I’m fighting with the Kickstarter web interface to fulfill the Run Your Own Mail Server campaign and trying to get Dear Abyss ready for launch, so here’s a chunk of an advice column.
All three regular readers of this column appear to be drawn by the pleasure of watching my childish behavior when confronted with the tedious duty of writing said column. While “you insulted me in the first three words of your greeting” is a feeble justification for breaking into your systems and converting them to global-warming-accelerating SkunkCoin miners, I’m willing to make it work.
Because that’s what’s sysadmins do. We make things work.
Even bad things.
Software vendors insist on developing new bad things and cramming them down gullets already obscenely bloated with horrendous badness. Systems administrators stagger through the endless hours of their brief years struggling to live beneath tremendous loads of badness smelted from software like arsenic from arsenopyrite. The inherent insecurity of absolutely everything enhances this burden like a beached, deceased whale enhances an oil spill.
The urge to retreat into malaise is a natural human reaction.
Sysadmins lack the luxury of being human.
The prelaunch page for the next Letters collection, Dear Abyss, is up at Kickstarter.