After 2 1/2 years of abusive driving I've already put 53,000 miles to my poor car: 2002 BMW 325i. It's not the long distance driving that resulted in this ultra high-mileage, but it was the extensive driving between Sun offices and clients in the greater Los Angeles area. (Ok... fine.. from LA to San Diego too) I gotta admit that the handling of a BMW's is remarkable, no wonder it's marketed as the Ultimate Driving machine - there is no doubt to that. On the other hand, this car is costly! (well.. at least to me) My monthly payments, car insurance, break/fix cost (since the warranty has just expired), and the ever climbing of the gasoline price all adds up! Farewell, my dear (poor) BMW. If anyone knows, please let me know which car has the handling as good as BMW's.. because after being spoiled by my bmw, all other cars are like toys to me! :-(

I was on the phone today with a friend of mine who has been a sys admin for about 6 years. Perhaps it's a boring job for him since he has started complaining on just about everything he encounters at work lately. "Is it the people, the env, or just wanting to see a change?" I asked. (having to know him for quite a while I was patiently listening ... well.. sort of) "Well... I've lost my faith and pride for being a sys admin, afterall, the "O-mighty-glory days" is long gone." After x amount of minutes in digging to find out the root-cause of his aggravation, I realized he is not being "valued" to keep the systems up. Instead, he is viewed "valuable" only when he has fixed a major problem in an outage. (so he said..) Perhaps it's the culture of the company's "preserved" since the Internet boom eras; (which I've experienced before) however, I've seen others' with a totally different view. "How about looking over the Preventive tools that my company offers? Perhaps you can better your situation by presenting the data to your managements on how performing proactive work can help bring the uptime of your systems' up?" There are tools like NetConnect, Configuration Services Tracker, Patch Manager, Explorer, and etc to assist in keeping the systems' availability accounted for and much more! Better yet, there are "GRAPHS" and data to prove your point! (those are the favorites among the managements) The great tools are out there and I was glad to help my poor friend out with virutually doing nothing. :-) At times I wonder how soon the companies out there will change from being "reactive" to "proactive". Is it an unchangeable trend that people are used to? Is it the culture? I really wonder...