A Drunk Sailor with a Bag of Money ...

...Still could not buy this product from HP.

I've just spent two hours navigating the organically-grown compost that passes for the HP.com website.  Have you been there?  Really?  I don't know for whom it was designed, but I promise you I should know how to find this thing.  No luck.

I've been on the site a few times, now, and every time it was a dismal, abject failure and waste of time.  I can't find a single thing on there, on a site which could be optimized for the customer and built perhaps with the goal of getting you the information you want quickly so you can just open your wallet and spend.  I actually texted my boss, tonight, as he was also looking for the same thing on the same site, and wrote "we need to go whitebox.  These guys look like BOZOs with a site like this."

Do this.  Pretend you have a big bag of money. Your job is to buy something specific from HP, and this time let's say it's an ILO2 Advanced License.  It's required if you wanted to use the iLO interface to reinstall your server remotely (incidentally, the totally free product that does the same thing on everything else is called IPMI).  It's going to cost you $400 for something that costs them a dime in after-development materials.  Do you think you can buy iLO2 in under an hour with absolute concentration and a big bag of money that they really want you to give them?  Don't be so cocky:  I went around and around for two hours.  We both gave up.

Your turn.  GO!

One Trait of the Noob Unix Admin -- snobbery

Paul Venezia squeezed this gem out on his Nine traits of the veteran Unix admin:

Veteran Unix admin trait No. 2: We use vi, not emacs, and definitely not pico or nano
While we know that emacs is near and dear to the hearts of many Unix admins, it really is the Unix equivalent of Microsoft Word. Vi -- and explicitly vim -- is the true tool for veteran Unix geeks who need to get things done and not muck about with the extraneous nonsense that comes with emacs.

and the best part:

Emacs has a built-in game of Tetris, for crying out loud.

.. and it's here that Paul suggests he has no clue but a good helping of editor bias.

Fucking LINUX has built-in games: does that make it unacceptable to Paul? Just because the options are there, doesn't mean one needs to use them or even install them, but I worry this indicates the idea of a modular suite of tools could be too new a concept.

No, he's just biased against emacs, which is normal. I used vi for a while, early on in my career, suffering with the archaic two-mode system that I still cannot fathom. I had no bias at that time, and as such didn't have the built-in snobbery that comes with using an obsolete tool that even its creator agrees is "built for a world that doesn't exist any more." Yes, and after giving emacs the same amount of unbiased time I gave to learning vi, I never went back. I assessed the two without bias, and I made a choice.
I'd challenge Paul to do the same.

I've listened to the ranting of the vi bigots for a generation, and I've worry how similar this new crop sounds to the old. I like Paul, and I agree with him on many topics, and I enjoy reading most of what he writes. Occasionally, though, when he displays an error as fundamental as this one, I wonder at the thought processes.

But, he's only been doing the sysadmin for just over a decade, so he's still almost new.