Reading this, it makes me wonder how adults so easily forget what it is to be young?

I remember it very well – the utter boredom of school, the monotony, the expectations that had little to do with anything real.

Schools are for warehousing and training to be good corporate citizens. That is about all.

Anyone who thinks anything else has just been brainwashed by the system (its de facto intent).

The funniest term in all of routing is the “totally not so stubby area.”

Yes, this is real.

I want to create my own area called the “really gnarly bodacious stubby area with a side of hollandaise.”

I don’t think I’ve ever wanted a piece of hardware as much as I want the 5K iMac.

Soon, my precious. Soon.

This article relates to a point I’ve tried to make for years to other IT people and they mostly just don’t seem to get it.

Complexity creates its own problems. The more complicated you make a network with redundancy and failover features, the fewer people understand it. Sure, I can create a network and server design so complex that only I can manage it but what then?

A lot of IT people are obsessed with cleverness. I am obsessed with things working right as simply as possible.

In general when I design a network or server infrastructure, I make some use of well-supported failover or redundancy features for absolutely critical infrastructure that the business can’t be without for even a few minutes.

For everything else I try to make it as simple as possible so that if something goes wrong, even a helpdesk worker can fix it while I am away.

For instance, instead of a complicated dual redundant everything stack of non-core switches connected to dual firewalls, if the business can stand three minutes of downtime why not just have a backup firewall pre-configured on a shelf? Or a switch?

Swap it and and done. Even a helpdesk worker can do this whereas if there’s 3-4 different connection paths, complicated routing and (as is usually the case) poor documentation, then not even junior sysadmins can do the job – especially if anything on the network changes and is not documented which happens all the time.

If it’s a holiday or someone knowledgeable is away – as has also happened to me more than once – if something in your very-complex network goes down and isn’t handled by failover or redundancy, the business might be down for hours instead of minutes.

This is the fault of the complexity directly. Networks and servers should be resilient in two dimensions: technologically and comprehensibility.

For anything in small- to medium businesses that isn’t absolutely critical (can’t stand more than five minutes downtime a year) simpler is often much better.

What’s weird about the Snowden leaks isn’t that the NSA was spying left and right, it’s that so much hubbub was caused by things that had been common knowledge (or at least I thought) for many years.

I remember talking with my friends about the Echelon project. In high school. In 1992.

That Edward Snowden is still working for the NSA, and there are other goals in mind, should at least be considered.

I doubt that they (national intelligence community and those who control it) are that smart, but you never know….

It’s funny that I would’ve made a really good – perhaps even a great – scientist 100 or 150 years ago, but now I’d be considered absolutely terrible due mainly to no real math talent or ability to learn.

Not a whine. Most scientists if they can find jobs at all are poorly paid and can work only in a few places whereas I can make more and work just about anywhere.

I don’t want to be a scientist and never would subject myself to the painful forced education in our society that it requires even if I had the requisite mathematical talent.

I just find it strange and interesting that the very skills that would’ve made me good 150 years ago – very wide knowledge base, ability to synthesize across many areas, etc. – would make me horribly unacceptable in the field now.

Fields change. Needs change. I get that. But I think even so-called “knowledge” fields form cults of expertise that serve as much to lock out and lock up ideas and approaches to them rather than pursuit of truth and human advancement.

It is inevitable – again, I stress not just possible but inevitable – that we have another major economic crash in the next few years. I’d say 5-8, but it could be sooner or a little later. Not much later, though.

It will be triggered by something, but the “something” won’t matter, just as contrary to popular belief the collapse of Lehman didn’t really matter as the cause of the financial crisis that began in 2007.

Lehman has been used as a scapegoat, and most people have bought it, just as most people buy most propaganda. (Another bit of bought and sold propaganda is the hoocoodande defense that I’ve seen several very smart people hornswoggled by.)

Anyway, having a lot of liquid money (if you have means) and not being in debt are steps to take now, not years from now.