Flying Blind

Anyone can fly an airplane. I know this because over the past decade I've let my mother, a bar-owning buddy, my whack-job sister and even my seven-year-old nephew take the controls of a plane I was piloting. They were flying the aircraft; I was piloting it. There's a huge difference. Flying is what you do when things are working. Piloting is what you do when shit goes downhill.

Administering a system is akin to piloting. Day to day, a fucking trained chimp can add user accounts in Windows and reboot the system when it crashes yet again. With practice he could probably learn to open a command line window and type dir. That does not make him an administrator.

If you don't know how to use the most basic UNIX commands like cat and grep using Cygwin, you're a trained chimp. The search function in Notepad is not the way you sort through thread IDs in a 500MB log and no, your m4d Excel sk1llZ don't cut it either.

On the other hand, I find it hysterical that one of the most common tools used by people writing UNIX and Linux shell scripts is Windows Notepad. Not emacs, not vi, not even pico (my favourite because I'm just that ghey), but Notepad. Which pretty much always writes a Unicode byte order marker. Which fucks up UNIX and Linux shell scripts.

If your job is Administrator and you're in class to prepare for the Oracle DBA II "Certified Professional" test, you should not have a problem using Oracle 11g running on any platform, not even on RedHat Oracle "Unbreakable <hah!> Linux". Your difficulties in using the better and more-refined-than-DOS bash shell should not prevent me and the others in the class from actually learning shit while you interrupt the teacher for the umpteenth fucking time asking how to change directories to list the files in /usr/bin/temp/ora-inst. You cockmonkey.

I have a little script of my own called "chimp" to run for these fucknuzzles which I usually remember to bring on a USB stick if I go to any tech classroom. It begins

#!/bin/bash
alias c:="C:"
alias dir="ls -lF"
alias del="rm -iv"
alias move="mv -iv"

It ends with echo "Ook."

And then the rest of us get to actually learn something about making the Resource Manager do what we want it to with a few different job classes. Or at least make it do what Oracle wants us to make it do during the damned test.

Survey Says...

Dear Microsoft,

When I fill out your dynamic survey, and in it I specify that I'm not a manager (question #21), that I have nothing to do with corporate policy (question #25) and that my job duties entail IT and software support (question #35), do not then throw management-style idiotspeak at me in a follow-up question.

In your current job, which of these statements best describes your strategic engagement with corporate IT policy?
Please select only one.

• Setting IT strategy, policies and/or goals for your company
  
• Working with others to help establish IT strategy, policy or goals for your company
  
• Translating business requirements of internal clients into technology solutions
  
• Implementing established IT strategy, policies or goals
  

None of those, you fuckwits. What the fuck does number three even mean?

At 2:30 yesterday some guys from $BigComputerCo stopped by to meet me in the CubeDesk of Hate. They're involved in hardware consulting for customers implementing $OurBigApp. Hi, How are you?, Nice to meet you, Thanks for the card, Why the fuck are you talking to me? I don't even deal with these guys tangentially. An hour later Shrek told me that we're going out to drink Glühwein (mulled wine) with them in half an hour. Cool beans!

That half hour became a full hour, in which time the rain had started. Instead of going within walking distance of my home we were going to the winter fairgrounds. Fine. Then Shrek told me they're treating us. Aw, HELLS yeah!

The guys were nice enough, the beer was free, we chatted for a few hours, and at the end of it I may be getting some free rack boxen. Big rack boxen. Stuff that's anything from 4-16U and runs some flavour of UNIX. Now I just have to figure out where the hell to plug it in -- I can't afford the juice at home.

One week from today I will be in a bar in Paris although not on $BigComputerCo's dime. Say luh gair.