Memory Fail
It seems my two G-Skill memory sticks are both bad. I tried to pick up some slower replacements over the weekend but the didn't work at all, and will soon be out on Craigslist. I really miss my beast of a machine, so I'll be trying to call G-Skill tonight.

The Lost Art of Fixing Your Mistakes
My wife and I went out to dinner last night. We don't go out often and we try to patronize local restaurants over the TGI AppleMcChains. We'd had a recommendation for Lazlo's, a grill and brewery on South 192nd in Omaha. The hostess told us there would be a 30-45 minute wait, we decided to give it a shot, and took our little paging disk. In about 35 minutes we were seated with beers and menus. We ordered our appetizer and dinner and waitress zipped away. My wife and I chatted about the logistics of tax season (she's an accountant) and birthdays. Just at the point where the appetizer should show up, the manager showed up instead. Our onion ring order had gotten lost, we should have had them by now. They were sorry, they would be here in 2 minutes, and they were on the house because the kitchen had made a mistake. Two minutes later, hot, hand battered rings hit the table. 10 points for Lazlow's.

Dinner arrived shortly, but there was another problem. My "Hot Brown", an open faced turkey sandwich, had mysteriously changed into a hot roast beef. "I'm sorry, but I didn't order roast beef, I had the open-faced turkey." The server (not our waitress) immediately apologized, told me it would be fixed and headed back to the kitchen. Unlike other times I've had this happen, there was no debate, no questioning of what I ordered. It was wrong, and they were going to fix it. My correct order showed up in just a few minutes, followed shortly by the manager with an apology. The order was misread in the kitchen, this was not acceptable to them, and my sandwich was complimentary. Please do come back and try us again. Wow! Another 10 points, a blog post, and yes, a return visit.

Restaurants are going to have bad nights. What was so impressive about this experience?

• They noticed the problems before I did: I had an apology and free rings before I got irritated enough to flag down a server.
  
• They handled the problem promptly, cheerfully, and without finger pointing: When I got the wrong order, the server did not waste any time double-checking my order or complaining about the kitchen staff. They just fixed it. Fast

• They let me know they wanted my business in the future: The economy is horrible, margins are tight. Writing off a couple of items told me that Lazlo's realized there was not an endless stream of customers, They needed to do something to retain the one's they'd inconvenienced. It worked. We'll be back.

So we made sure we tipped our server for the full amount of the bill, including the items that were written off (servers shouldn't lose money on management decisions or 2 for 1 entree coupons, but that's another post) and headed out the door feeling like we'd had a very nice dinner. Everybody makes mistakes. But owning up to them and fixing them is a lost art. Lazlo's made the best of a bad night. Go see them! The food and beer are awesome. http://tinyurl.com/72ubff

Would financial transparency help MLB teams avoid collusion charges? As the winter baseball meetings get underway, it's clear that the economy is having an effect on the free agent market. Donald Fehr of the player's union has already mentioned that the union is watching the owners very carefully for signs of collusion. I'm wondering how much information the owners are going to have to disclosed to prove that their free agent signing strategy was due to finances and not due to collusion

Yesterday, Omaha's Mayor Mike Fahey announced that all city departments needed to start cutting their budgets. Maybe the Chamber of Commerce should have pulled that radio ad about how recession proof Omaha is...... I'm just sayin.....

Haven't posted for over a year. Time to crank this sucker up. Today's chore is to visit the local co-location facility and get more familiar with the Pseries machines that I admin. I have most of the configurations down, but I have several gaps in the knowledge base. On Web 2.o front, I'm having problems with the normally wonderful Hiveminder not acknowleding my Twitter account. I'm not sure how to get Hiveminder's attention to get help. That will be an adventure.

The NFL discussion of race should be over. We've got two African-American coaches who have guided their teams through a long season. It should be clear now that leadership has nothing to do with skin color, strategy has nothing to do with skin color, talent has nothing to do with skin color. They're just coaches. Really good coaches. Good Luck to both of them. Now let's drop the race discussion and play football. Amen.

Today's Cox Cable Internet Customer Service Scorecard:
Outbound Email Down for: 5.5 hours so far
Time to Navigate Phone Tree: 1:48
Talk to Live Person: No

Voice response took me to a set of internet prompts. When I selected email, the nice female voice said there was a problem with the email servers and that the should be back up "shortly". I wonder how times that recording has played in the last five and a half hours.

Back from a whirlwind trip to Indiana to see my sister and my parents for Thanksgiving. It was interesting to see how technology has become part of the "Great American Road Trip". Most of the minivans cruising by had a movie running in the back seat, and I saw lots of passengers using laptops. I'd rather look at the landscape( the rest of the family says Iowa is boooorrrrrinnnng) , but if you need to stay plugged in..... The annual family movie outing was to see Happy Feet, with Elijah Wood as the voice of a penguin that just doesn't fit in. It was cute. I won't be banging down the doors for the DVD.

The Novell mess continues to stay interesting, today Mark Shuttleworth, the driving force behind Ubuntu linux, issued a public invitation to OpenSuSE developers to check out Ubuntu's development process. It usually takes a project fork to inspire this kind of talent raid. Ubuntu is getting plenty of criticism on it's decision to include binary video and other drivers in it's next release, but they continue to attract me more than any other distro. The general direction of the Ubuntu project is to make something that works for a lot of people right after the install, and that's more important to them than the politics. That's why I'm doing work for Ubuntu.

Tikiwiki had a massive attack on their website over the holiday weekend. One of the lead devs restored the site, but one of the features is still broken. I'm got my login back into the docs site, and I now begin a massive push to keep up with the 1.10 developments while filling in the blanks on 1.9.7.

Now, where were we? Oh, yes, about 3 years ago I made a post. Must be time to start again. Today marks the beginning of a very eventful weekend. It's DR drill time at work! That means we pretend that the primary data center has blown up, and switch over to the back up. It's two overnights in a row. Happy sleep deprivation weekend. Every sysadmin should do it. Even though we're on a new backup server, I'm feeling fairly confident. We've done this so many times.
In Ubuntu LoCo news, my order of four Ubuntu books finally shipped. (O'Reilly was backordered, and I'm hoping that means that the book is very popular.) I haven't received my latest ShipIt order yet, and I'll need those CD's to get a set in each library branch. I'm still waiting on the setup of the irc channel as well.