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Nothing is Ever Wasted, Part 2
Last week shared some of my early experiences working in non-technical jobs, and the lessons I learned which turned out to be relevant to my IT career as well. If you missed part 1, you can find it here . But as a brief intro, a tweet from security researcher Gabrielle Hempel and a signal boost from my fellow Head Geek…
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Geek Pride Day, The Extended Cut
Recently, in recognition of Geek Pride Day, PressBox asked Chrystal Taylor, Sascha Giese, and me to share our thoughts on what it meant to us to be a “geek” and how our geeky tendencies affected (and were affected by) our personal and professional lives. You can read part of our responses in the original article but (as…
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Switching Online Services to a Secondary Datacenter
In the first post of this series I discussed the importance of establishing recovery time objectives (RTOs) for each component in your production system. In the second post I covered the comparative demands of performing triage during outages of different magnitudes; one that impacts a set of network devices versus an…
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Writing Challenge: Day n+1
At the start of the 2020 December Writing Challenge, I wrote, “The act of writing is always a personal one. Even with supposedly dry, technical content, authors can’t help bringing a piece of themselves to the work.” Here on the day after the challenge has closed for another year, I hope this point is as clear to you as…
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Windows Remote Desktop Connection vs. other RDP clients
When Windows offers a built-in RDP client, why would anyone want to use anything else for desktop sharing and remote support? Windows Remote Desktop Connection (RDC) is easy to use, reliable, free, and already there. But there are several features the built-in client lacks that third-party clients provide. The following…
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IT Management is Key for Business Service Management
What is Business Service Management? As IT professionals we know the importance of technology to successfully driving business. IT acts as a business-enabler that brings connectivity, automation, and process efficiency to all business operations. All businesses depend on network connections—be it LAN or WAN. There are…
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Everything I Needed to Know About IT I Learned From WandaVision
*SPOLER ALERT* If it wasn’t clear from the title, there will be spoilers for WandaVision throughout this article. If you’ve yet to watch it, go ahead and come back to this later. I’ll wait. Inspired by a recent conversation with Leon about WandaVision and how its lessons reverberate through IT, I want to take a few moments…
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Un-Excuse-ing Upgrades
When we talk about upgrades here at SolarWinds, we spend a lot of time discussing the beneficial features, performance, and capabilities you can gain. That’s not by accident. The honest-to-goodness truth is, the most compelling reason to upgrade ANYTHING—from our phone to our game console to our monitoring software—is…
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Is free remote control software good enough?
If you ever have to support desktops and laptops in your company, chances are that you’ve used some sort of remote control software to avoid walking – or driving, or flying! – to your end-user’s desk. Remote control software has been around for some time, and there are lots of different flavors. Some remote control…
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Nothing is Ever Wasted, Part 1
A couple of weeks ago, Kevin Kline (@kekline) and I reminisced about activities from our youth (I’m talking about public speaking and sports, not “getting up from a chair without hearing several cracks and pops”), pursuits we thought at the time would have lifelong importance and relevance to us, but which didn’t pan out.…