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My sister and her family’s Christmas present for me:

I’m quite curious to see Eddy’s reaction.

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In fact, it was a FISHING CAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!.

Of course, it will have to stay at the zoo. And I don’t know which one it is. The picture is of Miss Minnow, so I’ll assume it is her.

Though I suppose it may have been the one who had fishing kittens (cubs) a last year.

Or even the handsome father.

In any case, I’m quite excited by this! Now, do you suppose the zoo will let me take my fishing cat out for sushi?

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I wrote this a few years ago, but it is repeating.

It’s Christmas in the data center
And the staff has all gone home
It’s the one day every year
When the servers are all alone

But just because they are machines
Doesn’t mean they don’t spread yuletide joy
Now that they’ve served web pages
To every girl and every boy

The switches and routers
Blink their lights of red and green
While the backup drives wish for tapes
From Santa, who’s still unseen

The LINUX box gave the Windows box
Several gigs of RAM
The Solaris server gave them all
Filters, to fight off spam

The mainframe and the PC
Share some Christmas cheer
And the security camera watched
To see when Santa will be near

The firewalls blocked the packets
Trying to peek at their still-unwrapped gifts
Everyone needs to be done
Before the operators return to their shift

Santa Clause comes in through a CRAC
And steps on to the raised floor
That’s how he enters the data center
He doesn’t just walk through a glass door

He gives out processors and disks
And patches to make them stable
And to the database servers he gives
Brand new reindexed tables

He upgrades the UPS
So it can give out extra power
And gives more fuel to the generators
They can run for forty-eight hours!

The network bandwidth
Was upgraded with an OC3
One circuit! Two circuits!
To ensure redundancy

Santa suspended monitoring
So no SysAdmin would get a naughty surprise
And though there were no windows
they knew that the sun would soon rise

Santa went back through the CRAC
‘Cause it was past time for him to go
And, to the servers he offered
One last “Ho! Ho! Ho!”

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I’ve been on a lot of outage calls lately. One ran literally overnight. In fact, I’m on one right now. It’s part of having a job in IT. Both my wife and I are on-call 24×7, and have taken calls at various times. We’ve gotten to where we can sleep through each other’s pager (most of the time).

As I’ve mentioned before, my cats have taken on the self-appointed role of “on-call kitty.” Basically, one of them would hang out with whoever had to get up and deal with the issue. Maggie seemed to start this, but Eddy took to the role after a few years.

Admittedly, they don’t do much. Sometimes, they will cuddle up next to whoever is has been paged. Or, they’ll just doze on the couch. It doesn’t seem like much, but just having the presence of another being makes a long, lonely call more tolerable. It is definitely something we both appreciate.

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When I was in high school, I read an article in Popular Mechanics about fountain pens. I thought it would be a cool thing to have one day (though you couldn’t really find them in my home town). Unlike most of the million-and-one things a teen-aged boy thinks might be cool to own one day, it somehow stuck.

In December of 1994, I was living back in Lake Charles, Louisiana, but had come up to Cincinnati to try to find a job. While there, I happened across a store called Appointments. It was here that I bought my first fountain pen: a 1994 Parker Sonnet in “Moonbeam Lacquer.”

It was another few months before I realized I had the bug, and became a collector. However, that was where I got my start. Obviously, I still have and use it today. I also still go to Appointments, and am friends with the owners (I was even in there today).

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Did you?

Eddy claims my his spot on the couch.

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You may have heard that Gawker Media has a password file hacked. Users who created accounts may have had their passwords exposed. Slate has a widget for checking if your account was impacted. This includes:

• Lifehacker
• io9
• Gizmodo
• …and a few others (check my first link for a full list–these are sites I’ve been known to follow)

This has kicked off a broader password reset for me, in case I used a password in common. Syncing so many accounts (including mail, web tools, and others) across so many sites is challenging–I have a spreadsheet to track it. I try to rotate passwords periodically, so this is driving me to do so earlier.

I encourage everyone to change passwords (especially if you commented on a Gawker site). It may be a pain for a few days, but it is better than the risk of a hacked account.

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Eddy the Barn Cat, hard at work at my daughter’s computer.

Remember: the Internet is run by cats.

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My daughter and Eddy hang with Santa.

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How Cajuns celebrate Hanukah.

Recipe courtesy Nola Cuisine.