October 2005 Archives

Some days you are master of a huge data center. Other days you're just sittin' on the floor outside the "computer closet" trying to figure out why the new cheap servers won't boot.

That's just how it works.

Ars Technica has an excellent article about MSH.

If you love perl and/or bash, you'll be interested in reading this tutorial. It gives some excellent examples that explain the language.

I'll be speaking about my new book, Time Management for System Administrators, on Wed, Nov 16 at the Boston Linux & Unix Users Group. This is my second time speaking there, and I really look forward to returning.

More info here.

The Drexel Computer Science Graduate Student Council has invited me to speak about Time Management. If you are in the Drexel community, I'd love to see ya there!

More info here.

I'll be speaking about Time Management for System Administrators at 6pm, Wed, Nov 2, 2005 at NYCBUG. They meet at the Soho Apple Store at 103 Prince Street in NYC.

More information behind this link.

"When I see a person I don't recognize in the office, I always smile, stop, introduce myself, and ask for the person's name. I then ask to read it off his ID badge "to help me remember it. I'm a visual learner." New people think I'm being friendly. I'm really checking for trespassers."

This and other great tips can be found in here.

I'm pleased to announce my new book, "Time Management for System Administrators" from O'Reilly and Associates.

You can now pre-order it on Amazon.com

For overworked system administrators everywhere, Time Management for System Administrators focuses on strategies that can help you work through daily tasks and be able to handle critical situations that inevitably arise. Written by the co-author of the popular book, The Practice of System and Network Administration (Addison-Wesley), Tom Limoncelli teaches interrupt management, to-do-lists/follow-through, calendar management, and life tools in Time Management for System Administrators. Intermixed with these skills are tips on doing things more efficiently and eliminating time wasters.

Did I mention you can now pre-order it on Amazon.com?

The "Being Happy" chapter in The Practice of System and Network Administration talks a bit about Cognitive Therapy and a book called The Feeling Good Handbook. The London Times this Sunday had an article that shows that research in this area is alive and well.

The man who's trying to do for happiness what Newton did for gravity has found it a scarce commodity in life. Seligman describes himself as a "walking nimbus cloud" who spent 50 years "enduring mostly wet weather in my soul".
...
Since its origins in a Leipzig laboratory 130 years ago, psychology has had little to say about goodness and contentment. Mostly psychologists have concerned themselves with weakness and misery. There are libraries full of theories about why we get sad, worried, and angry. It hasn't been respectable science to study what happens when lives go well. Positive experiences, such as joy, kindness, altruism and heroism, have mainly been ignored. For every 100 psychology papers dealing with anxiety or depression, only one concerns a positive trait.

So what do you have to do to find happiness?