Category: Opinion
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Prioritizing value
It is one of my strongly held beliefs that what we do must provide some customer value. If it doesn’t, we probably shouldn’t be doing it. I don’t mean that we necessarily do something we can charge for (the goodwill we get by NOT charging for it can be benefit enough to do it), but…
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Review: YubiKey 5 NFC
October is the national cyber security awareness month, where a lot of people emphasise the importance of InfoSec to daily operations. Here’s my small contribution; a review of my Yubico YubiKey 5 NFC U2F token. It’s a mouthful, to be sure, but let’s get into it: I’ve used password managers for years, and I’ve been…
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Payment and product
I have previously written about the adage “if you’re not paying for it, you are the product”, and struggled with how it applies to myself and this blog. To be sure, there are – at the very least – exceptions to this rule, that go both ways. The exception to who or what the product…
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Version control and me
In 2000, I spent a year abroad. At the time, desktop computers were the norm, and laptops were prohibitively expensive. USB flash drives had literally JUST hit the market, and the cloud was barely something industry insiders talked about. I produced huge amounts of text on computers, however, and the way I transferred it was…
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The ticket cost funnel
A common misconception among end users is that we (i.e. the IT department) charge them per ticket. While I don’t know where that misconception comes from, let me say right out that my experience of more than twenty years in the industry is that this simply is not true. While it is true that support…
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Reviewed: Stray
The most talked-about game release of the summer has been the post-apocalyptic cat-simulator Stray. Seeing all of the chatter about it, not to mention all of the videos of cats watching their slaves play the game, I felt like I couldn’t not pick it up. Here are my thoughts: Game: Stray Publisher: Annapurna Interactive Platform:…
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Weaponizing legal activities
This isn’t the post I was planning on writing this week, but it’s the one you’re getting. In light of the many, many news cycles this past week which have been taken up by the videos of Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin dancing at a party, I’ve decided to comment on the scandal – or…
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State of the Blog 2022
True to tradition, I’m writing a summer retrospective post. Meant to be the summer counterpart to my end-of-year roundup series, some information will naturally be duplicated across the two series of posts. After more than two years of varying measures to combat coronavirus, all measures were lifted in Norway a few months ago now, and life is…
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On Pride
Update, July 2022:As you may know, Oslo Pride was largely cancelled this year due to a terror attack that was in all likelihood directed at the LGBTQIA+ community. The official parade was cancelled on the advice of the police, as was the memorial that was scheduled to happen two days later. Like so many others,…
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Your lack of planning…
…is not my emergency. A while back, a customer contacted us, saying that they either needed to have a particular piece of software* installed, or that a change* needed to be performed on one of the servers which we operate for them. The former was very much not an option, as said software was not…
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Do not let perfection…
…become the enemy of good. A lot of what I do involve working with text, either on my own or with others. Moving a comma here, changing a word there, and completely changing the sentence structure over in this other section. At some point, you have to go from “doing” to “done”. Whether that’s because…