The condition of a military force is that its esential factor is speed, taking advantage of others’ failure to catch up, going by routes they do not expect, attacking where they are not on guard. -The Art of War, Chapter 11: The Nine Kinds of Terrain

Sorry Dan, but I already played that game once. 🙂 However, I will just add two more things. First, I used to have eyesight bad enough that it was measured in feet. My parents gave me lasik surgery as a Christmas gift a few years ago, and now I don’t need glasses. Second, I spent my first 2.5 years in college in the Environmental Science program taking chemistry, biology, calculus, genetics, physics classes.

This week will by my first week “on call” at my latest job. I’ve avoided the task for about 8 months now, but this week the pressure is on! One of the unfotunate aspects of this job is the apparent attitude of the rest of the team that I should have been born with all the knowledge needed to do this job. I find little as frustrating as being thrust into an important role where you either attempt to do things yourself at the risk of possibly affecting critical systems or wait for some decent training. While I don’t mind self-starting, I do mind when there are innumerable ways to build a server (anywhere from just setting it up and patching it to full NIST guidelines), but somehow I need to know the way they do it in-house from a cryptic checklist that makes sense only to people who have been through it multiple times. This has been my biggest frustration at this job, and one of four distinct reasons I won’t be staying entirely much longer. This morning I am figuring out how to put myself on call and get the necessary alerts on my phone.

I added a bunch of links to this page. While I still want to lower the number of total links, at least now my Google Reader list matches up with the links on this page. Not every site has support for an RSS reader, but at least now when I find something not updated in Google Reader or not really worth my time, I can remove it cleanly in both places and help manage my information uptake.