This is when multiple stakeholders end up fighting over limited resources in a corporate environment.
Explanation:
This is a term used during those sporadic times in every corporation where budgets suddenly become tight, the reason makes no difference, every manager, director or stakeholder suddenly frantically scrabble around for every bit of budget, even pinching off each other, sometimes pillaging general usage pots and generally behaving in a very scrabbly way 1, but if you are watching it, it can look like the children’s game of the same name.
Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.
all for perfectly valid reasons, they’re just protecting their projects[↩]
Ever since I started in support some 20 odd years ago, I have always tried to carry a small toolkit with me, back then it was a very cheap one supplemented with Christmas presents for my dad who has always known a quality tool 1. Now it is custom built out of the very best bits and bobs that I know about.
This is my current carry. It’s a tiny bit on the heavy side for most ‘suits’ but then again I’m not a lightweight person. Let’s break it down 2:
Wera screwdrivers have long been my go to make, I’ve adored them for years. And they have reached their Pinnacle with the 8009 Zyklop ratchet screwdriver. 12 built in bits rather than the normal six. Beautiful quality all around , thoroughly recommended. I do however swap out two of the torx bits that they supply with two flat heads which are still used a lot. In addition on the photo, we have another Wera part, this is off another screwdriver and is just an extensionas you sometimes need a little more reach. Next we have a set of screwdriver adapters for Allen keys, the funny rounded heads on these are so you can use them slightly at an angle. strangely there is also a chuck adaptor for drill bits, I just seem to need it a lot and don’t like using proper drills in a number of places as a hand chuck gives a lot more control, for this I carry just one 5mm drill bit and a little bag for the various small parts. The missing items off here are sockets, the 8009 supports them but I just never seem to need them.
Next we have a precision screwdriver. There are lots of precision screwdrivers on the market but all seem to be designed to be desk bound, The Megapro one is the one that I’ve come to love. Not only does it have a good selection of bits inside which most precision screwdrivers don’t, because they’ve got a tiny useless handle, but as the bits are inside its a nice single unit. Next is a Bosch handsaw. Well it’s not really a handsaw. It’s just a handle, but it takes the standard blades meant for the big electrical reciprocating saws which are easy to get hold of and have different types of blades, I have found this a easy way of carrying around a small saw because the handle is hollow and can hold two blades. The construction feels a tiny bit flimsy but it’s held up to sawing through a variety of things so far, so I’ve got no objection.
These are reverse tweezers, they default to closed rather than open meaning they can free up a hand and they work just as well as ordinary tweezers. Also because they’re held close by default, you don’t have to keep something on the end to protect the tip so they don’t get damaged or bent out to place.
Now you wouldn’t think you’d need a spirit level but I seem to 3, This one is a free one that comes with big Dell monitors.
Next is one of the nicest little torches I have ever met, Yes I’m aware that we all have torches in our phones, but quite frankly, battery life is a serious thing and sometimes it’s good to have a good torch that won’t overheat. This one is well constructed. It’s USB rechargeable, and you can also swap out the built-in lithium battery for 2 x AAA’s in case you run out.
Next are a pair of Knipex Cobra® XS Water Pump Pliers, they double up as spanner and pliers for me, they are tiny but you would not believe how strong they are. If you doing electrical or electronic things in server rooms or with computers and you need more grip than this pair of pliers can give then you’re doing something wrong in my opinion. They are apparently used by all of the small toolkit people and I can understand why.
Japanese micro snips, I don’t know why Japanese but these kind of very small cutters from Japan seem universally good. I originally bought them for modelling but now use them for everything. They’re obviously smaller than a proper pair of wire cutters but they take up less space, and for the stuff I’m doing I don’t need any more. Obviously they won’t handle things like a nail or something really serious. But again, I am not doing large scale construction.
And the last tool is a folding Stanley Knife, it’s not something you tend to carry around in public, but a main stay of every tool kit, this one as normal, carries a couple of spare blades and is rock solid.
All of these go in a little bag. I know that some people like all the foldout/fancy ones, but quite frankly, who has time for that. A decent indestructible bag works for me and I’ve ever found better than the Magma three pocket set. it just fits hand tools nicely.
There you go, my odd little portable tool kit.
being both a professional electrician and an amateur carpenter[↩]
This kit isn’t my absolute de facto kit. my day to day tools I use at home are not so compact. My go to screwdriver at home is a gigantic Stanley ratchet one and I have for the last 10 years been using a lovely set of precision screwdrivers that my dad bought me. In fact most of my home tools are ones bought by him at some point and they are both excellent quality and hold good memories but this is the custom kit I have built for travel[↩]
So I’m back for another AWS Summit. As always with Amazon, the actual organisation was slick and well put together, you received a phone call beforehand, asking what you were hoping to get out of the conference, the joining instructions and the app for managing what you got out of the summit was also really good. They seem to have scaled everything to an nicety.
The Queues moved very very fast
No recorded waiting music here, a live jazz band to pick up your pass
After picking up the pass and doing a good hard zip through the vendor showcase while they set up (making a list of people I wanted to see and chat too) it was in to the hall for the main presentation.
As expected, it was very, very AI orientated.
The main presentation on AI was exceptionally good, in that it broke things up into reasonable chunks and also was not only technical enough for the geeks, but presented things for the senior managers in a way that would be understandable. So, not only did they present their own AI as Amazon Titan, but it also brought into the common language the concept that there are multiple different types of AI cores that you could use, and how using them with bedrock, you could pick the one that is most suitable for your needs.
All of this was summarised really tightly and really made AI config into a wizard. 1
There was also a perfect nod to Amazon code whisperer which is a rather adorable plug-in, and is a truly practical use for AI with genuine productivity
Thankfully, it wasn’t all AI. They did demo a bunch of the core stuff that makes AWS so good, and laid out the different levels of servers vs containers vs serverless. showing that you can move between them at any point, etc etc, which always needs to be hammered home I feel in the modern app world.
The Lower Floor showcase floor before it got busy
However the conference was not perfect.
The showcase floor was scaled the same as other showcase floors. yet somehow felt constantly busy. I think there was enough room for the crowds to pass through, or for people to have conversations with the vendors, but not both at the same time. Now normally this is not a problem, because in such events you do most of your conversations when all of the sessions are on and the showcase floor goes quiet, but that break did not seem to happen, and that’s not to say there weren’t a load of sessions. They were dozens scattered all over the place. But they were on the short side, and there was no solid path or trail to follow. If you looked on both the app, and on the PDF, it was just a list of codes and the only colour coding or pathing was for the map its self. This seemed to dissuade people from going to the sessions. I never saw any large scale movement to get to the next session as you would in any other conference. People didn’t seem to know that the sessions were on. Which meant that I missed a number of sessions I would have rather liked attending, but quite frankly to have got them I would have had to sit down grimly with a pen and paper and some highlight markers myself and worked it out. So perhaps that needs to be improved for next year.
For the vendors them selves, They did seem to have a hard time differentiating themselves. There’s a lot of them there. and because you’re moving through quickly because of the constant pressure. It made it hard to just stop and have a look at ones that caught your eye (I really wanted to spend some time with CockroachDB but its was like fighting up stream).
The only other criticism for me was of the food. I’m one of the picky eaters on planet Earth, and myself and a colleague2 stood in front of a long queue. Then we were faced with a bunch of identical bowls. And had to work through a list of ingredients to try and find which ones could be eaten, at which point we gave up and went to the pub.
Conclusion
So was it worth it? Would I go again? yes to both, but only just….
AWS? Yes.
The technical side? Yes.
The chance to see which vendors are core to AWS and to talk to them? Yes.
The organisation of the conference and the facilities of the conference? No
Me being dignified
And this is what I was being dignified on
Dear Lord setting up an AI with a wizard, never thought I’d see it[↩]
This is just a reference blog for other people because I couldn’t find what I wanted out on the internet.
In another post I started to get a very sharp pain in my elbow, which was initially diagnosed as bursitis, by both my PT and by a very good physio, it had all the symptoms, apart from the fact that it had no swelling, the symptoms were:
No issue with movement or restriction.
No loss of strength.
An incredibly sharp and sudden pain when my elbow was touched on the bone (just the slightest brush was enough to trigger it), no other pain experienced.
This persisted to the point where it reached probably an 8 out of 10 on the jump up and down in pain scale. To the point where I decided that a trip to accident and emergency was in order. I went and was initially diagnosed with bursitis by the GP in attendance, I said that was what had been diagnosed before but none of the normal treatments had made any difference, he allowed me to go for an x-ray to confirm one way or another, when the x-ray came back it was determined what was actually happening was that the soft tissues in my elbow were being aggravated and inflamed and were in turn then pushing out my Ulnar nerve so that it was resting on the outside of my elbow. explaining the tenderness and pain.
He prescribed some really powerful painkillers, that ice was better for it than heat and advising me to use an elbow splint to sleep in 1. The painkillers didn’t do what I hoped, as my guts hated them more than my elbow liked them and the arm splint hurt like hell when I rolled over on it in the night. However now that I knew what it was and what it wasn’t, I could have a good check on what had changed in my life, Although it seemed the obvious culprit, I discounted the fitness I do, my PT is fanatical about keeping my activities even on both sides and this was very definitely effecting only one side.
Then I realised that one of the main changes recently was that I’d moved desks. And as someone that uses a trackball, I previously rested my elbow on an ordinary mouse wrist rest, just to keep my elbow off the table. however in my new desk, I didn’t do that as the mouse was much closer to the front of the desk. So I went and purchased one of those strange elbow arm things to rest my elbow on,
and while I was waiting, I found a very good make of gel pack that was soft after freezing, and took to putting that in the bottom of a bowl of water, letting the water chill to near freezing, then suspending my elbow in it without touching anything for 10 To 15 minutes.
This gave me amazing relief. The pain would completely recede, stay away for nearly three hours and then only very slowly start to come back. when the arm rest arrive I started using it. And now the pain stopped getting worse.
I’m not a doctor but I feel its a reasonable conclusion that as I was doing 60 hours a week with my elbow raised and no support using a trackball, I was rubbing a very small part of my elbow joint and inflaming it.
So if you are getting the same thing try:
Resting the joint so its not constantly in use in on what seems low impact work.
Proper Ice baths for that joint.
,the same that is used with repetitive strain injury in your elbow[↩]
This is the nice corporate way of saying: “This bit of IT kit is not your personal property, please stop treating it as such”
Explanation:
People have a very strong sense of entitlement when it comes to IT equipment. particularly in a corporation.
This can vary from shared SQL servers that they just simply hammer the hell out of thinking no one else uses them, to their laptops which they seem to think will just run forever and are outraged when they are told that a patch or upgrade is needed.
This puts IT support in a tricky position, because while they want people to feel a certain amount of engagement with the equipment, treat it well and use it fully, they don’t want people to treat it as if it’s their personal property and develop a personal attachment that makes it harder to manage for the good of the corporation as a whole.
The word that seems to be the perfect match for this need is “Tenant”.
If you are a tenant of a shared server, you know you are not the owner of that server, and moreover, it has overtures that not only might it be shared by other people, but will be used both before and after you. So please look after it.
Its just a nice phrase I’d heard desktop support use and figured other people might find it so.
Disclaimer: As always these posts are not aimed at anyone client or employer and are just my personal observations over a lifetime of dealing with both management and frontline associates.
