Slarty's World

Dedicated to the pursuit of all things Slarty. Be Careful.

Archive for December, 2005

Easy Redundancy Advice

I came to work on Saturday to replace a bad fan on our firewall (it is amazing the range of tasks a small business owner does), and was reminded of the #1 rule in trying to achieve redundancy in a server room.

The CPU fan started to fail on Tuesday, so I decided to wait until Saturday to fix it. I am always leery about turning off and on a machine that has been running for a long time, but in some cases, it is un-avoidable. We had a spare fan on the shelf; I was worried because the box was open. It has been my experience that an opened box means that someone replaced the part and put the bad part back in the box. Sure enough, that was the case. I had to run to a store and get a temporary CPU fan and then ordered a replacement part. The #1 rule is, when a part is broken, through the fuckin’ thing out.

On a good note, I still have enough time to catch the John Berkey art show in Northfield!

A few other Berkey links for your enjoyment:

Drawn Blog
Ask Art Discussion

Women and Technology

I run a small software company and we are in the process of hiring our first dedicated tech support/analyst person. Our company is very male oriented and one of our priorities is to make it more diverse. Unfortunately, there are very few (2 to be exact) women applicants.

I have been asking around to friends of mine about it and one person said that if I hired a woman, she had better be very well qualified. She was not being sexist; she was saying that if this woman is not up-to-snuff, she will have a horrible time working in this environment.

So this is what I am struggling with. How do I find qualified woman technology wonks? Any thoughts, world?