The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

March 28th, 2006 neteng

How does the idea of being a shut-in for the next six months of your life sound? If you’re of the pale skin persuasion, some folks might even be inclined to mistake you for a vampire upon your public reappearance. The end result may not be what you were seeking, but as they say, the joy is in the journey.

Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion will rule your life. It will piss off your significant other, give you constant “red-eye” from your unblinking attention to what’s happening on your screen and cause your family to worry about your sudden lack of contact. If you’re strong-willed enough to take care of other tasks in your life (i.e. go to work), you will be unable to walk outside and pass a flower without wondering what type of potion you can create with it.

I thought Civilization IV was habit forming, but Oblivion is my new GamingCrack.

Gaming fans, check it out. You will not be disappointed.

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Time Management for System Administrators - Chapter Seven

March 21st, 2006 neteng

Life Goals

Day-to-day tasks are important, but what good is living life if it’s all you can do to make it through the workweek and never achieve those dreams that always seem so far away. You need to set goals and work towards them, step-by-step.

The key to tackling the big-picture items is to define just what your goals are, give them the proper priority and divide them into achievable steps that can be easily transformed into to-do list tasks.

Here’s an example of a couple of my professional goals and the steps that I’ve broken it down into:

Complete VPN Backup Project (1 to 3 Month Completion)

- Troubleshoot network equipment to determine why packets are not making it back to client when failover is active

- Check Firewall
- Check Switches
- Check Routers
- Check VPN Concentrator/End-User VPN Device
- Check customer network

- Make sure that all Frame Relay clients have VPN devices that are accessible and fully configured

- Determine who does and does not have a completely configured device
- For those who have one but it is not configured, contact to fix the problem
- For those who do not have one, contact to determine configuration information and ship them a device

- After a successful failover test, verify with another client

- After verification is complete, run quarterly tests with all customers

Score Well on Employee Evaluation (1 year to Completion)

- Meet with my manager to discuss how I can best achieve this

- Take opportunites to volunteer on certain projects within the company

- Volunteer for technical projects
- Volunteer for non-technical projects (assist with move to new building, participate in customer forums, etc.)

- Maintain good job performance and documentation

- Keep up with networking technology
- Read trade magazines
- Attend conferences

- Maintain fresh documentation on all activities I perform

I’m sure these can be expanded upon, but you get the idea. The most important fact is that I can measure these goals and know what I’ve achieved.

On the first day of each month, it’s a good idea to pull out your goals list and make sure that priorities haven’t changed and that targets haven’t been eliminated altogether. It’s important for you to also see if any goals are slipping away while others are monopolizing more time than they should be.

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Geopolitics & Current Events

March 17th, 2006 neteng

The world is a busy place and full of intrigue. One of my many hobbies is the study of geopolitics. I also try to keep a critical eye turned towards world events. I’m fascinated with history and foreign places, so I anxiously observe all of the major (and sometimes minor) events happening around the planet. Here are some of my favorite sources of information and analyses:

Stratfor Inc. - Often referred to as the shadow CIA, this team of analysts is composed of a group of political, economic and security professionals. At various subscription-based levels, they offer up very insightful analyses of current events. If you’re a current-events junkie like me, this is a top-rate service that will keep you well fed.

The Fourth Rail - Late last year, Bill Roggio stepped away from his cushy day job as a software analyst and became an embedded journalist with the U.S. military in Iraq. His pieces are always well thought out and he has seen his work published in magazines such as the Weekly Standard and National Review. His focus is largely on the events happening in Iraq, Afghanistan and various national security issues in general.

Jane Galt - There is more economical and political talk than there is foreign affairs discussion happening at this site, but it’s still thought provoking nonetheless. Jane has an MBA in economics and flexes her brain muscles on the issues of the day. Bits about monetary policy, abortion issues and the housing market are just some of the things you’ll find here.

Winds of Change - This is a favorite of mine, because on every Thursday, they have a piece titled Winds of War that discusses the latest news happening around the globe. It’s presented in a summary-based format with a links to more in-depth discussion.

Does anyone else have links in a similar vein? Please share in the comments section!

Thanks,

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Time Management for System Administrators - Chapter Six

March 16th, 2006 neteng

Calendar Management

It’s time to focus on the contribution that calendars make to the cycle system. The daily and weekly calendars are great for scheduling your to-do list items while the monthly and yearly calendars force us to look at the bigger picture and make sure we don’t lose focus of our long-term goals.

As Thomas points out, the key to to a useful calendar system is making sure you record everything and that it guide’s your day. Don’t leave things off that you feel are unimportant or ’small’. It’s those items that will suffer because you forgot about them. Of course, you will rarely - if ever - follow your schedule to the letter. Tasks will often take longer than you first suspected or you will sometimes complete them early. If it’s a repeating item, you can adjust the necessary time for completion in the future and you will find that your schedule becomes more efficient.

Items to enter in your calendar include appointments, milestones and future to-do items. I also like to keep a record of birthdays and important dates to remember within the same datebook. Also, make sure that you now reference your calendar before commiting to future appointments. If you keep personal and professional items together, you will vastly improve your chances of not missing your kid’s soccer game because you promised to perform server maintenance on a Saturday morning. One of the tasks that I also give myself at the beginning of each month is to fill in recurring items on future dates.

For those of us using a paper-based organizer, one great tip from Thomas’ book was to set alarms on your watch or cell phone for important events. This helps avoid the need to check your schedule every hour on the hour for fear of forgetting a meeting.

One of the great notions that Thomas hits on is that of rhythms. He discusses the need to understand your personal as well as company rhythms. Know when your brain is in top form and ready to tackle a difficult task. Also know when your company is in it’s busy season and you’ll be able to coordinate vacations without having a major effect on your company’s profitability. It’s a good idea to perform the menial, brainless tasks when you’re hitting that energy slump and save the mentally taxing stuff for better times.

Does anyone out there have other tips for calendar usage?

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Time Management for System Administrators - Chapter Five

March 10th, 2006 neteng

To-do Lists and Schedules

Thomas demonstrates the use of the cycle method by walking through a sample day.

Create today’s schedule

This is the first thing you should be doing every day. Of course, if you have monitoring systems that need to be checked for problems, you will probably find it best to make sure that all is well in that arena before proceeding. But other than that, immediately begin the scheduling process before moving on to other things (yes, even before checking email and your RSS feeds).
Begin blocking out time in your daily schedule for meetings, appointments, etc. This will make sure that you have an accurate picture of what your day will look like. After blocking out these times, the leftovers will be used to tackle your to-do list.

Create your to-do list

Create your to-do list and determine how much time it will take to work through each item. This is also a good time to listen to your voicemails and add any relevant items into your list. I also like to take this time to open up my inbox and see what’s waiting for me there as well. It does take some discipline not to respond to items immediately or read other unnecessary items. Remember that you’re just there to gather more information on what you can tack on to your to-do list. Don’t forget to allocate items and time for interruptions and trouble-tickets if you deal with those as well.

Prioritize and reschedule

Thomas does a great job of narrowing down the types of priorities we face into three short principles:

- The deadline is today
- The deadline is soon
- Everything else

These are usually labeled as A, B and C tasks, respectively. Divvy these out to your to-do list. Thomas dives more into the proper way to prioritize in a later chapter, but for now, just use a little common sense and organize as best as you can.

So now you’ve determined the amount of time to complete each task and prioritized according to importance. Wow. You now see that it will take you a mere 12 hours to complete all of today’s items. Not to worry, you won’t need to burn the midnight oil while your Hungry Man dinner gets cold. This is where you get to take as many C & B items as possible and move them to tomorrow’s to-do list. If you find yourself with a task that really needs to be done today but is finding its way off of today’s list, try to break it up into manageable chunks and tackle what you can. Other ways to deal with the overflow include delegating, help with prioritization from your boss and the last resort - a late night at the office.

Work through the plan

Once you have your to-do list completed and items moved onto your schedule, it’s time to perform. Barrel through that schedule and keep at it. Once you’ve got some momentum going, completing your tasks can be relatively painless. As you complete each item, make sure to cross it off your list. This provides a feeling of accomplishment as you look back at your tasks and see that you were actually productive!

Finish your day

You might find that you haven’t been able to complete every single item in your to-do list, but it’s important to make sure that you account for each one. If you were unable to get to any item, denote it as so (I use Thomas’ suggestion of a dash) and move it to tomorrow’s list.

If you finish early, you can use that time to tackle tomorrow’s items, take on personal items (it’s a good thing you have a central database to take care of professional and personal needs) or even go home early if you’re allowed that kind of flexibility.

Go home

‘Nuff said.

Repeat

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Zzz…

March 8th, 2006 neteng

Despite the rumors, I was not mauled by a wild tiger while out on safari in Sub-Saharan Africa. I did have the opportunity, however, to obliterate any rational thought processes that might occur in my little noodle upstairs due to some very formidable issues at work. Yup, I’m tired. I will try to get to the rest of the book review as soon as possible, but I just wanted to send up a smoke signal to confirm my existence.

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Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories: Make a Mess, Clean it Up!

March 1st, 2006 neteng

Folklore.org: Macintosh Stories: Make a Mess, Clean it Up!

What a cool and motivating story. I’m sure I’m not alone in usually looking for the easy way out, so this was an interesting model they used to show the need to develop an ability to solve unexpected problems. This certainly was an unique take on the played-out mantra of “thinking outside the box.” Make a mess and clean it up indeed!

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Time Management for System Administrators - Chapter Four

March 1st, 2006 neteng

Now that we’ve gone over some necessary background issues, it’s time to give you guys an overview of the solution to our time management problem: The Cycle System.

As Thomas points out, this method uses three tools:

- Your to-do list combined with a daily schedule
- A long-term calendar
- List of long-term goals

I’d like to add a couple of things to this list that have been invaluable for me:

- Scratch paper for notes and diagrams

This is a must. I can’t count the number of times that I had a separate notepad with this stuff and couldn’t get ahold of it when I needed to. Now that it’s in your central database, you can be sure to have it on you at all times (You are taking your organizer with you everywhere, right?).

- A contact sheet/address book

I keep information on all of my customer points-of-contact as well as important phone numbers for technical support, vendors and coworkers.

- A current “hot list” of clients that are a top priority

This helps me keep priorities where they should be. It’s important that this list is constantly updated with a cycle that best fits your business.

Once again, it must be emphasized that because all of these items are very interactive, they should all be kept in a single database You’ll be constantly be referring to and cross-referencing action items from each of these sources.

I used to keep a plain, ordinary to-do list with an empty box next to each item and made sure that I checked off any completed tasks. This worked okay, but it could be done so much better. The new cycle method allows me to prioritize, schedule and break up larger projects into a set of manageable, logically ordered tasks. With the inclusion of a calendar, I am able to keep better track of my time and I can be sure that I don’t make promises which I can’t keep.

The cycle is composed of the following steps:
1.) Create today’s schedule
2.) Create today’s to-do list
3.) Prioritize and reschedule
4.) Work through the schedule and mark items as you complete them.
5.) Move unfinished items to tomorrow’s to-do list and end the day.
6.) Repeat

The next chapter will get down and dirty into the details of your to-do lists and daily schedules, but this should give you a good broad overview from which to begin.

As always, love that feedback!

Thanks,

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