The Kindle - A Quick Little Review

I've had my Kindle for all of 4 hours and I think it's really cool.

The screen is really easy to read, it's simple to navigate and pretty darn straight forward to use. The wireless connection makes it really handy to download books, search wikipedia.com and it has a built in dictionary so you can look up words on the fly.

I bought it because I'm really sick of carting books around and not reading when I have time to read simply because I don't have something interesting handy. I've downloaded a bunch of sample chapters of some books I've wanted to buy and imported a few PDFs of books I already own. I've been using a free software download to do the file conversion - results vary depending on the complexity of the PDF, of course. Documents that are primarily text converted pretty nicely. The big study guide for my Microsoft exam is so-so. You can also email documents in various formats to it directly and Amazon will do the conversion for you and then deliver it automatically.

I know some people has DRM issues with the whole thing. I'm not too concerned. Sure, if you buy a book from Amazon it's in the Amazon format, but its available to transfer to other Kindle devices registered to your account (like a family member) and you can delete and re-load then as often as you want.

You can also download a lot of free books from manybooks.net and Feedbooks provides a downloadable index of their books that you can link to directly from the Kindle and download the books on the fly. Lots of classics, etc.

And seriously, having an easy way to read those crazy Microsoft white papers I feel like I'm always printing. It's totally worth it.

When Things Work.

This morning, I've been at the office. I needed to make a key change with our imaging system that affects the user's logons, so it's one of those things you can't do during the business day.

And due to the additional security features we have turned on for the system, sometimes regular changes to the system actually break things. I don't really like broken things, thus have given myself the entire weekend to fix anything that could have potentially gone wrong.

But it worked. Just like the documentation was supposed to. I appreciate that the tech just sent me their internal documentation, instead of making me rely on them to hand me information only when things start going wrong. Plus I didn't have to make one of them actively work on the weekend and I end up understanding the system better overall because I was doing the work myself.

I did have a tech available via email - but that was more for moral support. He would have only jumped on if things went badly and we had to roll back the changes. But I hate rolling things back - I really like to just fix the problem and keep moving forward.

The Internet Life

Do you remember life before the Internet? I barely do.

It's hard to imagine that there are some people I know best (or only) via the WWW. I was chatting with a friend the other evening and he commented on how he's got a better handle on my personality via IM than he ever had from dealing with me in person.

Maybe that's because when we see each other in person it's always related to our jobs and there really isn't much time to talk about anything other than technology. Not that we don't spend most of our online time talking about technology and work too, but the other night we got onto other topics that probably would never come up when we happen to be in the same room.

It all got me thinking about how I interact with people via some kind of online chat - I'm in the age range where it's not the most used medium for our generation, but I spent so many years developing relationships with remote co-workers that were exclusively via IM maybe I'm just more comfortable expressing myself that way.

There are a lot of people on my chat client list that I don't regularly chat with anymore, but it's nice to see them there throughout the day. I remember when one of my old colleagues switched jobs and wasn't able to connect to IM from his office. I went through weeks of being really unnerved by the fact that he wasn't showing up on my list. It was like some put up a wall between us that I couldn't figure a way around.

Then there is another tech friend of mine who I know is pretty much accessible anytime. He's not always on IM, but if he's got a phone signal he'll usually get back to an email or a text. I sent him tech question yesterday knowing full well that was skiing in Canada. I wouldn't have minded if he waited until he returned to get back to me - but sure enough he replied within 10 minutes. Is it better for him that he's that totally connected or is it a pain in the ass?

Maybe because we both are in an industry where we are available to be paged or alerted by our office servers when they are in need, we don't mind being available to real people, too.

A Thought on Network Administration

This is nearly a perfect quote to describe Network Administration. I found it on Evan Erwin's blog, at www.misterorange.com where he wrote a post thanking Google for it's existence.

"While most of my job does not require Google, a good majority of it does. The better you are at analyzing what keywords are important to your search, the better geek you can be. Sometimes Network Administrator really means what it says. Other times it just means I Can Google Better Than You. "

I used to compete with another colleague on our abilities to find solutions to our problems fastest. He'd call me and say "I'd bet you can't figure out what's wrong with my server..."

Immediately = 15 Minutes

Yesterday: One of my office domain controllers, ROOTDC01, failed. Not so much that things stopped working when it failed, but it left us open to serious downtime if it's partner, ROOTDC02, failed before we had replaced the first one. I decided that it didn't make sense to bring a replacement Windows 2000 domain controller in, only to proceed with our planned domain controller upgrade project in about 4 weeks. It only made extra work. This was the (sort of) perfect opportunity to bring in a shiny new already Windows 2003 DC into the organization. And it would also force me to finally "walk the walk" after quite a few months of "talk" (and testing!).

Earlier Today: This evening, a co-worker and I started on upgrading the schema in our organization to support this shiny new DC. This process, which happens on ROOTDC02 (the remaining DC), is relatively simple on paper and successful 99.9% of the time. But it could do major damage the other .01%. And since I didn't have an 2nd DC to act as a backup, a screw-up could leave me doing a lot of disaster recovery. For many many hours.

All I really had to do was follow the step-by-step directions that I prepared for myself during the testing phases. And then, of course, second guess my directions. Wring my hands, close my eyes tightly and pace around while things were happening. And in some cases, when Microsoft documentation says "immediately" they really mean "give it 15 minutes to stew a bit." This is when most of the pacing happens. And rapid refreshing of my replication monitor application.

Now: Everything seems to have gone nicely. No system errors that weren't expected. No crashes, no blips. It's only the year 2006 and I've finally gotten around to getting our systems up to 2003.

Monday: Bring in ROOTDC03, the new partner for ROOTDC02. We are still in a touchy spot over the weekend - but I think we'll be fine. Once that new server is running, I can start upgrading the other DC to Windows 2003... might even finish the whole project before my deadline.