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 rather that we inspect what we do to identify whether or not the customer benefits from it. Here are some examples:
(more…)Category: Opinion
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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:
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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.
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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 using 3.5″ 1.44 MB floppy drives. Microsoft hadn’t even started talking about version control features in the Office suite yet, but I had to keep track of what file to hand in to my tutor. In lieu of actual version control came increasingly impossible to deal with naming conventions such as this:
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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.
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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:
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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 rather scandals – here. There is, indeed, scandalous behavior being displayed, although it is not on the part of PM Marin or anyone else in the videos.
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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.
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On Pride
Update, July 2022:
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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, I attended both impromptu events, and it was a powerful experience that I will not soon forget. -
Your lack of planning…
…is not my emergency.
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Do not let perfection…
…become the enemy of good.
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