"Lindsey" from W-- called me at the office. That's fine. She said that she saw our posting for a junior systems administrator and she thought she had the perfect candidate.

I stopped her and told her that, unfortunately for her, we had made an offer and it had been ...

Broadway, like Hollywood, has a problem. "They" -- there are about forty Broadway theaters, 31 of which are owned by three companies, 3 of which are run by non-profits -- produce an expensive entertainment service which draws tourists but utterly fails at clearing the potential market. That is, they could sell a ...

• Daniel O'Malley: Stiletto (Rook volume 2)
• Matthew Phillion: The Indestructibles (and volumes 2, 3, 4)
• Stephen King: On Writing
• Derek Landy: Demon Road (and Desolation)
• Jay Posey: Outriders
• Ken MacLeod: Dissidence
• Mishell Baker: Borderline

O'Malley follows up the tight-single-viewpoint The Rook with a multiple viewpoint political/espionage/action ...

These are the basic strategies for securing what you care about. I will make certain assumptions: you are living in the early 21st century; you are living in a highly connected information state; you are not intent on committing crime, and therefore have no reason to spend an outsized portion ...

When the contents of a recruiter's mail message are semantically equivalent to that of the classic 419 scam -- "I have this thing that doesn't belong to me, let me get it to you and we can share in the profit" -- you should take that as a hint that ...

When I was younger, I dreamed of something like this. Voice control for my home! A Star Trek computer that I can interact with conversationally! I just say what I want and it happens!

Now, I just see an internet-connected microphone in a software black box which I can only ...

Send me things to review, and I promise to give them honest negative feedback.

Nothing positive. No gushing. The best you can hope for is "I tried this for a week, and there's not much wrong with it."

Honest negativity, though. Is your manual badly written? I will say ...

The major difference between a trivial project and a serious project is that on a serious project, maintenance and improvements take much, much longer than the initial development phase.

The other difference is that a trivial project can become serious, but a serious project never becomes trivial -- it gets abandoned ...

The best way to solve any problem is -- no, I lie, there is no single best way to solve all problems.

But I often find that there is great value in this approach.

• Stop. No, really, stop working on it. It may take a while.
• Pretend that you are starting ...

Once upon a time there were programmers.

Then there were systems programmers and application programmers. Systems programmers wrote operating systems and utilities for them. App programmers wrote apps. There was a lot of crossover.

Then there were operators, systems programmers and application programmers. Operator was a junior position who did ...

You can deploy an operating system, use the package manager to install software, use a configuration management system to... manage configurations... and you can do so to a piece of hardware or a virtual machine.

It's really tempting to clone the VM, file off the serial numbers and use ...

when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging

I don't know who originally said that. Wikipedia says it might be Will Rogers.

It's good advice, and the worst part about it is recognizing when you are, in fact, in a hole.

If you've won fairly, you can be gracious to the losers.

Contrariwise: if you see a winner who is an abrasive jerk, odds are it wasn't a clean victory.

• me, about a year ago. Or two.

At $WORK we use TUTTLE, the Tiny Utility Toolkit for Tweaking Large Environments. Tuttle is a system administrator's configuration management tool designed for the particular situations we faced. It shares a name with a plumber in BRAZIL, the Terry Gilliam movie. If we were starting from scratch today, we ...

I dropped Sprint as my cell service company in order to go to an option I perceived as being generally cheaper and more reliable. As a bonus it turns out that they actually have customer service, unlike Sprint.

As soon as I dropped Sprint, they started sending me marketing messages ...