Programming competition for East African students
Google (my employer) has announced a "Google Gadget" competition for students in Tanzania, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi and Ethiopia. The designer of the best gadget will a $600 USD stipend, five runners-up will receive a $350 USD stipend. Prize categories include Best Gadget UI, Best Local Content Gadget (Most Locally Useful Gadget), Best Education Specific Gadget, Best Procrastination Gadget, Most Technically Sophisticated Gadget, Gadget Most Likely to Get International Traffic, and Best Social Gadget.
Complete details are available on the East Africa Google Gadget Competition website. A PDF suitable for your university bulletin board is available here.
Women and Latin Americans in Open Source
A co-worker of mine, Fernanda Weiden, was interviewed on the FLOSS Weekly podcast.
Fernanda Weiden of Google in Zurich gives her perspectives on women and Latin Americans in the open source community, the Brazilian Women in Free Software, Debian Women and the Free Software Foundation of Latin America
True story about Fernanda: She taught herself English by reading Linux "man" pages.
I appreciate you!
Today is the 8th Annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. I know this sounds kind of funny, but I really appreciate all the system administrators out there. I meet a lot of system administrators. I visit a lot of sites. I hear stories about heroics, and I hear stories of people who persist even though they are working with terrible management, unappreciative users, and CEOs that treat IT as a "cost center" instead of an investment in future corporate growth.
Last week the 2nd edition of The Practice of System and Network Administration started shipping. The new edition includes a lot of new anecdotes, many from the fan mail we've received over the years. Some of the fan mail is fun, like when we were told that something we suggested helped recover from an outage a few hours faster, which saved his company $100,000. Often we are pleased to receive email from someone who's received a promotion and wanted to thank us for writing a book that was instrumental to their career. But most of all I want to say that I am humbled by the messages we've received from the lonely system administrators: The under-appreciated person struggling to fix a big mess they inherited, with all the responsibility when it fails but none of the authority to fix the larger problems. We received email from one person who, when reading the book, burst into sobs after realizing she wasn't "the only one".
This will be the second year that I'm volunteering to judge SysAdmin Of The Year. Nominations are open, so email the URL (http://www.sysadminoftheyear.com/) to all your friends. The first 2500 nominated sysadmins get a free tshirt, which is pretty cool in itself.
Tom
P.S. If you are in the Philly/NJ/DE/NY area (or aren't, but like last-minute travel), don't forget that I'l be doing my time-management training classes during the tutorial part of LOPSA's SysadminDays local conference, August 6-7, 2007, in Cherry Hill, NJ (just outside Philadelphia).
Book Recommendation: What All Network Administrators Know
I just came across Douglas Chick's book, "What All Network Administrators Know". I immediately rushed to add it to our web page of recommended titles (scroll to the bottom).
One of the problems with TPOSANA is that it really focuses on big sites. This book is perfect for sysadmins that are just getting started or are at a small site. It is down to earth, very practical, and contains tons of excellent advice. (If you want proof, preview it on Amazon by clicking on the "random page" button.)
Sysadmin Appreciation Day and Sysadmin Of The Year
Don't forget (or don't forget to remind your boss) that Friday, July 28th is System Administrator Appreciation Day. www.sysadminday.com
However the new hotness is the 2006 Sysadmin Of The Year contest. Sponsored by Splunk, LOPSA, and many other organizations. One Grand Prize winner will receive a $2,500 Splunk Professional license and an all-expense paid trip to Washington, D.C. to attend the Large Installation System Administration (LISA) Conference December 3-7, 2006. More than 2,500 other prizes will be awarded. Nominate someone today!
