I thought I’d recycle this old piece that I wrote for Swynk around ten years ago – with a few updates and additions to bring it into the 21st century.
This month brings another traditional holiday celebration, and with it another opportunity for IT pros to ask in puzzlement: "what’s a holiday?" Sure, we’re vaguely aware that most of our friends and family members who chose different careers have days on which they actually don’t work – a concept we find intriguing, if a little frightening.
Some of us (this does not include Norm the Neonatal Nerd in the next cubicle, who has "Born to Network" tattooed across his left hand) even have childhood memories of engaging in celebratory activities involving egg-laying rabbits, turkey and dressing dinners, and fat men with white beards wearing red suits. These activities were performed manually, without a shred of electronic data passing across a cable or circuit board.
Most of us, though, have repressed those memories and can’t imagine doing something that has nothing to do with bits and bytes — and calling it fun. However, since all those around us are going to be dressing up in strange clothing and gorging on candy all evening a few weeks from now (something we do every day), it seems only fair that we come up with a way for high-tech workers to have a happy Halloween, without giving up our gadgets and gizmos. Thus, we offer here a few suggestions for celebrating:
1. Get a copy of Ghost. No, no, not the movie – the venerable Symantec software package. Create clones of all your Windows machines. Imagine these clones taking over the computer world, replacing the DNA of perfectly good UNIX computers and evil Macs with their own. Even destroying their own ancestors, wiping out all remaining NT workstations and Windows 2000 computers. Slaughtering millions of XP machines and devouring the Vista operating system that spawned them.
2. Pre-order a copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. You know you want to. Seven might be determined to make you part of the Collective, but who can deny that it’s mightily attractive? Just look at that beautiful interface and those Borg implants. Just don’t look at the price tag – that might be scary.
3. Having hardware hassles lately? Soundcard suddenly stopped working? Getting memory errors? Intermittent problems with your USB devices? It might be evil spirits at work. But if you’re really, really brave, on October 31, at the stroke of midnight, open up the case and venture into the frightening tangle of wires and jutting circuit boards inside, in search of the dreaded Socket Creep. Sometimes add-on cards will slowly rise out of their slots just like the undead rising from the grave. Don’t be afraid to take action. Slam them back into the holes where they belong. You’ll be glad you did.
4. Find some thick coax cable and make a vampire tap into it. Enjoy the thrill of that first byte. And if you have any idea what I’m talking about, cringe when you realize that means you’re about as old as one of the undead.
5. Go phishing. Who knows what you might catch: celebrities’ passwords, Congressmen’s credit card numbers, the mothers’ maiden names of thousands of ordinary people. You might even get arrested and thrown in jail – another fashionable Halloween tradition.
6. Just stay home and watch the SQL. Bad Halloween movies are always worse the second time around and this is no exception. See an innocent child table get run over by a database engine, because of a corrupt driver who failed to merge (because he was distracted from fantasizing about an OLAP dance and hoping to have a one-to-many relationship).
7. Lock your doors and Windows, and if you must go out, be on the lookout for the Bare Metal Hypervisor. It’s big and bad and it’s planning to take over your network and turn all your operating systems into virtual machines that do its bidding. If you find yourself unable to function from the fear, practicing Xen probably won’t help.
8. Visit an Apple store. Watch all the Pod people wandering about, eyes glazed over, wires dangling from their ears, unable to communicate and oblivious to their surroundings. Hear them chant their mantra: “There’s an app for that.” Watch them mindlessly shell out big bucks for under-powered anorexic laptop computers that look so fragile a strong wind might break them in half. Warning: Don’t feed or try to pet the Leopards and Tigers (and watch out for the Cougars if you happen to look like the “I’m a Mac” guy).
9. Dig up an old copy of SATAN. Sure, it’s ancient technology but hey, the life of a network administrator is already hell anyway, so what do you have to lose? The System Administrator Tool for Analyzing Networks (http://www.porcupine.org/satan/) may have been superseded by newer, cooler and even scarier security tools, but none of them give you quite that same thrill of living dangerously (although I know people who might argue that using security products from certain vendors does involve selling your soul to the devil).
And the number one way for IT professionals to celebrate Halloween:
10. Turn green. Everyone will applaud you for being in step with the latest environmental mandates, and no one will know the real reason for your sickly pallor is that you overindulged in too many (software) suites.
