If you've been following the development activity of Systembot, the bot I wrote to monitor my machines (physical as well as virtual) you've probably noticed that I changed a number of things around pretty suddenly.  This is because the version of Systembot in question had some pretty incorrect assumptions about how things should work.  For starters, I thought I was being clever when I wrote the temperature monitoring code when I decided to use what the drivers thought were high or critical values for sending "something is wrong" alerts.  No math (aside from a Centigrade-to-Fahrenheit conversion), just a couple of …

This post is a day late because I've been on the road and pushing way out of my comfort zone for the past couple of days and learning a lot in the process, so here is my slightly belated birthday post (with the apropriate soundtrack, of course).

I just turned 38 years old. Those seem like simple, empty words but they're anything but. Over a third of my expected lifespan is gone now, which is not an easy thing to admit to oneself. Looking at it one way, I've spent that time just trying to figure everything out - learning the …