Cage Data offices will be closed from December 23rd- January 1st, but don’t worry; our on-call line is always available for your technology emergencies. Just give us a call at (203) 774-0294 and listen to the prompt for assistance.

Merry Christmas. This greeting has struck fear and elation in the hearts of mankind for years. Usually you’re on one side of the poles: you love it or you hate it. I am not sure I have met anyone who is in the middle. No one’s ever looked me in the eye and said, “Christmas, yah it’s ok. Kind o’ like the peppermint but that eggnog stuff, not really a fan.” No, it’s one of the two extremes.

A family friend starts the Christmas countdown on December 26th. It’s a bit extreme and I must admit, I find it a bit annoying to see Christmas social media posts in July.  It’s over the top. The Christmas in July movie celebration on some cable stations I can do without. The good thing, I realize I can change the channel. Yay for me!

There are others who just hate Christmas. They are like the Grinch (from the live-action movie starring Jim Carey):

Narrator: So whatever the reason, his heart or his shoes, he stood outside his cave, hating the Whos.
The Grinch: [opens phone book] Alphabetically!
[looks into book] Aadvarkian Abakeneezer Who, I…
[yelling] HATE YOU!
[looks into book again]
Aaron B. Benson Who, I hate *you*.
[looking into book]
Hate, hate, hate. Hate, hate, hate. Double hate. LOATHE ENTIRELY!

I admit this might be an extreme for those who “don’t like Christmas” but it illustrates my point. I’m not sure why some have such a reaction to the holiday. I understand the revulsion to the commercialism, (see my post from last year), and I understand all of the issues with family that’s cause pain and trauma in a lifetime where we would want to just take the holiday and toss it out the window.

Whether you hate it or absolutely love it, you have to admit this time of year has a great influence on our lives. And if you’re on the end of hating, I feel for you. There is no escaping, there really isn’t any place you can go to escape, Christmas.

I guess that’s my point in all of this: it doesn’t matter who you are, or where you’re from, Christmas is going to influence your life one way or another. My hope for you this year is you allow the joy of Christmas to sit with you, to touch your life and influence how you interact with the world. Hopefully, you can take a moment and reflect on the moral of the story of the Grinch: that Christmas will come. It will “come without ribbons. It will come without tags. It comes without packages, boxes or bags… Maybe Christmas doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas…means a little bit more.”

This is my wish for you this Christmas, that you might exclaim, like the Grinch, “Help Me… I’m feeling.”, that you will find joy this Christmas, and that your heart may grow three sizes that day! Merry Christmas!

This is the fourth part in a series on shifting our thoughts about Monitoring. All of this came from a talk I gave at GalaxZ’17 in Austin, TX earlier this year. You can find part one, “Ein Minuten Bitte”, part 2, “Empathetic Monitoring”, and part 3, “New Partners” from their respective links. But if you’re ready to read on, we’ll talk about…

Reformation

That’s a heavy word. But I want to be clear about how much work goes into this process. There’s risk involved here, too. Change, being introduced the wrong way, can cause schism instead of reform. You’ll notice in the 16th century the Protestant Reformation didn’t create a new and improved Roman Catholic Church, but rather a whole assortment of new Protestant sects from Lutheran to Baptist to Pentecostal.

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This is part three in a series about monitoring all coming from a talk that I gave in Austin, TX at GalaxZ’17. In part one I introduced the problem and in part two I discussed how we should start to change. Today we’re looking at who, in our organization are our…

New Partners

Hopefully at this point you’re on board with me. And maybe you’re thinking “Sure, sounds good, but where do I start? Who do I even talk to?” And that’s an awesome place to be, you’re eager to move forward and that energy is going to be needed for really encouraging organizational change.

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You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

– Rahm Emmanuel

When I first heard this quote years ago, I was appalled, how can a public figure use a tragedy to forward their private or personal agenda. He was specifically referring to the energy crisis of the 1970 to move the country forward to a better energy policy, this never happened and the opportunity was wasted. But I’m not using this to talk about politics.

If you work in technology, it’s not if a crisis will happen, but rather, when. As a technologist I constantly have to deal with crisis. It can be as small as an employee not being able to print or as big as an entire enterprise infrastructure going down. Can you say firefight? We learn to live in chaos, controlled chaos but chaos none the less. This chaos becomes a normal part of life.

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I started out in the technology business years ago, too many in fact. I have to admit for transparency, I am not one of the original tech gurus who wrote code and stored it on keypunch cards. No, the first code I wrote was in high school; I stored it on paper teletype tape back in the late 1970s. Yes, I just dated myself, it’s ok, like fine wine, I feel like I’m getting better with age… or like cheese I am just starting to stink.

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I started writing this post thinking about using the term “critical mass” and I thought to myself, those word you are using are you sure they mean what you think they mean? (kudos to Inigo Montoya) So I looked it up. Critical Mass is the amount of fissionable material needed to maintain a nuclear chain reaction. And yes we have come to use it in the business community in regard to the amount of effort needed to sustain a venture.

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It hasn’t been too long since Cage Data made an announcement like this, but here we are again. As we continue to grow, we want to make sure we’re continuing to offer the best possible customer support. After some conversations with our team we determined that our biggest need was some frontline customer champions to answer your calls and requests when the rest of us are knee-deep in technical problems.

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