December 2005 Archives

40 minutes of tips from Time Management for System Administrators can be viewed online for free. The video gives a good basic understanding of the kind of information you'll get in the book.

I'll be speaking at Philly Linux Users Group about Time Management for System Administrators on Wed, Jan 4, 2006 .

More info can be found here.

I'll be speaking in Cambridge/Boston at Back Bay LISA about Time Management for System Administrators on Wed, January 11, 2006.

More info can be found here.

I'll be speaking in the SF Bay Area (Mountain View) about Time Management for System Administrators on Thu, Feburary 23, 2006.

More info can be found here.

At LISA2005 Brent Chapman gave an excellent talk "Incident Command for IT: What We Can Learn from the Fire Department". (Slides are webified here or download the PDF).

The ICS methodology has a lot of really good points to it. Adopting it for IT work should have a lot of benefits, not just in emergencies:

If you use it for "routine" and pre-planned events like moves, upgrades, and deployments, your team will be more comfortable using it for "surprise" events like outages and security incidents.

Brent has more about LISA2005 in his blog entry.

Bilancio's review

Today at the Opening Plenary of the USENIX LISA2005 conference, Christine and I were presented the 2005 Outstanding Achievement Award for our book, The Practice of System and Network Administration. I accepted the award on Christine's behalf, as she is in Switzerland and couldn't attend the conference.

Here is the transcript of our acceptance speech:

Time Management on Google Video Friday is my birthday. Instead of asking for a gift, I'm giving one. For the last month I've been working to produce the following 45-minute video that highlights many of the techniques in the new O'Reilly book "Time Management for System Administrators".