In my last article What Is Professionalism, my focus was to make the concept clear in order to have a valid ground to highlight the importance of professionalism in the workplace. Professionalism is not only important at our individual level but the demonstration of the same in normal working routine has significant positive effects. This is the reason that professionals are much valued and command much premium in the job market.

Have you heard of Business Exchange?  It is an information-centric social networking site that is run by Bloomberg and sits on the same URL together with Business Week magazine.  As you can already guess, it is a site that is extremely focused on business and the news.  After reading a great blog post on Business [...]

This week, among the many projects and deadlines, we were asked to fill out anon

This week, among the many projects and deadlines, we were asked to fill out anon

After excessive time in board/campaign/committee meetings, I’ve observed that in most cases, by the end of a meeting, there are always those who are drained and  feel like the meeting was pointless, and there are those who feel energized and have a sense of accomplishment.

This weekend, I missed a good friend’s birthday, for what I thought were legitimate reasons: ”Sorry, I can’t make it. I’m swamped with projects”.

The next day, I asked him how his party went, and about possible extra credits for our Political Philosophy and Theory class.  He responded sourly, “you didn’t come to my party and you ask me stuff about school?”.

If you looked at 10 different LinkedIn profiles, you might see 10 different ways in which people have entered their details.  For a social networking platform that is trying to standardize the way people depict themselves with their “xxx% profile completeness” status that appears when you edit your profile, the results have been surprisingly across [...]

SCaLE is coming up fast! Sign up for SCaLE-U classes taught by LOPSA instructors!

Register now to reserve your seat at the table for these highly acclaimed courses by seasoned instructors.

Hope to see you all there!

I wrote this blog sometime ago but recent blogs from some of my favorite TR bloggers Chris Reed and Jon Gillespie only served to bring it back up. It is somewhat of a rant but I believe a check in on your values and a confirmation that your online brand doesn’t need “management” if your values are aligned in all aspects of your life.

In my Twitter vs. Productivity entry (published mere minutes before this one), I outlined how I tweaked my Twitter usage to use the tool more effectively.

For five months now I've hardly read the Twitter stream of those I follow on the service. Also, I rarely tweet on anything except when my blog software sends a notice of a new post (via the Drupal Twitter Module), much like the automation on most news service Twitter accounts. I've been enormously productive.

Tom Limoncelli of The Practice of System and Network Administration (TPOSANA) and

LOPSA training classes at SCaLE were a great success!

The Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) in Los Angeles, California was in February, so this commentary is quite tardy.

Somewhere along the line, I’ve been labeled as a pretty calm and collective guy buy my friends, and people who are generally close to me. I always chocked it up to the fact that I’m kind of a science guy who likes to take a Spock-like logic and reason based approach to life.

Scott Ruecker of LXer interviewed me via email about my involvement with LOPSA and the SCaLE U training classes coming up in a couple weeks on February 20 in

As a followup to its highly successful training programs, LOPSA is partnering with the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE) for the second year in a row.

So, apparently trying that blogging thing didn't work so well in the last several months of chaos. So, I think we're back to a variation of the same question:

Why blog?

So, a while ago I managed to lose the list of news feeds I tracked. As my life finally started winding down to a mellow level of chaos, I recently started playing catchup. The result is that I've been reading either overlooked, forgotten, or simply neglected feeds and posts around the blogosphere.

Is that really the question?

I've often wondered whether I should maintain a blog, or whether I should rely on others to write about the various topics I'm interested in. Recently I've decided that I should blog for a variety of reasons. Those reasons are...Is that really the question?

So, the LOPSA Sysadmin Days 2007 training event is now over. I thought it was a very successful event, and I met many new and interesting people.

I have no information on how the other courses went since I was teaching all four sessions, but anecdotally I heard they went well overall.

When I get caught up I'll provide more details about the event.