Rusty's Blog

There’s a long running gag about life being what happens to you while you’re busy making plans. It’s not quite that simple. The reality is that plans are how you compensate for the fact that life really doesn’t care what you actually do, but you do.

Why do we make plans? Because we realize that the car ain’t going to wash itself, or change it’s own oil. The dogs ain’t going to pour out a measured volume of food and limit themselves to that. And we learn over time that certain things won’t all happen ‘at once’ but will take work to accomplish and that work ends up being done better if there is some organization around it.

My sister probably remembers who the family is, though I don’t recall their names. But when I was in school, there was a family in the community who was building their own house. They had no building plans, or designs for what the house would look like when built, except as God directed them. Every nail they put in was placed as god directed. OK, I wish them the very best, and hope that all went well for them, but it’s not a method of construction I would be comfortable with.

On the other hand I do know quite a few people who seem to respond to the world around them, drifting with the wind, never seeming to do anything with a plan or purpose towards their future. You probably now a few as well. Many of us call them teenagers, but that’s not really fair to many teens.

Assuming I take care of myself, treat my cronic conditions as directed, and don’t loose a significant amount of more ground, I can reasonably expect to live for another 40 to 55 years from now, and possibly longer. It’s not something I personally expect to accomplish, but that’s based more on a lack of confidence in my own handling of situations, rather than how my physician or the medical community handles things. All that said and done with, I’m looking at about 20 to perhaps 30 years of employment before I should look to retire. I have serious reservations about how much of what I know today, will apply to this variety of jobe in 20 or so years, but a long time ago I realized that flexibility in how one applies nowledge is the key to being able to deal with a changing infrastructure.

When I was in school, there was a common question. How much should the annual sallary be for a database manager? Answer, a databaase manager is a piece of software thaat handles the actual management of the database. The software may not have a salary, (though annual recurring charges may apply) however the person being though of as a database manager here is probably the database analyst, engineer, or the like.

I bring this up because netorks are begining to get to the same variety of levels. I help to manage a network for a rather large employer. Over the next several years, I expect to see the actual management of the network begin to mmigrate faster and faster towards a piece or collection of software that handles all the management of the network. Moves, adds and changes are the things that seem to take up the most work these days, and these should all be easily automated, including automatically adding and modifying the systems that monitor and alert people to problems in the network. By the time I retire, I suspect that most businesses large enough to really need someone with the specialized knowledge of how to do these things will realize that software can handle all of that for them. However it won’t come from within the large organizations. There’s too much corportate inertia. It will happen because small companies will be looking for competitive edges, and will have employed such solutions, and will grow large as a result. It’s long been known to have hapened within database systems, and at some level, network administration is very much an extension of database administration.

Oddly enough, that’s not where this started out going. I’ve noted elsewhere that I’m an amateur radio operator. One of the things that I occasionally do as part of that is to participate in radio contesting. I was going to do a bit of that this weekend, but before the contest would have started, our systems were not ready for it. So, my plans ended up in limbo for the weekend. I’ll have to see about taking in a movie Sunday or something to compensate I guess.

One of my thoughts had been to see if I could help out up in Fargo. It’s almost a day’s drive for me, and this weekend would have been good as I could drive up on Saturday, hellp Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, then drive back Tuesday night or Wednesday, and go to work Wednesday night. However I don’t have someone ‘ready’ to watch my pooches for a few days like that, and while Mindy would very likely have been welcome and made friends with several people there, I don’t think Nick would have been as handy.

In looking over the situation however it occurs to me that as much help as people needed in preparing for the flood, they will need a heck of a lot more help in the comming months with recovery. Cleanup after a flood is not just take down the sandbag walls and dump out the sand. Oh, there’s some of that as well, but there’s a lot more involved. Some people will need help dealing with property and equipment that was damaged by the flooding. Others will need help repairing landscape that was damaged, and a few people are going to need help with preparing their land for planting.

Next year, probably not this one, we will start to see bumper crops for a couple of years as the floods put down a significant amount of nutrient rich topsoil across the entire flood plain. But it also will drop a significant amount of sand and rocks in some places, and those will affect crops this year. Additionally the nutrient rich topsoil is going to end up in people’s basements, against their walls, and in furniture where their homes were not protected fully from the flooding. That’s going to be a big, and expensive issue for the entire summer, going into fall.

Somehow I think that there will be a need for volunteers most of this summer. I’m hoping I can be a part of that. We’ll see.