Two things going on at work — with myself — that need to be nipped in the bud.
One of the feeds I have in my aggregator is the Creating Passionate Users site. It’s what I’d long to be, and never quite make it. While I can deal without the hokey graphics, the writing is superb, and the ideas deep — each and every time. The feed might hold the record for “most flagged entries in NetNewsWire to read later”
The Death by Devil’s Advocate article hit home for me this week. I’ve done a lot of that in my career — killing ideas, many even my own, by analyzing them to death.
I’m not exactly sure why I do this. I don’t know if it’s an “IT” tendency to keep from over-extending oneself and the infrastructure into some unmanageable mishmash, but an awful lot of ideas get killed by imagining possible negatives. And I’ve been doing that a little too much these past few weeks — it’s the only side I think my co-worker has seen, and too much a side that my boss is seeing. And I don’t like how it looks in the mirror. I need to rip out the negative nabob and pipe it to /dev/null.
I realized tonight that I’m planning these hardware installs like I play SimCity. I never could play SimCity and win with the regular rules. When SimCity 3000 came out for Windows, what I did was find the cheat codes to give me unlimited funds, pause the game, and then I proceeded to build my entire city for hours, and only when I had all the grids laid out perfectly, the roads where I wanted, all of the electric and pipes ran, did I unpause the game and let the city run.
I’ve done similar with the eXtension infrastructure — I’ve bought all the hardware and support equipment (even down to the label printer) — and I’m making sure I understand all of the little things — e.g. the Dell Remote Access Card, the Raid controller, BMC, the Xserve install options, that all my cables and devices are labeled, etc. And while I do plan on making sure I’ve got authentication and backup strategies working before I unleash the rest of eXtension into the infrastructure, what I need to make sure I’m not doing, is building the entire city on pause before I press “Go”. There’s time enough for moving the city around after it’s started growing.