When working on a team of system administrators it is important to teach the junior members an important lesson: DON'T LEAVE YOUR WORKSTATION UNLOCKED! Even though physical office areas are frequently reasonably secure, leaving a workstation unlocked does have the potential to expose sensitive information or worse... get one's Facebook profile hacked with an embarrassing status update!

One common way to indoctrinate new members it to make use of their unattended workstation to browse a less than appropriate web site and leave it up on the screen for casual passers-by to notice.

Unfortunately, this browser-based method of team indoctrination does not work well on team members who are always buried in a dozen terminal windows, are running some foul desktop environment without any of the usual hotkey commands, use elinks to browse the web, or they guy who wonders why nobody else is using emacs to read their Microsoft Exchange email.

Solution? An ASCII art cat meme for your console window!




The live site is best viewed from a console shell or terminal with fixed font width (e.g. Using the "curl" command from a terminal):

http://cat.thatlinuxbox.com


p.s. I was hoping to find a nice happy domain name for this ascii art cat meme that was easy to remember. Sadly, cat.me and pretty much every other domain name containing the word "cat" are already taken...

Ogre! Huge! Awesome!



Allen helped to fund this project on Kickstarter and totally scored. Steve Jackson Games wanted to do a re-print of the Ogre boardgame originally created back in 1977. This sixth edition, the Designer's Edition, is a really great example of how to use Kickstarter. The project was seeking $20k to help fund a re-print and in the end received over $920k! You can read all about the Kickstarter campaign here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/8...rs-edition


The game includes nicely detailed, high quality cardboard 3d models of the Ogres, which are giant tank war machines:








The basic game can be set up and played in 30 minutes to an hour which makes it suitable for a lunchtime gaming session at work. Here are some pictures from a longer multi-day lunchtime game:

This week I was chosen to be the Interim Team Lead over the Linux Team in our little section of UFIT.

Our existing team lead is heading off to greener pastures to do cloud stuff and to perform all kinds of SysAdmin wizardry at Rackspace.

Martin Smith, we will miss you!

This is what it looks like when there is an interesting technical issue on a system administrator's computer screen. The sixth SysAdmin is me (taking the picture).

A few months ago I started standing at work.

I've been tweaking my desk area and this is where I am today, version 2.0 of my standing workstation:



The upper LCD shelf is made from a cheap melamine shelf with CAPITA legs from IKEA. So far it is working well, and the third LCD monitor is a nice addition.