Hartr.Net

Airport Control

My wife & I are sitting at LaGuardia airport after a couple of days in Connecticut with some friends. Personally, I am running on approximately 3 hours of sleep, so my thoughts may be a little confused and ramshackle at this point. That part is fine. As always, the important

You're not (just) a Programmer

At least, you shouldn't consider yourself one. The other day, I was getting my oil changed in Jefferson Park and having a conversation with a fellow client who had come by to get lubed. While discussing the lockdown and general WFH malaise, she asked me what I did

Well, Kinda

So it's a month and 5 days later. I didn't stick to my plans quite as rigidly as I would've hoped to, but... I learned a good deal. I know how HTML works better now, which definitely helps me manage this site overall. Going

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Keeping Honest

When I was young, one of my friends had a dad who was a programmer. Perl, to be specific. My dad, back at home, spent his days on the phones convincing strangers to buy a product he had been briefed on. But this guy, from my perspective, created entire worlds.

tech

Everything is New. Even the server.

So, quick observation. I'm never going back to WordPress. Yes, it works. But it's haggard with age and frankly hazardous to use. I'm not sure if you've read my previous articles, but I was getting an average of two hacking attempts every

Something is different

Good evening folks! Hope your preceding days, weeks, and months have been safe and enjoyable. It's been a crazy couple of weeks if you live in the Western hemisphere. Moving in tandem with the rest of the change, I've decided to officially (and permanantly) move my

Evening Everybody

Hi folks. How have you been? I ask you to come use this site because I don’t really use Facebook that much anymore. I find the platform is simultaneously constricting and too open. And it concerns me, especially when I see that other platforms like Google more or less

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So, whaddya do? A course into devOps, secOps, SRE and embracing the complexity

I have issues explaining this to people. Sometimes I delve into industry buzzwords. For example, I’m in dev-sec-ops, I’m in computer networking or security, or just that I keep the site from going down. Sometimes this explains the question and we move onto another topic. But

Getting Hacked: Protection is Free, I Scream 'Use It'

I can’t legally admit that I was ever hacked. But sometimes people close to me get it. When I can’t respond in time, bad things happen. True, with great sysadmin powers come great responsibility. But in another truth, the rivers of data that connect us together are leakier

A Rough Year

I’m sure you’ve all had it. This year has been a bastard to all of us. Some of us have lost friends, jobs, loved ones, homes, futures. We’ve all had to put our lives on hold, watching the fishbowl of the world outside. Seeing empty TV spectacles

poems

Wrote a Poem

Hi folks. I won’t take too much of your time. But I wrote a poem and now you can read it. In Carcosa; Lamentia & Dolores swept calmly to the sea; The witches laughed and played their games In subtle harmony While black stars rose and islands sank Demurely

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Friends, I did a thing

So, as you may know about me, I’ve got a strong interest in open-source software. It’s fun: pull something for free, break it, get a new one. Free as in free beer appeals to my senses. And the horror of spending an extra hundred on a Windows

Keeping on Track

I realized that this professional blog has begun to veer into personal stuff. I don’t really want this. Sure, we have tragedies in our lives. But if we are going to stay above the mire, we have to keep walking. So I’m going to discuss some of my

Losing your Roommate

Travis was my roommate at Sangamon State University in 2008. We had a lot of fun times and he was one of the best men I knew from then until now. Two years ago, I saw him for the last time when my now-wife and I came back up

A Network of One's Own

A few days ago, my delighted wife and I completed purchase on a bit of condo space in Chicago. Given your beloved author is the primary techie of our house, it fell to me to build up our own at-home network. That’s right: finally, the chance to fully

Great News from the Finance End

For the first time ever on hartr.net, cloud migration has resulted in a significant savings on AWS costs, which have been mitigated 90%. Migrating from Amazon towards DigitalOcean has also resulted in a 33% reduction in compute costs, which is terrific news for everybody who likes to read or

On the wonderful onset of May; or why you need Vitamin D

I went for my first run of the spring yesterday. It was really wonderful being able to go out and run on the newly-built Chicago riverfront walk. This particular segment wraps along the river between Irving Park and Addison, and there’s plenty space to avoid the other locals

And now, Some Valuable Data, or Why You Should Always Push to Git

I’ve been keeping a small, folded piece of an old business card on my desk. It reads: ~ Push to git It’s a decent reminder. We often forget that our brains are limited: our capacity to store and pull the right information at the right time is downright saddening.

Flotsam in the Ocean

It’s been a few minutes, but I hope everybody has been up to some sort of good. Wow, the world has changed significantly since my last post. Again, I hope that everybody who reads this post is taking decent care of themselves and their own. Part of the shock

Some Technical Things

I’ve been doing a lot more research lately in an attempt to get up-to-date on the world as it exists in the enterprise IT operations world. Just a few years ago I was throwing server racks into the back of my Hyundai and driving them between sites

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Site duration

Most of my site durations are about two minutes and eighteen seconds. So maybe it makes sense to have the stuff that I write to be readable in that amount of time. Maybe less. The secondary question is whether or not the majority of those visitors are bots. That’s

Back at it

First of all, thanks for coming to this site. I put a decent amount of work into it, and I’m glad to see the metrics and the people popping in from time to time. I should apologize for the lag between entries, but we all have the rest of

On Presence

This article might be a little bit longer. And probably not as poetic as the first one. It may be jarring, obtuse, infuriating and maybe none of these things. One thing it will be is a commentary on the existence of stuff itself. And non-stuff, which may technically be

On Ma

I’m going to be curt in this post because that is the nature of its subject. Ma is a Japanese concept defined by Wikipedia as “gap”, “space”, “pause” or “the space between two structural parts.” When you clap, the silences between the claps are Ma. It is present in

Moving Onward

I’m sure everybody has had a tough year in 2019. I know that my father passed away in September, which was a brutal occurrence for me. But now it’s December, and we can celebrate the waning of this period. Lots of things have occurred, but we can set