working. Stack tracing? Procmon? Miserable understanding of DNS and networking, what's a /24? These were things senior admins knew and used once the tickets went up the chain because customers were screaming.

I was always (well, not always, once I'd proven myself) a senior admin/engineer, now I focus almost purely on AWS automation, and it bums me at out how many admins are completely happy with just being Next button admins who are absolutely AFRAID of touching a bash or zsh shell, or even a Cisco router without the UI.

I suppose it shouldn't bother me, it's done great for my career.

Some people have more money than time or interest in spending that time grinding games. I've been level 12 in Battlefield 4 for years. I don't get to play it more than a few times a month. I'd love to pay $20 to have all of the unlocks so that I can actually use the weapons that everyone else has.

Because to me, that $20 is worth FAR less than the 100 or so hours I had to waste getting those weapons.

Oh, I got this! Worst wireless reliability I've ever seen in a business. They keep putting out 'fixes' to wpa2 authentication and we still have constant issues in our office when going from WAP to WAP.

I'm actually not a fan of the hardware at all. I hate that I can't buy an actual dock to dock, so I'm unplugging ghetto caddy every time I want to take my laptop home from the office.

Thing is I love OSX, and actually, not even specifically OSX, I love some of the apps MADE for OSX only. If these damned developers would make webapps or linux ports I'd LOVE to migrate back to either a thinkpad carbon X or some sort of cool new Surface Pro/convertible deal.

I'm going to go through all of my apps at some point and see what I REALLY need that is OSX only. I just realized Intellij has a Linux version and so does Unity.. so, as long as I can virtualize efficiently with virtualbox or something to get .net 4.5+ stuff going I'm totally game to start working from Linux.

I'm the opposite, I loathe big laptops. I always used Thinkpad X's or the Vaio Z's connected to monitors. That way when I leave I just pop them off the dock and carry them out the door with my paperwork. Take 'em to a coffee shop or out on the porch and get some work done. On that note, I can't do the 11s though. I initially had an 11" MBA and that was way too small.

I'll never do another 15" laptop!

Man, I finally a few years ago got completely comfortable with OSX and scripted so much stuff that I can set myself up basically anywhere in 5-10 minutes. Now I'm stuck on a MBPr and get to watch all of these amazing new PC laptops come out that are so innovative. All of the hybrids, convertibles, detachable convertibles, rotatable convertibles. I'm so envious.

Come on Apple, seriously.

If you've ever submitted an iOS app and had a youtube frame/etc that allowed unfiltered searches, the app submission team will nearly always look up "Violent," and reject the app based on the ability to look up Violent videos.

Violent videos just seems to be a trigger point for a lot of politics/companies/etc.

I remember the first time I got that, and went, "well, yeah, you can look up puppies too." But, hey, maybe someone is downloading our app just to get through some youtube filters their parents set up.

Oh no, I didn't get that at all. It did sound like you were saying that only people with severe issues need CBT though. I think that every single person would greatly benefit from CBT training, just as I feel that they'd benefit from meditation, a healthy diet and a consistent workout routine.

I would be hard pressed to NOT recommend CBT to someone, even the most positive and least anxiety-filled person. If you believe that CBT is only for someone with severe anxiety or negativity you are completely wrong. It can help anyone!

Partitioned off open workspaces please. NOT the wide open "everyone is equal" cafeteria setup where every single noise/movement distracts each person.

Geez, oh yes. They built their platform and decided to start reselling it. That's why Netflix, Pintrest, Airbnb, Expedia, Foursquare, NASA, the MLB all use AWS.

They converted 100% in 2011 according to Jon Jenkins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxk8b9rSKOo#t=449

McDonalds doesn't make money from their website, which is the problem in your comment. If we were comparing McDonalds we would be comparing their fast food infrastructure.

If you were an up and coming fast food burger joint that was going from 1 shop to 2 shops, and possibly more shops, you sure as hell would want to ask McDonalds for it's strategic advice and further advice on how to run your burger shop as well as possible. They've been there, they've done it, not that you need to follow their guidelines, but you definitely want their knowledge in the back of your pocket. They've got about 70 years of experience.

Same with Amazon, who has to keep Amazon.com online or they lose massive amounts of money.

Your last point is completely untrue. I've programmed Asterisk systems for large call centers that specifically had supervisor modes where the supervisor could monitor calls to make sure employees were keeping customer service up to par. If this had been illegal the state Workforce Commission would have had a field day each time an unfair termination case came up.

I'm going to assume that's purely state based, but it definitely is legal in some jurisdictions. I'd imagine moreso than not.

I agree that I don't want to work somewhere where you're monitored. I think we'll all agree to that.

But I've actually saved someones skin before by providing logs when a sexual harassment lawsuit came up and an employee was fired unjustly (manager fired them, but his advances were blatant in the logs).

It protects the employee if you use the communications properly.

I've been a network administrator and had control of everything.

That did NOT mean that I was actively viewing everything and sitting in a tower somewhere cackling at all of the deep dirty news I had. I had to pull data a handful of times during lawsuits or sexual harassment complaints.

You should not be delving into deep personal/sexual conversations on any work tool without having in the back of your mind that it may come up at some point, whether you're at a startup or not. I'm on my 3rd startup and while I know nobody has been monitoring (because I pay for the tools) I still keep the tools somewhat professional. To the point that I couldn't care less if someone looked into my conversations. If we're going to bitch about that, then the fact that my data is on some unknown server at Hipchat is FAR more worrisome to me than my COO looking at my conversations.

You SHOULD trust your employees and if you don't trust one replace them. You should also TRUST your management to not spy on you. But you should also assume that they have the ability, if not, you're daft.

It is absolutely ridiculous to be uncomfortable with managers seeing employee communications. First off, any time you log in to a machine at most corporations you're told that ALL network activities are monitored. It's not a joke. They are monitored. Every packet you send out and every packet you receive CAN BE RETRIEVED. This isn't new. I'm 30 and have seen this since I was in high school. I'm sure older folk have seen it for even longer.

Next off, you are owed NO privacy on services that your company is paying for for interoffice communication. You never have been. The fact that people bitched and moaned over Hipchat allowing history to be viewed is just ignorant and stupid.

You know why managers have the ability to view these things? Harassment. Sexual, physical, altercations, etc. If your company has more than 5 people these things WILL come up and the INABILITY to retrieve this data is BAD.

We have ALWAYS been able to retrieve this data via XMPP (Openfire), MSOffice Communicator/Lync, etc.

This is NOT some mind blowing new development.

It's an extremely specific library and anyone who needs this sort of thing will easily find it in their search.

You're commenting like I refuted or disagreed with you about something - I was just positing the opposite, that yes, because of what you said it's more difficult for someone who wants to go run away from everything to do so. I was agreeing with you.

No where did I refute that.

I didn't mean go on a long vacation. I meant disappear and start a new life. You wouldn't post about that on social media, you'd just pack your bags and go. But social media will have your friends being detectives about where you've gone, someone from reddit might see you at the airport or grabbing coffee, etc.

On the flip side, if you're an adult and trying to "disappear" for.. whatever reason you've chosen (it's your prerogative), social media has made that difficult.

Digital Ocean has never, since their release, provided anything impressively technical with regard to their infrastructure. It's not surprising that this is half-assed as well.

Are you deleting all of your replies?

After having both Lightbox7 and whatever Sonys big photo-store/share platform close down and wipe out my high school/college albums I've learned to definitely not rely on any image hosting services.

Back then there wasn't twitter or any other good social media and you found things out by visiting the site or through ICQ.

You're a newer user, I believe. They gave 6 months after the Ignition users flipped out about having SEVEN days to upgrade their accounts. I've had Ignition for 3+ years.

It's been awhile, I could be misremembering things a bit.

I'm referring to the LogMeIn Ignition drama, the mobile app, not their free subscription.

LogMeIn had a $29 or $39 (I forget) application called LogMeIn Ignition that was sold as a method to connect to your computers. The expectation, rightfully so, was that this extremely expensive (for a mobile app) app was all the user needed to access X amount of computers using LogMeIn Free. There was never, back then, any mention that you needed to ALSO pay a subscription fee to access devices.

Then out of the blue the users were told that they had to pay for a LogMeIn subscription to access their computers.

That is scummy as hell and plenty of corporate customers (myself included) have migrated away from them and now use paid services at TeamViewer, etc.

Some users, like myself, bought LogMeIn Ignition for emergencies. I don't think I ever even used it. I bought it specifically to remote in to my mediaPC and my desktop at home in the event I needed to retrieve a file or fix my Plex server.

I'm totally on their side about making MSPs and IT consultants who used it as a jumping point to their clients computers pay. They should have done that a long time ago - the difference is they didn't pay for an app at all. I paid more than I've paid for any mobile app for Ignition.