The Left Side of Normal Airplanes, The Internet, and Everything Else

To all of my fellow hard working system administrators out there, happy sysadmin appreciation day! Like Rodney Dangerfield, we usually "get no respect" and only hear from people when something has gone wrong. The other 99.99% of the time, we're practically invisible. When everything "just works" our users take us for granted and ignore us at best, but when something breaks, it's our fault and it has to be fixed right now. Sometimes that "right now" is repairing a broken server at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning, or crawling under a building to run temporary cable to route around the closet that caught fire and destroyed part of the network infrastructure, or any other one of a million things that could go wrong. Network or server problems don't know about holidays, vacations, or sick days. All anyone knows is that "something" isn't right and needs to be fixed immediately. The best system administrators are most invisible of all. They have redundancy and automated failover baked into their plans (assuming they can get funding for such things). They have accounted for the common failure points and worked around them to reduce the pain that users feel when something does go amiss. So, for all of you who share the burden, my hat is off to you. May your inbox stay empty and your cell phone remain quiet.

Flying can be dangerous business. One of my instructors once held up a copy of the Federal Aviation Regulations book, which weighs in at a hefty 1,000 or so pages, and said, "You see all these rules? You've read them? You have to understand that each one of these was added because somebody died. This book was written with blood. Consider it your job to make sure you don't make this book any longer." If everyone follows the rules and performs their inspections properly, and flies the airplane properly, you significantly increase your chances of making it safely to the ground. There is always some amount of risk in flying, and you have to treat it with a healthy amount of respect. You're going to get back on the ground one way or another, but you should be fully in control and landing on a proper surface when you do so. Unfortunately, even the best of us can make a mistake, or our equipment can fail on us. Aviation lost a great female pilot last week, Chandy Clanton. She was practicing for an air show when her Edge 540 aircraft crashed into a field. I do not know the circumstances behind the crash or whether it was mechanical or pilot error, but I do know that she will be missed by the aviation community.