Beautiful
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Deal then
“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear”
– MLK Jr
Mac monitoring app
Being an operations geek, means I am always on the lookout for new ways of doing the all essential 3M ‘s success criteria of running IT systems, Monitoring, Metrics and Measurement.
Lithium is an OSX based monitoring app, that has so far eluded my watchful eye.
SNMP driven, with a PostgreSQL backend, native OSX console and a PHP backed web interface along with iPhone and upcoming iPad app frontends.
Apart from being a beautifully designed app, and at first glance, looking to be a flexible and useful network monitor, it also has one of the coolest features I never knew I needed, coverflowed RRD metric graphs, truly a thing of beauty!
Preparedness
”The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy’s not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable.”
– Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Denzel is the man
Set in a post-apocalyptic USA, Denzel Washington’s Eli journeys through a hopeless landscape of pillagers, non-believers, lost souls and just all-around bad guys, armed with only his faith, the book he has sworn to protect, and the biggest macheté knife I have ever seen, which plays a certain part as pertaining to the aforementioned bad guys.
Directed by the Hughes Bros (“From Hell”), and touting gorgeous cinematopgraphy by Don Burgess and a scintillating soundtrack, it is by far one of the best “nuclear dramas”, I have seen so far, carried beautifully by Denzel’s all encompassing presence, surpassing even the immaculate performance by one mr. Smith in a similiar outing.
Highly recommended!
Robyn is cool
I remember Robyn all the way way back from my teen years. She has lingered somewhat quietly all these years, holding on to her own musical personality, while trends came and went.
The very cool techno/pop style “Hang with me” tune is a good example of her sound, I especially love the tech posing at the start of the video and everyone knows girls who know how to handle gear are the sexiest of them all! 
ITIL-ity
OK – so you know you should probably do something about this ITIL thing that every OpsMgr and their dog keeps yapping on and on about.
But where do you start? – ITIL is such a knowledge-heavy field with the essential volumes filling up a couple of football fields, that the entry barrier is so high you need a ladder just to see the barbed wire at the top!
But there is hope – you can do ITIL gradually and at your own pace, without spending fortunes on certifications and getting cross-eyed from reading!
If you want a quick an’ dirty intro to the complex subject of ITSM, I can personally recommend the Best Management Introductory Overview of ITIL-v3 book, which gives you the lay of the ITIL land very concisely and effectively and best of all, the PDF download is free.
Once you’ve got a couple of ITSM pointers under your belt, you’re ready to tackle a more practically oriented text.
This is where the IT process Institutes Visible Ops Visible Ops book comes into play.
In my mind, quite simply the best most practically applicable guide for doing an ITIL implementation in your organization – bar none. This one is not free, but so worth the investment.
ITPI also has a Visible Ops Security book, that comes equally highly recommended if you need to give your organizations security procedures a boost.
All in all – a not too expensive way into ITSM beginners nirvana – you might not ace an ITIL certification after reading these texts, but you’ll be armed with a lot of very practical information that you can integrate into your organizations current service processes.
Now shut down your browser and go read!
I agree a lot
Jon Pralls 85 operations rules to live by make so much sense they should be mandatory questions when interviewing potential new operations managers, hopefully replacing the by now very cliché “What happens when you type www.google.com into your browser address bar?”, that technical HR people, seem to think constitutes the ultimate in IT Operations knowledge.
I was always rather tempted to reply “You break the Internet?“
Groove(y)!
Another guy who really has his musical chops together, but doesn’t let that get in the way of grooving his a** off, is Shane Theriot, a New Orleans native, who has the nailed both crazy outside bop playing ala Henderson and sleazy Meters funk with a zydeco backbeat, and all the while manages to sound like he’s not even trying – amazing cat!
Mr. Landau to you …
Amazing clip of Mike Landau group from Germany 2007. Mike kicks off a mindmelting groove solo after the head of “I’m buzzed”.
We should all listen and learn, this is how it’s done, no one above, taste and tone wise, rythmically and melodically just perfect.