So a friend of mine calls me to tell me that the hard drive on his Dad's mac had failed and was wondering if there was anyway to recover the data as there were no backups. My answer was 'it depends on the failure mode'. Failure modes of a hard drive are: If the drive…
So a small story: "My wife, a native Japanese, and I are started a Kitchen remodel so this weekend we went looking for new appliances. After about 90 minutes at the first store we realized that in Japan every single gas range is sold with a wok grate while in the US only one mid…
LOPSA Live Candidate Forum #2 The second LOPSA Live Candidate Forum will take place on Thursday, May 24th at 9pm Eastern, 6pm Pacific. The format will be identical to the first, however the time has been moved later to allow more people to take part. Join #LOPSA-Live on Freenode. You can find instructions for…
PICC'12 a Great Learning experience This past weekend (May 11-12, 2012) was the PICC'12 conference. It was a great conference. I can't thanks people enough for the work they did. Although I had the grand title of Chairmen the real work is done by all the volunteers. So I again want all the kudos to…
I want to thank those who asked me to run again for the LOPSA Board. The last election process was an education for me. One thing I got a baptism of fire og IRC. Also those lopsa-live sessions bolstered my feelings that lopsa members are an informed group and can ask the tough questions. …
Mike and I started the discussion on what makes a master IT worker after I brought up a Cal Newport post detailing some of the myths of seeking the perfect career. Much of what Cal said, I agreed with–the job you want isn't going to plop down in your lap. The job that you find to be…
It has been a privilege to serve the system administration community over the past year as a member of the LOPSA Board of Directors. I hope you will grant me the opportunity to continue serving in that capacity. I have been on a fascinating career journey, working in varied environments such as dot-coms, Fortune…
My name is Martin Gehrke, and I am running for the LOPSA board. Why am I qualified to be on the Board? While I am relatively new to LOPSA, I feel I have a lot to add. When learning that Pittsburgh did not have a LOPSA chapter, I founded one. We have grown from nothing…
A little over a year ago, I ran into a problem that I wanted to discuss with some local IT professionals to see what see what their experience had taught them. I searched around and eventually stumbled across LOPSA, only to discover that a local chapter didn’t exist. Inspired by the organization’s mission, I…
Hello! I'm Kent Brodie – I currently work as a Senior Sysadmin for the Medical College of Wisconsin supporting the area of genetic research. (If anyone has a few hundred terabytes of disk to spare, please send it my way..). I was recently asked by members of the LOPSA board to run as a candidate…