infrastructure

  • To Boldly Go…

    September 4, 2025 I’ll admit it: I’m a Star Trek fan. But not a hardcore, “go to the conventions” style fan. Over the years, I’ve watched The Original Series (TOS), The Next Generation (TNG), a bit of Voyager, Discovery, and lately, Enterprise. Never DS9, which is a flaw in me, I’ve been told. Thanks to…

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  • A VoIP Project Debrief

    He’s talking about phones — again. A cautionary tale of technical outcomes and incomplete information. Strap in… Recently my team and I completed a long-overdue VoIP project, spurred on by building a new 60,000-square-foot addition and needing something more modern than a copper-based, expensive PRI system (from 2001 maybe?) with proprietary VoIP clients grafted on…

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  • Momentum

    Today is my 60th Day with my new employer. My team asked me recently, “Why do you keep count like this?” I tell them that it’s to preserve momentum — forward movement. Coming into a new organization, with challenges and things to address, you only have so much time to effect change. You have to…

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  • Watching the Detectives

    As what some would call a “serial entrepreneur,” I have a soft spot in my heart for small businesses and those fledglings just leaving the nest. Armed with great ideas or better approaches, it’s an exciting time, and I get to take a hit of some of that new venture vibe. Often I come in…

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  • An uncomfortable book hits too close to home

    The CEO (and CIO, and VP of IT) have resigned. The board president/former CEO has come back from retirement, to quell any potential stockholder revolt. In the last month, stock prices have fallen 30%. A Mid-level IT Operations Director has been thrust into an interim VP of IT role, to stabilize a big, years-overdue project…

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  • Redundancy = Resiliency

    Recently I learned that one of my former employers was hit by ransomware, locking out access to a file and SQL server. They are one of a couple of higher education sites in the same state system that’s been hit by attacks over the last year, in a period when higher education domains have been…

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  • The New (Old) World of Zero Trust

    Everything old is new again. In Technology management we’re always pushing that boulder up the hill. At the same time, the hill is changing, our methods of pushing are changing, and our goals once we get to the top also change. The core IT function of protecting the network from intrusion has morphed and changed…

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  • Frog + Water + Heat

    In 1996, in Washington State, I had my first-ever rock chip of my windshield. It was a good one: a fist-sized rock, nestled deep inside a load of freshly felled timber being hauled down I-5, got jostled enough to pop out, bounce on the pavement, and aim right for my windshield. As I said, it…

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  • There’s no place like home…there’s no place like home…

    August 23, 2020 Make no mistake; the COVID-19 pandemic is expensive. In a macroeconomic sense: world economies sputter along in low speed, needing fewer of this and that means fewer people employed, making fewer dollars, and national and world GDP not nearly as robust as before. No doubt the world we go back to will…

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