Todd Kwon-Do
How do I love thee?
At this time tomorrow, I should be underwater in Fort
Lauderdale exploring the wreck of the Captain Dan. The "Dan" was a 175' Coast Guard buoy tender that had several owners before it was sunk as part of Florida's artificial reef program. She rests in 110' of water... a significant depth to be sure. Recreational Advanced Open Water certifications prepare divers for maximum depths of 120', however it's rare for most people to venture beyond about 70'.
The "Dan" is the first of about eight dives that we will do in the next two days. For people that don't scuba dive the fears always involve sharks, or running out of air. However, the fact is that the real dangers in diving all revolve around things you can't see until it's too late; nitrogen narcosis, air embolism (the "bends"), and oxygen toxicity are just a few of the dangers you have to be careful to avoid.
The reason that a lot of people don't go beyond 70' is that your body absorbs lots of nitrogen under pressure and the "bends" become a real possibility. So, you have to limit the amount of time that you spend at deeper depths. For lots of people, the risk associated with "going deep" for 3-7 minutes of time to explore doesn't make it worth the trip.
One way to extend your bottom time, and be safer when diving, is to use mixed gasses. Instead of breathing normal compressed air like most divers (which contains 21% oxygen), you can use a higher percentage of oxygen or even a complex gas called
tri-mix. This kind of technical diving can extend your range, but it comes with it's own risks.
When we descend on the Dan tomorrow, my wife and I will be breathing a
Nitrox mix which contains a higher percentage of oxygen than normal air. It makes us less susceptible to the "bends". The trade off is that if we calculate the mix wrong, fail to properly monitor our dive times, or don't keep track of the volume of mix that we breath, the oxygen in our systems can actually become toxic and kill us (wierd huh?).
Of course there are lots of things that will work to keep us safe. There is the fact that we are both trained in this type of diving, we will also be monitoring each other (as well as ourselves) during the dive, and then there is also our most important tool... our computers.
We have little waterproof computers that we dive with that are attached to our air systems and ourselves. These little guys (when properly programmed) will monitor how many breaths we take, our depth, the pressure in our tanks, and the percent of
Nitrox mix we are using. They will track our depth every .5 seconds and will recalculate our oxygen exposure, nitrogen absorption, and other factors, and then they will use that information to keep us safe. They will tell us when and how to surface so that we have appropriate "decompression" times at specific depths that they will calculate on the fly.
Basically, we need these computers to stay alive.
So, how much do I trust my little computer? Not that much!
I carry three of them.
As long as they are all telling me the same thing, I know I am OK. I have been laughed at by other divers on the boat for having more than one with me, but I feel good knowing that I am not betting my life on a single piece of equipment, or a single manufacturer.
The bottom line is that I believe in redundancy, which is a lesson that NASA learned this week when the computers on their space station got a virus.... AGAIN!
NASA announced this week that the computers on the space station had
spyware on them that was designed to collect account information and transmit it back to a server on the Internet. They also announced that this was not the first time they have had this problem up there.
Down here on Earth, our engineering team is dealing with the same problem every day at our client's offices by applying what I have learned while diving. We count on several layers of virus protection to keep us safe from the bad things on the Internet. That redundancy helps me and my client's sleep well.
A good virus strategy has at least four layers. Information is scanned at the SPAM filter, on the mail server itself, at the border of the network by the firewall, and finally at the workstations and servers. Like my dive computers, we try and use different manufacturers at each level so that we get the benefit of different "points of view" when scanning for viruses. Again, redundancy saves the day!
To all of you I say that you should take a lesson from my dive computers, or learn from
NASA's mistake, so that you don't have to suffer the humiliation of calling your computer guys to come clean a virus out of your network.
Remember, you have been warned! :)
Ok... I am off to check over my gear and prepare for tomorrow's festivities!
Todd Kwon-Do
I might end up hitting this boat....
My good friend Maggie has a saying, “Every once in a while, you have to chew through the leash.”
What she means is that now and again it’s a good thing to break the ties that bind you in your everyday life. Don’t answer the cell, don’t check your email, and don’t call in for your voicemail. That can be hard for me, and it takes a conscious effort on my part.
It’s almost midnight. I am sitting on the deck of my boat in Newport, RI watching the changing tides and winds push us VERY close to the boat that was previously in front of us. Since I can’t sleep anyway, I have been sitting here thinking about how it is that I got leashed in the first place.
I think it all started with a pager. Early in the life of my business I resisted getting a pager and being “on call”. But the life of a technology consultant isn’t forgiving in that way, so ultimately I relented. I remember thinking that having a pager was like being chained to the office. The only other person employed by my fledgling company shared my concern.
Later on, we had the opportunity to get remote access in the form of a Citrix server. I remember resisting that too, for the same reason. Likewise, I have had concerns with the VPN’s, terminal servers, IP phones, PDA’s and all the other gadgets that have been designed to make my life “easier”. Each one of these little wonders is designed to be more efficient at chaining me to my office.
...Or is it?
That first pager was an eye opener for my partner and me. While we thought it was a leash, it turned out to be a pair of wings. What I mean is that once we had it, we didn’t have to constantly check our voicemails. We didn’t have to be paranoid about being in the office either. If someone had a problem, they would page us!
Oddly enough, many of the other “leashes” were implemented with similar results. Our various remote access solutions allowed us to work from home and avoid having to go to the office to deal with an emergency. Now, instead of missing a meal with family, all we had was a slight interruption. So, as time went on, we became early adopters of each new “time saver” or “life enhancer”.
Pretty soon, we had so many of these “conveniences” that they had become leashes again.
I think this is how most people today live. I know that my Father can’t go 12 hours without checking his email, and my best friend has to have his phone with him at all times so that he can respond to his office messages immediately. It may be true that these technologies free us from having to be “at the office”. But if that is the case, then it is equally true that these technologies grey the line between our business and personal lives.
So, is that a good thing? I don’t know. In the end, I suppose it all comes down to setting boundaries, showing good common sense, and establishing priorities. We have to make time for ourselves.
So Todd’s tech advice for this week (mostly because I am on vacation), is that you draw a line in the sand now and again and press whatever power buttons you can. Shut it all down. Turn it off. Cut the power.
Chew through the leash!
...That being said, please ignore the irony of the fact that while on vacation, and on my boat, I am using a laptop to post to my company’s blog :) I didn’t check my email though!
[looking up from the laptop] - Wow. This boat is getting really close....
Todd Kwon-Do
A Pear-fect Plan
In April of this year I moved to a more rural setting. I grew up in Vermont so this was a welcome return to familiar things. However, there are some differences between Vermont and my new surroundings. Most notably, there are a lot of fruit trees on the property.
I am a computer guy.
I have never been a cultivator of food products.
When I moved here I wasn’t really expecting that these fruit trees would produce anything more than nice flowers. However, this is one of my pear trees:
As you can see, it is producing fruit! It’s exciting, but it’s also creating questions and quandaries. When do I pick this fruit? How do I ripen it? Is there anything I need to do for the tree so it doesn’t die? Also, I have noticed something else… look at these two pears:
The two pears came from different trees that are only about 15’ apart. The two trees appear to be about the same age and presumably the two trees get the same amount of sunlight, rain, and nutrients from the ground. So, why are the pears on one of the trees so much larger?
The trees are doing their jobs, so I decided to do mine. I got online and started learning about pears. You know what I found out? The difference between the two trees lies in the way they were cultivated in the early part of their lives.
It turns out that the best way to get bigger fruit from a pear tree is to pluck half the fruit off of the tree when it first starts to produce. Very simply, the tree has limited resources for growing fruit. Fewer pears means that each one gets more of those resources… hence, bigger, better fruit. Each successive season, you leave a few more pears on the tree until you have the tree producing at full capacity.
It all comes down to quality over quantity, and it occurs to me that as business professionals we can all learn from this.
I once had a new customer who came to us because the deployment of their new business management software was a total failure from management’s point of view. It was an expensive product to be sure, and it had every bell and whistle that the business could ever need. To be fair, the software was working… but the business hadn’t really seen any additional productivity or benefit from having it.
In the end, it seemed to me that the deployment flopped because they failed to thin the fruit when they first installed the software. New software almost always means a change to the way that the staff works. Rolling out the new workflow and software with 10,000 features left the employees in a tailspin. Everyone became a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. The company would have been far better off if they had rolled out a few features that provided the most benefit, and turned everything else off.
In my experience, users tend to respond better to this. It is so much easier to master a few new features, and once people see how much easier their job has become, they start to ask management and IT for more. That is how you know when the tree is ready to produce more fruit.
So, the bottom line is this: in business technology as in nature, you need to be a little patient. Trying to do too much too soon only leads to mediocre results.
Now, does anyone have any idea what to do with 150 pears?
Todd Kwon-Do
The K.I.S.S. of death…
Computer guys are a funny lot. Where most of the rest of the world places a high value on a simple and elegant solution, computer people tend to go the other way; they like their world complicated. Computer “geeks” get off on high-tech, super complicated equipment. They want to see racks full of blinking lights and interconnected cables. The bigger and more complicated something is, the better they like it.
So, it should be no surprise that most computer consultants and internal technical staff tend to focus their thoughts on the complicated problems. It’s fun to be a hero and figure out a difficult problem before anyone else does. Unfortunately, that often leaves the easiest problems unresolved. In fact, it is a rare occasion that an IT person will sit down and put some serious thought to how to handle something like a virus attack, or a deleted hard drive. These problems seem run of the mill and hardly worth the time of someone that just de-jiggered the central matrix oscillator (IT people also like to make things sound complicated).
I guess my point is this, there is a reason that people say, “the devil is in the details”. I have been spending a fair amount of time recently writing disaster recovery plans. What I have noticed is that everyone wants to know what the plan is for a fire, terrorist attack, or some other major issue. What I know for an absolute fact is that 90% of the “emergencies” our clients have had over the last 10 years have been a product of some mundane, every day issue.
Here are some questions to ponder:
1) If you think you have a virus on your computer, what are the right steps to take to deal with it?
2) If you accidentally delete important files on your computer, what is the very first thing you should do?
3) What should you do for your computer network if the power in your building goes out?
Most people think they know the answer to these questions. Unfortunately, unless some thought has been given to educating the users of the network, everyone's answer could be a little different. For example, some people would call their IT guys if they had a virus. Another person might click SHUTDOWN, and still others might try running a virus scan. On the surface, those all seem like decent ideas, but in the end none of those solutions deals with the immediate risk to the company.
In case you were wondering, the number one concern if you have a virus is that it will infect other systems in the network. The priority has to be containment; you don't want the virus to spread past your PC. Trying to shut down, scan the system, or waiting for IT, gives the virus time to execute code that can damage the network. So, if you think you have a virus, the first step is to disconnect your network cable. Once that is done, the virus is contained and your IT guys have the time to decide how best to handle the situation.
So, my advice is simple. If you are a business owner or an IT manager, I suggest that you make a cheat sheet with the 3-5 steps that you want your employees to take for the following:
Distribute the list, and answer any questions that the users have. If you are an employee, ask your boss or IT guy how you are supposed to handle stuff like this.
As a business owner, I would also be certain that your IT people or your consultants have some documented procedures for issues like:
With just a little planning and education of your users it is possible to prevent small problems from forcing you to break out the disaster recovery plan. Not sure what the right procedure is for some of these? I would suggest that you ask your IT consultants, I am sure they can give you a hand!
