May 28, 2008 in the late evening
· Filed under rant
I was titled both as as Systems Administrator and Systems Engineer in the past. I never made distinction between those two until recently.
In a recent team project, the apparent and blatant lack of systematic approach and lack of attention to details appalled me deeply. The shared agony made me think why, why some systems administrators or engineers are better than others.
I came to categorize SA/SE people to two groups. One is SA and the other is SE. I define systems engineers as those who
- have the skill-set of a systems administrator. And, to
- consistently apply engineering principles and practices to the systems administration work. Read the rest of this entry »
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May 21, 2008 in the wee hours
· Filed under Uncategorized, rant
a few light-to-medium thunders later last night, main power to my house and the neighborhood was cut around 7:40pm. The power was restored only after 11:40pm. I reached their IVR, when I called the power company at 8:10pm. My wife scoffed the to-the-minute accuracy when the power company projected to restore power by 10:27pm.
I suspected the projected restoration time of10:27pm was just a WAG or SWAG added onto the time when the repair team was dispatched. From our past experience (6+ years in the neighborhood), power usually gets restored a lot quicker than projected.
This time, it took a lot longer, a full four hours, to restore the power. The APC UPS for the blog server stood up two hours after the outage. However, its WAN connection served by Comcast went offline with the main power too. Our modern life was cut short by four hours tonight, Read the rest of this entry »
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October 17, 2007 in the late evening
· Filed under consumer rights, rant, trendnet, wireless router
A replacement TEW-432BRP wireless router finally came from Trendnet via FedEx. I experienced random reset on an apparently defective TEW-432BRP wireless router. With my first report of the problem, Trendnet promptly asked to RMA it.
Minor gripes of the RMA process and the replacement unit 
- I had to mail the unit back in my own expense first. $8.95 with USPS first class including $0.65 for receipt confirmation. The ‘Free after MIR (mail-in rebate)” price tag motivated my purchase at first place. Read the rest of this entry »
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March 28, 2007 in the wee hours
· Filed under rant
I changed job last week. The new employer is a bank card issuer. I picked up the term of issuer, when sitting in an internal development team meeting. Before this training session, I would have said the company does back-end processing for banks. Now I know ‘back-end processing’ is certainly an ambiguous and simplistic description. Read the rest of this entry »
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