I’ve been incredibly lucky to encounter some truly amazing people. On about my 15th anniversary of working with UNIX, I decided to send a little thank you note to the guys who invented it – Brian W Kerrighan, Dennis Ritchie, and Ken Thompson – since they’d essentially provided me with the ability to make a…
I really like working with Amazon’s AWS. I’ve been taking care of Unix/Linux systems for a very long time, and AWS for a few years… Here are a few tips to make your life with AWS easier… Giant sites with hundreds of machines can most likely skip this post, or just use it to remember…
Don’t do the cover yourself! Get a Professional! Mike Dennis, one of Jessica’s writing-group cohorts, spent at least a half hour trying to discourage me from doing the cover. I think he’s got a point. The cover turned out to be a lot trickier than I thought it would be. I’d never really thought about…
I think my wife, Jessica Argyle, may have had the easy part… writing No Name Key; a great work of historical fiction; a murder story set in No Name Key, in 1935, as the strongest hurricane ever to hit the US came ashore. Whether to publish a book yourself, or try to find an agent…
I’m still cleaning up after Heartbleed – a little bug that essentially rendered a lot of encrypted communications completely useless from March 2012 to now. Plus they get bonus points for giving the bug a really cool, scary name. Plus like a totally awesome logo. That’s the best marketing for a security vulnerability I’ve ever seen.…
I haven’t posted for a while but my buddy Danny asked me my opinion on the “NSA Leaker”, Edward Snowden. I had to pause and think a bit. You see, I do the same type of work as Mr Snowden did. I’ve been doing Sys Admin work for years and years; basically, I’m the god…
Welcome to xlogs http://xlo.gs – a free tool to help manage the Amazon Cloud. Over the course of the last year of so, and in reviewing a number of AWS environments as a consultant, I noticed a couple of interesting things. An incredible number of …
Paul Graham just posted this… dropping funding for each YC startup from $150K to $80K. Had I been accepted, I’d be a little bummed – but I don’t have that problem 
But because there isn’t anywhere to comment, I’m putting up a quick blog post a…
Consulting tends to be interesting. Sometimes, you get interesting fun new things to do. Sometimes you get to do the stuff nobody else wants to do. Recently, I suspect it was the latter. One wouldn’t think converting a wiki would be that tough. Re…
Summary: Hmmm… it’s just a blue box… doesn’t look like a card. Surprise! You need to put $20 on the card at checkout. Surprise! The card isn’t in the box… it’s in the flap covering the box and it’s hard to get out. Card feels cheap – I hope …