New Tech Skills In Two Hours
How long does it take to learn a new skill? It’s like…a really long time, right? You never have that much time to learn whatever it is. Most people who learn new skills are dedicated super humans who put in 25 hour days doing labs and reading books and taking courses and sniffing markers. Those folks sacrifice everything to stay ahead and command the respect of their peers. Right? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?
Don’t overthink it.
New skills come from one thing. Focus. That’s it. That’s the secret. Focus to learn a skill comes in blocks of a few undistracted hours at a time. Not dramatic sacrifice. Not bragging to social media about how you’re crushing it on your studies because you’ve given up your personal life.
Let the public drama queen masochists do what they feel they must to impress…whomever. They are not your role model. You don’t need to be them. You just need to find a few consecutive hours on your calendar. Block them off. Use them to focus on a single thing you want to learn. During the blocked off time, learn the thing. Do not do any of the other things that Continue reading
Buying Used Cisco Gear From eBay For Your Lab
While most of the lab work I do is with virtualized networking gear, once in a while, I need actual hardware. For instance, to fully explore QoS, hardware is key. Many QoS commands won’t be available to you in a virtual network device.
eBay offers lots of older networking gear for pennies or even fractions of a penny of what the gear was worth new. Why so cheap? Mostly, older networking gear is too slow for modern LANs and WANs. That’s a win for learners who don’t care about the speed as long as they can still use the old box to learn the fundamentals of routing and switching.
There are caveats to eBay networking gear, though, not unlike buying a used car. Know what you’re getting into.
You’re buying someone else’s junk.
Why is it junk? It could be the gear aged out, but still works fine. It could be that the gear broke, but you’ll be able to fix it. It could be that the gear broke, and you won’t be able to fix it. Sometimes, folks who move out of a data center sell pallets of retired gear by weight to whoever will take it just because Continue reading
Jassy’s Replacement At AWS Matters
As Andy Jassy takes over the CEO role at Amazon, the question is asked, “Does it matter who takes over at AWS, the position Jassy is vacating?” The idea is that AWS is such a dominant force in public cloud, an untrained monkey could sit at the helm and AWS would continue printing billions of dollars. So who cares who replaces Jassy? Whoever the new human is, they can’t get it wrong.
That might be exactly right, but for the thought exercise, I decided to go a different direction. For purposes of this opinion article, I choose to entertain the idea that Jassy’s replacement does matter, and matters a lot.
Growing A Gargantuan Gorilla
We can all agree that AWS is the 800 pound gorilla of public cloud. However, I believe AWS will see increasing pressure from all quarters. By way of comparison, let’s consider Cisco Systems of the last ten years.
Cisco has dominated the networking space in a variety of categories for a very long time. The last decade has seen them as the target all of their competitors aim at. In that context, did it matter who replaced John Chambers when he moved on? You Continue reading
The Dystopian Reality Of Human Data Trafficking
Amazon Alexa wants me to know that they celebrate International Data Privacy Day. I’m awestruck at the chutzpah of this claim.
Reviews of a Samsung smart television I’m considering express frustration at the crapware loaded onto the system because it is difficult to navigate and tracks viewing habits.
An app I need for my Mac immediately requests access to my Documents and Downloads folders for no obvious reason. Denying the request has no impact on the functioning of the app.
A phone app I use to help me track strength exercises wants me to share my data with the Health app. It won’t stop asking me about it, even though I’ve repeatedly denied the request. Why? It’s not just for my own well-being, I’m certain.
Garmin shares my workout data, all highly personal containing health & location information, with various third parties, and there’s no way to opt out if you want to use their hardware.
Twitter delivers customized ads, even though I had at one time opted out, at a rate of 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 tweets to my timeline.
Facebook rages against Apple for daring to require that apps hosted in the Apple store contain Continue reading
The Attention Economy And The IT Talent Dearth
In IT operations, finding talent is difficult. For years, there has been a shortage of folks who are capable of maintaining complex infrastructure. To be sure, some of this is geographical. And certainly, the rate of technology change makes it difficult to find people with specific product skills. Hard to find a Kubernetes expert with ten years of experience. 
But I suspect there’s a couple of other things going on that, when combined, make the talent dearth even worse.
The Brutality Of Complexity
When I was studying for Novell Netware 3 (before directory services) certifications decades ago, there was a lot to know. Networking with IPX. Architecture of x86 servers. NLMs. Storage strategies. Mail systems. Whatever else was in those red books many of us had on our shelves.
Pre-AD Microsoft certifications were similarly challenging. Domain controllers. Backup domain controllers. File & print systems. User permissions and design strategies. The GINA. Networking with IP, IPX, and NetBEUI. Mail systems. IIS. So much more.
That was before the addition of directory services to Novell and Microsoft operating systems. Directory services changed the game for file, print, email, and more back in the day, and it put a major burden on IT Continue reading
What Does A Network Engineer Do? (Video Shorts Series)
After recording a podcast with my friend Zig Zsiga on demystifying the role of the network engineer (https://zigbits.tech/70), I decided to record this companion series of videos. These are shorts explaining from my perspective the many roles played by a network engineer.
You can watch the entire series in less than 30 minutes.
Freeze Your Credit Reports Before Identity Thieves Open Credit In Your Name
I found out today that I’m a victim of identify theft. Specifically, the bad guys have gotten a hold of my name, SSN, and probably other fun tidbits of my personal information. My best guess is that this is a result of the Equifax breach, not that it matters.
How Did I Notice The Identity Theft?
I am enrolled in a free credit monitoring service that notifies me when things happen on my credit report. (I’m not recommending a particular monitoring service. The one I’m using is tied to a bank where I’m a customer, and it’s good enough.) There were two “hard inquiries” listed within a few days of each other.
There are hard and soft inquiries. As I understand it, a hard inquiry means you’ve applied for credit, and the lending institution is trying to figure out whether or not they’ll extend you the money. If you see a hard inquiry and you’re not applying for credit, that’s a red flag. Soft inquiries are for things like pre-approved credit card offers that you didn’t ask for but receive in the mail anyway.
One of the hard inquiries was from the Small Business Association government agency. The thief Continue reading
Vendor Lock-In. Maybe Not So Evil. (Video)
Is vendor lock-in all that bad? Many argue yes. You’re tied to a vendor because you’ve used some of their proprietary technology, and so you’re (apparently) stuck with it forever, limiting your future business agility. I think that’s an incomplete argument, though.
You Can’t Do Everything, And That’s Okay
You’re a responsible human–a reliable person who does everything that’s expected and more. Congratulations! Here’s more work to do.
Yep, that’s the rub. If you’re good at your job and other people notice, you get never-ending opportunities to prove once again how good you are. More work to do, and more work to do, and more. The balance in your life is lost as you drown under a pile of opportunities and challenges with deliverables, due dates, and project managers scheduling recurring meetings to get status updates.
No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
If you’ve been through a few jobs, no doubt you’re familiar with this cycle. You leave the old job with a sense of relief, having transitioned your projects to others in a ceremony known as “the hand-off.” You chuckle a bit to yourself as your co-workers and manager who clearly didn’t grasp what all you were handling go glassy-eyed as you talk them through it.
You start the new job with a lightness in your heart. No projects. No due dates. No recurring meetings. The anxiety of getting familiar with a new company, figuring out your role, learning the politics, sure–there’s all that to contend with. But Continue reading
Finding Nuance In A Time Of Negative Noise
I am put off by the mainstream media, the American president, and Twitter these days. We’re living in a media world that lacks nuance. Nearly all discussions are polarized. That polarization results in a mockery of clear thought. A polarized world views issues as binary. Good or evil. Red or blue. Masks or freedom. Shelter at home or open it all up.
No more anger, agendas, or simple-minded retweets for me. I want facts without bias and reflection on what that data might mean. I want difficult conversations with no clear answers today, in the hopes of progressing towards a decent answer eventually.
Thankfully, I’ve discovered a few folks having nuanced, engaging discussions that attempt to analyze the difficulties of our world honestly and thoroughly. If these sorts of conversations might be interesting to you, here’s what I’ve found so far.
Eric Weinstein’s The Portal Podcast
On this long-form podcast, Eric interviews heterodox thinkers about both current events and goings-on in the scientific community, physics especially. Eric is a brutal interviewer at times, refusing to let folks go down obvious trains of thought, instead forcing them to get to the point with haste. This tactic, although often uncomfortable to listen Continue reading
Using AppleScript To Size A Window To 16×9 On MacOS
As part of an automation workflow I’m building around Elgato Stream Deck, I needed a way to size an application window to 16×9. This would be one component of a workflow that would allow me to launch an app, size the window, position it on the screen, and hide all the other windows with the push of a Stream Deck button.
The easy part was the Stream Deck configuration. The hard part was the AppleScript–I had never written one.
The Script
This AppleScript is crude, but it’s a start. I explain what the script is doing using inline comments, which in AppleScript are noted by the leading double-hyphens, although pound signs and (* *) delimiters for multi-line comments are also supported.
---------------------------------------------------------- -- SET VARIABLES ---------------------------------------------------------- -- theApp = name of the app MacOS will act upon set theApp to "ApplicationName" -- appWidth = how many pixels wide we'd like the window -- appHeight is calculated as a 16:9 ratio of "appWidth" -- Note that "as integer" means decimal portions of a -- calculation are truncated. set appWidth to 1600 set appHeight to appWidth / 16 * 9 as integer -- screenWidth = display pixel width -- screenHeight = Continue reading
My Adventuring YouTube Channel
Over the past couple of months, I’ve been organizing my collection of media files. I discovered a bunch of video lurking in an archive folder I’d forgotten about, featuring hiking and other adventures. So, I uploaded several of these usually short videos to my personal YouTube channel featuring mostly the New Hampshire wilderness & mountains.
This kicked off a chain reaction to upload more current adventuring video. If this is your sort of thing, enjoy at https://www.youtube.com/user/nh48ecb/. If this is not your sort of thing, thanks for humoring me.
If you’re not sure what to think, here’s a short video I re-discovered that gives you an idea of the scenery I’ve collected over the years. Maybe that will help you decide if you care. 
Synology Running Out Of Space? Empty The Recycle Bin.
While performing end-of-year clean up on lab infrastructure, I discovered my 8 disk Synology array with about 22TB of usable storage was almost out of space. Really? What had I filled all that space with?
After a lot of digging around, I found that I had enabled the Recycle Bin on one or more Shared Folders, but had NOT created a Recycle Bin emptying schedule.
This means that over several years of shoving lots of data through the array, the various Recycle Bins attached to various Shared Folders had loaded up with cruft. I figured this out running a Storage Analyzer report.
To get my space back, the solution was to empty the Recycle Bin. One way to do that is to edit the properties of a Shared Folder and click “Empty Recycle Bin”. You’ll get a sense of relief as Storage Manager shows available space growing as the Synology removes however many million files you’ve been composting for however long.
However, I like to solve problems permanently. No one has time to manually empty recycle bins on a disk array in a distant rack. Manually. Like a savage. Yuck.
Automating a recycle bin task on a Synology box is Continue reading
Opting Out Of Toxic Culture
In a culture of Internet toxicity, a question all productivity-minded people should ponder is why they are participating in social platforms. For example, Twitter has become a predominantly negative cesspool. Even the pun-loving techies I monitor from a distance seem to lean increasingly toward darkness and anger.
Few rainbows are to be found on Twitter these days. Maybe it’s just the dark mode UI talking, but I don’t go there to laugh anymore. I don’t go there to connect with friends. Instead, I put on my virtual armor, and read through comments and responses directed at me or my company. To be sure, much of what I see is fine. However, many comments are meant to start fires, even when couched in smiling niceties.
That’s the Internet for you. We’ve always had flame wars, trolls, and haters, all the way back to my dial-up days on Delphi forums and AOL. I know how to block and mute people, and of course that helps. Even so, I find that there’s something different in the tone these days. Folks are on crusades to bring others down. To shame. To burn in digital effigy.
To destroy.
When toxicity spills over into my timeline Continue reading
The Mythical Eight Hour Workday
I haven’t tracked my time in many years. I’ve always felt the practice was a nuisance. Hey, I’m busy. I have a lot to do. I’m working on it. Don’t distract me with a time sheet. You know what I do, boss, right? Do I really have to document my daily doings?
Working for myself means I don’t have to perform such trivial tasks, and of course, I don’t. However, I have been wondering over the last month where my workday goes. Often, it feels like I park my tush in my office chair, begin working on tasks, and then the day is suddenly over.
Except that often, the day isn’t over. My workday ends when I’ve accomplished everything I need to for that day. Eight hours gone by? Whatever. Head down. Keep at it. Get everything done. The list won’t get shorter tomorrow. If I want to get paid, I have to get my work done.
The Final Countdown
With more days than I want falling into a pattern of working more hours than I’d like, I’ve gotten serious about determining what the problem is. Do I need to turn away projects? Should I hire someone to handle some Continue reading
Improve Productivity. Shut Off Notifications. (YouTube)
Here’s a short car video where I recommend shutting off notifications as a way to increase productivity. Spoiler alert. That’s pretty much the summary of the entire video, so you can save yourself the four minutes. Or…watch it to get the nuance. I’ll be okay either way. I’m not making money on YouTube ads.
Connecting Python To Slack For Testing, Development, and Chat
Plugging Python Code Into Slack, Maybe For A Chatbot
The scripting language Python can retrieve information from or publish information to the messaging app Slack. This means you can write a chatbot that puts info into Slack for you, or accepts your queries using Slack as the interface. This is useful if you spend a lot of time in Slack, as I do.
The hard work of integrating Slack and Python has been done already. Slack offers an API, and there are at least two open source Python libraries that make leveraging these APIs in your Python code easy.
When searching for Slack projects using Python, most of the top hits are using Slack’s official python-slackclient. Github reveals that python-slackclient is an active project, with recent commits. In addition, most code examples I turned up are using python-slackclient. But it’s not a preference borne of experience. Maybe you’d prefer an alternate library like slacker.
Securing The Slack App Security Token
The slackclient library is security-conscious. Some other library sample code shows putting the Slack access token right in the source code as a static variable assignment, which is a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad idea. Why? If you publish Continue reading
Leveraging Desktop Real Estate To Decrease Distractions
I use a dual-monitor setup. In my setup, the main screen sits centered directly in front of me. The secondary screen, which is slightly smaller, is off to one side. The real estate provided by the two screens gives me plenty of pixels across which to splash my applications–ample “screenery.”
I use my screenery productively when recording podcasts. I display a script, conferencing app, and recording tool without having to switch between them. Research productivity is also enhanced. I display a note-taking app front and center, with research subject matter like a video presentation, Kindle book, or PDF off to the side.
No Pixel Left Behind
Acres of screenery has benefits, but lots of screen space is also a potential distraction. I fight the desire to fill every pixel with an application. If I don’t use all the pixels, I must be wasting desktop space, right? I don’t want to waste my not inconsiderable investment in fancy monitors. Hmm. Sounds like an example of the sunk cost fallacy.
Desktop operating system developers have catered to my craving, adding sticky edges to windows that ensure not a single pixel is wasted. I can make my window edges stick to each Continue reading
Automating Logistics To Improve Productivity
Getting work done is hindered by logistics. Logistics is work about work. It’s the work you do so that you can get something else done.
For example, there’s a workflow I use to create a podcast. Most of that work is logistical: creating a collaborative script document from a template, inviting guests to a recording channel, scheduling the recording, coordinating sponsor content, updating the production calendar, editing the episode, writing a blog post about the episode, and promoting the episode on social media.
Relatively little of the workflow is what I consider the meat of podcast creation: researching the topic and guests, writing interview questions, and recording the actual show.
I draw the line between logistics and meat by considering what I can delegate vs. what I need to do uniquely myself. Most tasks can be divided along this line.
Solving The Logistics Problem With Delegation
One way to boost productivity is to delegate logistics. Delegation frees up your time to focus on the remaining tasks requiring your unique skills.
Delegation comes in at least three forms.
- Humans.
- Software.
- Automation.
Some tasks can be delegated to other humans. In my case, I delegate many tasks in my business to consultants, Continue reading
I Didn’t Even Know I Was Sick
This piece was originally published in the Packet Pushers’ Human Infrastructure Magazine, a publication about the human side of working in technology. HIM is sent every other week or so to Packet Pushers Ignition members. Sign up for free.
I recently tweeted…
I’ve become okay with only having so much time in my schedule. Would adding this { new | random | unexpected } thing to the mix stress me out? Yes? Then I can’t do it. Have to leave some space. Have to execute well on the things already on the list.
I grabbed a couple of replies that especially impacted me.
Cutting Things Loose Has A Cost
The hard part for me is deciding when to cut things loose in order to make room for new things that are more valuable. Sometimes it’s natural, like a job transition, but most of the time it’s not. I’d rather make intentional choices, not wait until I’m burned out. Of course, often the major problem with intentionally stopping a project is the social cost. Disappointing people is expensive for multiple reasons. And it’s very difficult to weigh that against the benefit of doing something new.
Benson crammed a whole lot Continue reading