Archive for 'December, 2010'

2010 is lurching to its grave as I type this. A fresh faced 2011 stands nearby, spade in hand. I look back at this year and wonder “What even happened this year?” A few major life changes have caused me to allow life’s activates to drown out the thoughtful passage of time. Days blur by. In fact, the concept of managing time in “days” is becoming harder and harder. Time is measured by “awake” and “collapsed”. From whence have I come? Where am I stumbling towards? Or am I just blundering in place?

Some things of note that happened this year:

• I moved with the family from Cincinnati, Ohio to Scottsdale, Arizona
• I moved from my old blog at thenonapeptide.blogspot.com to TheNubbyAdmin.com and have attempted to consistently share my troubleshooting and observations on the industry.
• I was offered and accepted a position to be the webmaster for a Joomla based video training site that a friend developed.
• As a result of the above opportunity, I searched out how to become a sole proprietor to sign the papers as a contractor. I then chose to form an LLC with the hopes of using my skills as a SysAdmin to create a hosted services company. You can read more in these posts:
  • Creating an IT consultancy in the USA, Episode 0, part 2
  • Creating an IT business in the USA, Episode 1: Stop… rewind!
  • Creating an IT business in the USA, Episode 2: Live Your convictions!
• I’m working on developing a web site that will offer data recovery services and hopefully help bootstrap my larger dream of a hosted services company.
• I’ve learned far more about online marketing and advertising than I had ever thought possible.

Some things of note that didn’t happen this year:

• This is my first year in IT that I did not take any kind of certification exam.
• I have not had anything near stunning financial success with the video training site.
• I still haven’t launched my own web based data service like I had hoped to by this time (secrecy is intentional; I don’t want to shill for my own products on this blog)
• I am nowhere near launching my first hosted service. The amount of money needed staggers me. I’m reevaluating my plan.

I’m feeling a bit like I’m running against a moving sidewalk. So much busywork, so little tangible progress. Or perhaps I had unrealistic ideals as far as success is concerned. I’m not much of one for “New Year’s Resolutions”. I prefer to just start doing what I need to do as soon as I recognize it. However, I do like making goals. What do I hope for this year in my career? I think I’ll keep the list small, but significant:

1. Launch, promote and profit wildly with my online data recovery service.
2. Strategize my first hosted service. Have a coherent plan that makes sense and have made significant strides towards developing the hardware, software and marketing that is necessary for it to be ready for public consumption. It doesn’t have to be accepting customers in 2011, but it should be within eyesight of that goal.
3. Have made significant strides as a SysAdmin to question my biases and understand things outside of my comfort zone. I want to understand the mindset behind DevOps, project management and ITIL. I want to be more disciplined in my work. That includes the use of source control for configuration file management, asset management and stricter documentation.

At first, it was hard to pare down that list. I want to learn more about Linux, virtualization, storage, scripting, and a myriad of other technologies. However, those are mere tactics. I need to focus on the strategies, the larger goals, and then let the tactics take care of themselves. Perhaps as I design my first hosted service, RHEL will be the best fit and I’ll need to dive head first into that topic. Perhaps I’ll work on my CCNA. Perhaps any number of things will happen.

I hope that 2011 will be a year of personal and professional growth, and the occasional owner’s draw check with a positive integer and multiple zeros after it. =)

Have you made any goals yet? Care to share them?

With potentially more of a crowd draw than Cassius Clay versus Sonny Liston, the battle between Joomla and Drupal is sure to get some emotions running high. I, however, am mostly oblivious to the battle lines as I’m just a hapless infrastructure SysAdmin who has stumbled into web administration and is just trying to make sense of articles, sections and categories *casts contemptuous glance at Joomla*. Honestly, I don’t want to stir up strife. I just want to find the product that works best for my uses. Plus, I love open and honest debate.

In a recent post of mine called “Tell Me About Yourself or DIAF“, a commenter named John Locke mentioned his own struggles with Joomla. The comment conversation that ensued ended up with John answering my specific questions about Joomla / VirtueMart versus Drupal / Ubercart on his own company blog. I encourage you to read his post “Ask Freelock: Why pick Drupal/Ubercart over Joomla/Virtuemart?“

I’d like to keep this conversation about CMSs and their more prominent eCommerce plugins going, so if you have thoughts, opinions or flames you have a few options. First, you can comment on John’s blog or mine. Second, you can post a reply / rebuttal on your own blog and ping John and me separately. Third, you could guest post on my blog with your own perspective. The choice is yours!

So what what do you say? Drupal? Joomla? Or as @mindless_pixie said to me via Twitter: “Conrete5 FTW”

On the internet, you are guilty until proven innocent. Or rather, if you have a company website and are trying to convince a web visitor to part with their money in exchange for your services, you are not who you say you are until you can present enough evidence to convince your visitor otherwise. Unless I can see decent evidence to the contrary, I suspect that every website is set up by someone who is completely incompetent or an outright scammer. Both want to take my money and financial details and send photocopies of my social security number to everyone in continental Europe.

I’ve been hunting around for a Joomla developer with experience in eCommerce solutions for a few months now. I have a project that I think will be profitable for the company I’m starting and I’m hoping to financially bootstrap my dream of hosted services with it. Joomla has a massive community with tons of development companies and freelancers, and as such I’ve waded through close to a hundred potential developers and firms.

I have two main fears:

1. The person that I eventually contract will have grossly overstated their competence and will not be able to design the elements that I need with skill and elegance.
2. The person I contract will not have great English communication skills and, while they may be technically brilliant, will not be able to understand my thorough list of tasks or be able to communicate effectively with me in some areas where I need guidance for decision making.

To alleviate these justified fears, I want to know about a company and their workers. What’s a person to do? Check out the company’s “About Us” page, of course. That is, if one even exists.

There are three types of About Us pages that I’ve found so far:

1. The nonexistent one. Really? It’s too hard for you to even toss up a bit of marketing spiel? Pshaw. You fail.
2. The “blah blah blah” one. This one is marketing spiel at its most obnoxious. “We bring together best of breed technologies to bring you a rich, vibrant, Web 2.0 eCommerce solution. We know you’re time is valuable so we’ll blah blah to maximize your ROI and blah all over your TCO earnings reports. With blah, your blah will be more blah!” There’s nothing personal about it. No company profile. I have no idea where they are located and how many people work there. I have even less information to do some background sleuthing on the company.
3. The personal one. This one has a picture of real people. Not stock photos. Real employees of the company. It lists some of the primary workers’ names, their professional experience and, ideally, something personal about them. No, not their teacup poodle’s middle name. Rather, some prose written directly by the person or people that speak to who they are as a professional.

When evaluating development companies or freelancers, if the about us page is not in the third category, I am going to remove them from consideration 9 times out of 10. This habit is not just limited to freelancers or developers. This is my habit when I have my SysAdmin hat on looking for software, hardware, services – anything. Heck, I do that no matter what hat I’m wearing. Even if it’s helping my mom buy hot sauce online. No “About Us” page? No purchase. You don’t want to tell me who you really are? That means you’re a spam gangster who punches kittens and hates the sound of children laughing.

If you have a business or attempt to do any kind of marketing of yourself, your products or your services online, please make a worthwhile “About Us” page. Tell your potential customers who’s behind the business and where you’re located. Even if it’s just a general “We’re located in Queensland Australia!” I don’t necessarily need to know that you work on the west wall of your third floor apartment on Walker St in Townsville.

That brings me to another point. Sometimes transparency can bring its own set of problems. If you openly confess that your business consists of only one or two people and yet your list of services offered would make Rackspace scramble, you’re still in trouble. That means that your knowledge is an inch deep and a mile wide or that you subcontract much of your work. The latter is preferable to the former. There’s no problem with subcontracting, but I’d suggest being transparent on exactly what services you typically subcontract. That way people know that you’re not spreading yourself too thin and it encourages folks with your forthrightness.

A great example of this in the Joomla development community that I found is The Dev Department. Their About Us page has some legit marketing speak to appease the executives as well as a more personalized page that gives the names and competencies of the core workers. They’re also transparent about who they use for subcontracting. Not only did I give them bonus points for that forthrightness, they also won extra points for using A Small Orange as their hosting company. Those are points that would never have been awarded if they merely stated “We can host your website!” and never mentioned how or with whom.

I’m not saying that it’s always appropriate or necessary to include a detailed personal profile on your “About Us” page. However, at least include some kind of information indicating who you are, where you are and if you subcontract anything. Not just raw marketing-droid language.

Could those suggestions lose you some customers? Certainly, but it could gain you a few as well. You could always A/B test your site and marketing to see what performs best. However, consider that doing the Right Thing is better than doing the best performing thing. Be up front. Be honest. Be open. Be good.

P.S. If anyone out there is a Joomla developer with eCommerce (osCommerce, VirtueMart, etc.) and email marketing knowledge (Joomla email marketing plugins, iContact, Campaign Monitor, etc.) contact me at [email protected]. JSYK, if you’re in America I’ll need you to fill out a complete W-9 form for my company. I have a registered LLC in the state of Arizona with a certificate of good standing. I work above the table at all times. It would be even better if you had an eLance, oDesk, Freelancer or Guru.com account.

P.P.S. Thanks to Jason “Obfuscurity” Dixon for prodding me to write this post.

I recently wrote a six-part series concerning useful physical tools that SysAdmins should consider carrying with them that was published across RedGate’s SysAdmin-Talk and SimpleTalk blogs. I also wrote an episode that dealt with useful tools that should be in a SysAdmin’s “virtual backpack”, i.e. a portable storage device. Here’s the list of articles:

• 10 Things That Should be in Every SysAdmin’s Backpack, Episode 1
• 10 Things That Should be in Every SysAdmin’s Backpack, Episode 2
• 10 Items That Should be in Every SysAdmin’s Backpack, Episode 3: USB Edition
• 10 Items That Should be in Every SysAdmin’s Backpack, Episode 4: Network Admin Edition
• 10 Things that Should be in Every SysAdmin’s Backpack, Episode 5: Boot Disc Edition
• 10 Items that should be in Every SysAdmin’s Backpack, Episode 6 – From the Ministry of Silly Tools
• Ten Things that should be in Every SysAdmin’s Virtual Backpack

In retrospect, I realize that those articles are based mostly on my own experiences which are probably wildly different from other Sysadmins’ experiences. Furthermore, in the words of one of my favorite Buttersafe comics:

Having said that, I’m am absolutely certain that I’ve left out some excellent ideas for physical and virtual tools that every SysAdmin should consider carrying. If you think I’ve left a vital tool out, or even just an oddball resource that might be handy to have in the bottom drawer, let me know about it and I’ll make a “Community Edition” post (or two, as the necessity may be).

What have I overlooked?

Do you have a casual Friday? Or do you work at a trendy-kewl startup where the only dress code is “wear clothes”? This, dear SysAdmins, is the shirt for us:

Perfect for when you have to locomote a switch from one IDF to another when both hands are occupied (perhaps with slapping the person who thought LinkSys switches would be a good idea). If anyone gets one of these, I request pictures.

I’m preempting any New Years’ Resolutions and getting back on a more disciplined life track now, rather than three weeks in the future. That includes being more consistent in my weightlifting regimen, paying closer attention to blood sugar issues and attempting to faithfully use my task management system again (I’m restarting that last one for the 19th time this year).

I saw a post over at SysAdmin-Talk titled “SysAdmin Desktop Wallpaper” that caught my attention. The desktop picture is a composite of three images that correlate to various workday related functions.

The idea is that you can place icons for network shortcuts in the upper left picture of network cables, fun things like games in the upper right corner with the picture of candy and icons of things that need immediate attention ate the bottom on the picture of a to do organizer. At first, I thought it was a cute idea, but didn’t give it much thought. But then the idea began to grow on me. At this point, I’m actively considering using it.

Personally, I hate icons on my desktop. I strive to have a zero-icon desktop with the exception of drive letters and a few network shortcuts. I also hate the idea of multiple task management systems. At the moment, I’m balanced between using Toodle-do and Outlook Tasks out of necessity. Adding a third concept to the mix, that of utilizing my own desktop, might be overkill. However, the idea is not without merit.

I hadn’t thought of using a desktop as a task management scheme. BGInfo is about as creative as much multitasking as I get with desktop pictures. Does anyone else use their desktop as a form of task management? How has that worked for you?