If you’re reading this, my first blog post EVER (and as such my first journey into the terrifying world of being a Web 2.0 whore), then aren’t you lucky…And I’m sure you’re also wondering why I’m doing this, and where I came up with such a ridiculous name for a blog. Well you’re about to find out…
To answer the first question, I was inspired by a friend of mine who started his own blog (shameless plug for him: www.digitalbush.com). He seems to use it as a creative outlet for whining about his job and throwing ideas on writing code out for the world’s scrutiny, and I thought it was a pretty sweet idea. While I’m not a coder by trade, I am a voice and data engineer for an IT consulting company, and I think we share many of the same frustrations.
As for the name, I adapted it from a speech a client gave me once. On one of my first trips to their office, I had set up a PC and user profile in a slightly different manner than the others machines were. Quite proud of myself, I expected to get some praise for making things easier for the users, streamling their processes, and so forth. Instead, I got a 30 minute lecture on how the users there are (you guessed it) robots and monkeys, who unless they see the same output every time at every workstation have no idea what to do. The speech struck me as quite humorous and a reflection on the IT industry as a whole. As IT professionals, we fear change, but we know it’s unavoidable. How many of us have appliances on our network with firmware 2-3 years out of date, just because, despite fixing several security vulnerabilities and bugs in the product, we’re afraid the upgrade is going to mess up that one feature the CEO uses? Or even worse, we leave servers unpatched and vulnerable because we’re afraid of causing downtime? I think it’s a sad statement when Microsoft releases Windows Server 2008 and publicly admits they don’t expect anyone to migrate to it anytime soon, despite the great new feature sets it brings to the table. All this is a long, roundabout way of imploring my fellow IT professionals to control the technology, not let the technology control you. In the end, you’ll be glad you did when your networks are stable, secure, and feature rich.
Future posts will contain more specific ranting and musing about Microsoft, Cisco, Linux, Dell, wireless, and pretty much anything else I can think of. Stay tuned.
