coffee a clear liquid

Confessions of a SysAdmin

• Drupal 6.x upgrade process is great
  

  So, I just performed a Drupal 6.4 to 6.6upgrade, and it not only took a very short amount of time (about 20 minutes start to finish), it worked flawlessly!
  I've been a fan of Drupal ever since we launched the LOPSA site in 2005, but the latest incarnation is really well done software.
  Hats off to the folks driving Drupal!
   

• Tumblelogs, Microserfs, and Starbucks water
  

  So, in the spirit of building the habit of posting, even if it isn't the long, thoughtful, well-researched pieces I so much love to read, as I said in my last post, I bring my stream of consciousness blog entry today.

  So, I was suffering from an unusually bad case of exhaustion and sleepiness at work. The solution was to go get a red-eye from the little cafe in the basement of the building. They use Starbucks service. Every time I get handed a cup of freshly brewed Starbucks coffee, even with a little java jacket thing around the cup, it's so hot it burns my fingers.

  This reminded me of the 1985 Douglas Coupland novel Microserfs. Everyone in IT or Gen X or younger ought to read it. Coupland's prescient commentary on Microsoft and dot.com life in generally right on. The reason i thought of this novel in particular, though, is the commentary on how hot Starbucks coffee is. I wanted to find the quote from the book that is relevant, so I started googling around to find it. The exact quote is found on the Critical Mass blog entry from May 2006:

  From "Microserfs:"

  I think Starbucks has patented a new configuration of the water molecule, like in a Kurt Vonnegut novel, or something. This molecule allows their coffee to remain liquid at temperatures over 212 Farenheit. How do they get their coffee so hot? It takes hours to cool off -- it's so hot it's undrinkable -- and by the time it's cool, you're sick of waiting for it to cool and that "coffee moment" has passed.

  Of course, while searching for this little gem (and drinking the life sustaining coffee), I stumbled across something new (to me): tumbleblogs. Apparently the term was coined in a Red Handedpost back in 2005. That officially puts me more than three years behind the curve on this one.

  Back when it was easy to be on the bleeding edge, I was usually there hemorrhaging gleefully with the other early adopters. Now, I'm usually a little behind with the new safety blade version of the cutting edge, right before the blunt edges come out.

  Will this become a tumblog? I guess time will tell.

• Blogging hurdles
  

  So, apparently I have to rethink not whether I want to blog, because I think I made that mostly clear in the last post, but I have to rethink my process.

  I thought about why I almost never post to this blog.So, apparently I have to rethink not whether I want to blog, because I think I made that mostly clear in the last post, but I have to rethink my process.

  I thought about why I almost never post to this blog. My musings resulted in:

  • I like reading long, thoughtful posts on other blogs.
  • I always try to write posts that are like the ones I enjoy reading.
  • Long, thoughtful blog posts, especially with references and links liberally sprinkled about, take a lot of time and effort to be high enough quality worth both posting and, more importantly, reading.
  • I don't like blogs that are only posts with one or two sentences and a reference to another site.
  • I need to get into a regular posting habit.

  After these thoughts solidified, I suddenly felt the urge to post. So, in the spirit of blogging, I grabbed the iBook and fired up MarsEdit, my blog editing software. Sitting in the Local Drafts folder in MarsEdit were (and still are) four unfinished posts I've started over the last few months. That was the wafer-thin mint.

  This all is a culmination of my recent musings on a variety of topics, my recent experience reading several liveblogs during the U.S. presidential candidate debate, and my recent introduction to how people use Twitter (which i'm not sure I understand adequately, yet).

  The final result is my decision post a combination of short and quick thoughts or links to things I find thought provoking, critical, or otherwise blogworthy with my preferred format of longer posts with more information, ideas, and references in them, such as I've mostly done in the past.

• LOPSA partners with OLF for OLFU 2008!
  

  LOPSA does training in partnership with conferences throughout the year in addition to the occasional (twice now) Sysadmin Days event. This year David Parter, a Director on the LOPSA Board, and I taught a System Administration Master Class at YAPC::NA 2008 in Chicago. Now LOPSA is partnering with OLF for the second year to bring you OLFU, a day of training. 

• Long time no blog...
  

  So, apparently trying that blogging thing didn't work so well in the last several months of chaos. So, I think we're back to a variation of the same question:

  Why blog?

  RecruiterGuy says blogging fascinates [him] more because of what he reads rather than what he types. He likes finding the interesting and normal posts about normal and interesting people. My spouse, who is a professional writer, recently started blogging because, with an audience, there is an expectation of content, so she just has to write it. The New York Times says, "Reason No. 92: Book deal," due to some blog authors landing book contracts based on the subject of their blogs. Some time ago when professional blogging wasn't the norm, Fredrik Wackå spent a few months talking about why companies should blog.

  As many people know, I am interested in things related to communication, knowledge sharing, and various types of media. Blogging is a natural fit in amongst those topics, as it is a form of sharing knowledge through intentional communication, using various types of media - though all web delivered content. Blogging can be more a conversation with the reader than more traditional forms of written work - even other styles of web/net content. The tools we have today allow us to create blog posts as responses to other web content, especially other blog posts. For example, this post uses trackbacks to the sites it references. That means those sites, if they use trackback technology, now know that this post references them. It is the only way to automatically tell another site that you point at them, and it can be a rather powerful tool in furthering our global conversation. This is what the Blogosphere is all about. Purportedly, Brad L. Graham, on his Must See HTTP:// blog, coined the term Blogosphere in his September 10, 1999 post. Now it is a fairly common word to describe this interactive and sometimes navel gazing nature of blogs that we all seems to love (or hate, depending on the blog's content). In looking at how we can share more knowledge, communicate with more people of both similar and dissimilar viewpoints, and leverage our technology and global community to improve our lives, blogs are the personal conversation compared with the formal discourse of traditional news and industry or trade journals. Instead of responding to an article with an opinion piece in another newspaper or a letter to the editor posted to a web site, we can immediately respond on a personal and/or professional level, with full attribut