Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

I hate the idea of writing about anything even tangentially related to my job because I know people I work with read this page and I’m not usually willing to risk anything I say here being misinterpreted or held against me at a later date. Today, however, I want to draw upon my experience as an IT professional to comment about something posted on John Gruber’s linked list at Daring Fireball.

Question for anti-iPhone IT managers like those quoted in the Wall Street Journal story yesterday: Do you see your role as serving the employees of your company, or ruling over them?

(As an aside, I’m very turned off by how Gruber has divided people into antagonist “anti-iPhone IT managers” and “iPhone doubters” versus protagonist individuals who are implicitly more intelligent. “iPhone doubter” and similar phrases resemble “holocaust denier” and other pejoratives too much for my liking. He’s essentially accusing these people of stupidly “doubting” a reality of iPhone super success that is not yet certain.)

I’m not an anti-iPhone IT manager. I do see my role as serving employees, but not by obeying their every whim. I’ve been hired because of my expertise and to presumably use that expertise to create a work-ready environment. A huge part of my job is to make sure that equipment and services are as reliable and available as they can possibly be so that employees, who are generally technologically ignorant at all but the most shallow levels, can work and make money for the company, and hence, my salary. When either employees or executives dismiss my opinions and recommendations out of hand because they want something that may adversely affect others who rely on the same infrastructure for their jobs, that angers me. It defeats the point of my presence. It relegates me to “just do it because I said so” trained monkey status, and I’ll be damned if I’m anyone’s “do it” bitch. My job is to provide what the company needs to function, manage the infrastructure underlying that function, and protect the same. IT policy by executive edict or end-user whining snowballs into eventual disaster, for which I will take the hit later because of my inability to manage the arbitrary tuna net thrown over top of me.

So I intend to serve the employees the same way a parent serves a child - by knowing better in a lot of cases, and by saying “no” frequently when adverse consequences, including my inability to effectively and securely manage features-by-fiat, are likely to occur. If that means employees sometimes cannot play with their new toys on the corporate network, too bad. It’s not that I rule end users with contempt. I have to consider the big picture, and sometimes that means temporary inconvenience while the IT people plan and test and secure and make sure you have the reliable, functioning technology you need to do your job.

Pursuant to a previous post here, I just finished the last of 20 Mr. B double claro Magnums. I’d describe them as mediocre. I attempted to take the band off the first five or six, and each time the glue tore the wrapper. I left the band on the remainder, and by the time the cigar had burned down to the finish, the wrapper on each one had cracked and made the cigar hard to draw through. They didn’t taste funny or anything, they just weren’t very well constructed. That’s a little odd because the Mr. B maduros I’ve had in the past didn’t have the same problem. Perhaps double claro wrappers, because of their fast curing process under intense heat, are naturally more fragile. I don’t know.

I don’t think I’ll order another bundle, however. The JR Famous maduro Churchills I usually smoke are much better made, and remain my favorites. The JR Famous cigars also come in a double claro wrapper, and I think I’ll try them sometime in the future, but for now I’m going to order another box of maduros to take with me to Connecticut next week.

If there’s anything I’ve learned from the JR Cigar catalog, it’s that you can’t judge a cigar by its price. The JR Famous cigars are 50 cents each, while the Mr. B’s are 75 cents each. Yeah, thats right - my favorite smokes are super cheap. Cigar pricing is somewhat of a scam. Ok, not in a literal sense, but these manufacturers know that if they ask $7 apiece for a cigar and you’re willing to pay it, then their cigars are worth $7, maybe more. That’s capitalism in action, and I say, good for them. All kinds of different cigars come from the same factories, and while each may have different blends of tobacco, the tobaccos used across brands are the same. Construction quality, as demonstrated, may differ, but the single data point I’ve presented here doesn’t show that more expensive cigars are better constructed (although I suspect that’s generally true).

Don’t be afraid of inexpensive cigars! Make sure what you’re getting is a real cigar made from all tobacco and you’ll eventually find something you like to smoke that won’t break the bank.

Over millions of years of human, and prior pre-human, evolution, some things became so important that that they’re not optional, they’re built into human DNA. They’re reflexes, things that happen involuntarily, without any conscious thought beforehand. Breathing is a good example. People breathe all day every day without thinking about it. In fact, you have to consciously make the decision to stop breathing. Oxygenating blood is so important that breathing is not optional.

Protecting your eyes is another important built-in function. When something comes toward your eyes, you blink without thinking about it. It is so important that your eyes not contact other objects that your eyelids close immediately. You have no choice.

Who am I to argue with millions of years of evolution?

Utterly terrifying.

[Julie Amero] was substituting for an English class. She went to the restroom, and when she returned, students were gathered around a computer that was displaying porn pop-ups. Amero, who describes herself as a total computer novice, couldn’t make them stop, and she eventually ran to the teacher’s lounge to get help. In court, school officials admitted that the antivirus software installed on the PC was out of date, and antispyware programs were not installed. A school official did tell parents, however, that the school district had comprehensive filtering and firewall software in place at the time.

Although it’s hard to conjure up a simple explanation for why a substitute teacher would show middle-school students porn pop-ups on purpose, Amero was prosecuted on the ground that she had done this intentionally. She was eventually found guilty and faced the prospect of 40 years in jail because of the incident.

The idea that circumstances beyond my control could cost me the rest of my life in prison because of some superheated sexual paranoia that fuels illogically indignant parents and abusive prosecutors makes me want to surround my house with razor wire and land mines. Considering that in Ohio, you can be declared a sex offender without any criminal conviction whatsoever, I wonder if there is any truly safe place to live where children and their parents can’t potentially ruin your life at a whim.

We had a very good rainbow this evening.