I’ve found some answers to the question I posed earlier, what are IT’s dirtiest jobs?

Jason Hiner over at techrepublic.com (registration required, I believe) just started a thread asking, What are the worst jobs in IT? accompanied by the counter question, What are the best jobs in IT?

Great question, one I’ve asked here before in my IT Dirty Jobs post. And now I get some answers! Here are my three favorites.
How about computer technician for elementary, middle school, and high school computer labs, yikes. I envision virus infestations and germy keyboards (of course, studies have shown that keyboards are filthier than most toilets. Ew.) Not to mention the script kiddies who fancy themselves as hackers in the older grades.

I also liked the job description for an industrial machinery debugger and programmer. The loud, hot or cold (depending on the time of year) factory floor is your workstation, and apparently you have to climb over the broken machinery, risking life and limb! Risky, dirty, and high pressure all in one.
And the final one I’ll mention because it gets a lot of votes is “sole IT person,” meaning if it gets plugged in, you’re the one in charge of it company-wide. Yeah, that has to be a dirty job. Crawling under desks, driving to remote sites only to find out the problem is fixed before you get there, and the pressure under emergency situations (all eyes are on you until the network is up). Sounds down and dirty to me.
Other finalists include: ISP tech support, network cable installer, help desk, cooling fan hairball remover (okay, actually, computer refurbisher, blech).
So there you have it, a report on some downright dirty jobs.

If you didn’t already know that business and IT have real connections that matter to customers, here are a couple more examples.

I like the user experience blog This Is Broken. There are two recent entries that caught my eye as examples of connecting IT procedures to customer-facing services.

This post showcases an error in the printout on this receipt from an ATM application. Hee hee.

*This is line 1 of the store message*

*This is line 1 of the marketing message*

Another This Is Broken post is about a misprint on the label of a pair of jeans. Granted, this is probably a counterfeit label example, but, it relates to IT in front of customer facing products. The printout is a data source error ” =if(Label=”",”RMA”,”?”) ” which is funny text to read when it’s out of place on a label that’s supposed to contain say, sizing or brand information. I know, I know, you can’t blame IT for those necessarily, and the Internet conspiracy people think the image is photoshopped, but I like the image nonetheless.

Both examples are good reminders that IT and data does make a difference to the quality of the product or service that faces customers. Online shopping experiences are always good examples of how IT can make or break a sale. This Is Broken tends to get to “meatier” IT connections for consumer products, and I appreciate that approach.

What are you reading on IT blogs?

Ever feel like you have 100 channels but nothing’s on? I’m definitely feeling that way about television. Now that I have a TiVo®, though, my television viewing is sharply focused to just the content that I want to know about. I recently showed a co-worker of mine my RSS aggregator, Bloglines, and he said “It’s like TiVo for web pages!” That’s the perfect explanation.

So. How do you find good, insightful, relevant blogs on topics that matter to you? I recently read the CNet Top 100 blogs list. You can also download the list as an OPML file and import it into your newsreader. Their categories are a little “out there” to me. Their categores are Cutting edge, Digital lifestyle (that one’s vague), Law/politics, Mac nation, Open source, Search/media (this one’s an odd combo to me), Security/threats, Software,Tech business, and Web culture. Many of my favorites are on that list, but I think it’s definitely bent towards a geeky Mac bloggers’ list, and weighted towards computer technology. I would have also added a “Parenting” category as well as an “Automobile” category. And what about Mobile?

For IT-related blogs, I’ve got several categories in mind. Examples include IT Governance, Infrastructure Management, Application Management, Change and Configuration Management, Identity Management, IT Culture, Mainframe, Capacity Planning, Performance Monitoring, Enterprise Architecture, Network Administrator, and Service Oriented Architecture, all categories for which I’m doing searches for blogs. What categories would you choose for IT-related feeds? What would make your top 10 (or 100, even) IT-related blogs list?

I took some photos at the BMC Forum in Dallas October 2005

I had some fun with my digital SLR pretending to be a photojournalist. Here are some photos of activity at the forum.

Chip and Stephen work for Dell and Temple-Inland, respectively, in Austin, Texas, and they’re brothers. I had to ask them if I could play paparrazi and snap some shots.

Checking email between sessions like a lot of us were doing.

A lively discussion in the hallway requiring hand guestures and everything.

Another discussion after the Marimba 101 lesson.

Here’s a partial shot of the expo area where you can go see products in action.

Reporting from a conference room set at 60 degrees Fahrenheit, here’s your roving blogger reporting from Dallas

Blogging live is harder than it sounds. Fortunately the wireless connection is behaving in two of the session rooms I’ve been in so far. But, beyond the technology (which is the easy part), it’s difficult to take notes and figure out what to report on. So here goes. Let me know if you’d like to hear more.

There are plenty of sessions to choose from and at least five tracks. This morning I went to the BMC Performance Manager Roadmap and Strategy session with about 35 attendees. Sean Duclaux started with a trick question by asking for a show of hands. How many PATROL Express customers? (a few) How many PATROL Classic customers? (a bunch) How many BMC Performance Manager customers? All! We’ve changed the PATROL product name to BMC Performance Manager. Of course with a product evolving like this, lots of questions ensue. I’ll try to capture the questions and answers here.

Q: How do you decide which to use, agent-based or agentless monitoring?
A: Based on collection policies that you set, the agent might deploy automatically, perhaps by pushing a lightweight local presence onto the computer to be monitored. More on this below the question/answer set.

Q: What kind of pricing is available for people who are already invested in the PATROL Classic product line?
A: The licensing scheme has been completely redesigned in a few ways. One is that there’s a CPU metric, so if you want to monitor a server, it doesn’t matter if it’s Windows or UNIX or Linux — you can switch between them. Also there are tiers of deployment that are simplified, such as a departmental license. I’m sure I’m missing some layers here but the overall answer is that PATROL Classic is not going away, but you will see infrastructure cost savings as you upgrade and decommission old infrastructure.

Q: What technological help is available for upgrading our KMs?
A: The BMC Performance Manager SDK was just released in August and you can request it (it comes free with BMC Performance Manager). With this SDK you can create application classes and XML config files that will pick up all the info that your KMs do (as long as it makes sense to do so), and there are third party implementers being trained on the SDK right now. (OTL is in Austin this week for training, apparently).

Q: What about about the install footprint — how much disk space for this lightweight local presense?
A: It shouldn’t be a big space hog. Just looking at my own Marimba client install I’m seeing a less than 50 MB install, and Marimba is the one that gathers the most information, not a lightweight local presense. I’m guessing lightweight should be MUCH less than this.

Q: What about bandwidth, will it fill up my network sending data back and forth?
A: This is all configurable, but typically only when an event is raised will it be sent back. Of course if you’re going from PATROL 3, which apparently didn’t send data anywhere (I’m no expert on this but that’s what was said), you’re going to see a difference in network capacity.

Q: The Million Dollar Question (according to a guy in a UNIX-only shop) — will the RSM (Remote Service Monitor) run on a UNIX box or is it Windows only?
A: The product manager and architect are arm wrestling over that right now. The basic answer is that we (well, the architect) wants to do everything, but … a Windows RSM can monitor both Windows and UNIX, but a Solaris/UNIX RSM can only monitor UNIX, so we need to know whether that’s worth building — does it fit into the environment that you envision? UNIX doesn’t exactly listen well (ok, at all) to perfmon information, for example, so there’s no monitoring of Windows with a UNIX RSM.

Q: Will a lightweight local presence (LLP) incorporate auto recovery actions?
A: Even if you are managing a solution remotely, as long as dynamic connection can happen, we’ll let you do recovery actions for remote connections (not til after December though.) PATROL Express can do remote restarts right now.

The gee-whiz factor for me with the new direction is the combination of agent-based and agentless options. Both are available now with a single view point, meaning your PATROL Express data can be viewed alongside your PATROL data. You can apply a policy to determine whether you monitor something with an agent or not. Here’s an example of a policy application out of the BMC white paper, “Effortless System Management.”

Policy example: If a small file/print server is reassigned to serve the office of the company’s chief executive,
the IT staff may decide that it wants an autorecovery capability on that server. The IT staff simply sets the
new performance management policy for that server, and BMC Performance Manager makes the
appropriate changes, which may include pushing an LLP out to the server.

Another recurring topic so far is compliance efforts such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPPA, Basel II. As Sean put it, “You don’t want to see your CEO on the cover of a magazine in an orange jumpsuit.” So, if Sarbanes-Oxley or other compliance efforts are your concern, figure out how to get your policies in place. I’m hearing this over and over.

All the presentations are available with a username and password, so if you’re attending, here’s the site to download the presentations. Your packet has the username and password.

Disorganization, mixed connections, incompatibilities… what are IT’s dirtiest jobs?

I’ve been watching Dirty Jobs on the Discovery Channel and it is really quite enjoyable. Mike Rowe, the great voice behind Deadliest Catch, works alongside people with, well, dirty jobs. For example, in last week’s episode he worked on a pig farm. Another episode has him diving in the muck for golf balls in an alligator-infested water hazard. Yet another was “roadkill collector” and boy did that turn my stomach. Let’s just say it’s a good thing they haven’t perfected ” smell-o-vision” for the TV yet.

It’s rare that I’ll run into something smelly as a tech writer, though. Then again, the biggest mess I had to clean up in tech pubs land was a six-month stint double-checking translated Word documents. I had to look for English Word macro code that linked to glossary comments that were embedded inside of translated Word documents. So the document itself was in German but the RTF code was in English. The overall effect was quite confusing to try to read during an 8-hour-day since I don’t really read German. I also had to re-import all the screen shots so that the German-version screen shots were in place instead of the English-version screen shots. Then, after making sure the Word source file was “clean,” I had to export it to online help and check through all the online help. Messy, sticky, detail-oriented, confusing to “read,” and tedious.

While not quite up there with the dirtiness of say, french fry factory mechanic, there are dirty jobs in IT also, I believe. Mostly centered around disorganization, rather than actual filth. How about sorting through a mess of a database that you’ve inherited somehow? Or trying to get an acquired companies’ network working securely with yours? Or even crawling around your data center running network cable under the floor or above the ceiling tiles? Send ‘em in. I’d love to hear about dirty IT jobs.