I recently read the original 1972 edition of Mark Green’s ground-breaking book Who Runs Congress? and though more than 50 years have passed, Congress is just as broken today as it was then. One continuing reason? Tenure and the direct link between seniority and power. In most workplaces, employees hope the best rise to the… Read More »
The tremendous growth of commercial and residential development over the last 10 years in the Town of Matthews has led many to express dismay about any proposed high-density projects, but a closer look at the town’s long-term planning goals provides a much clearer picture of what the town envisions for the future and how state… Read More »
When it comes to choosing candidates in local elections, I always think, “Is this someone who, when in office, would do what my neighbors and I would do?” I don’t have a litmus test or expect complete agreement, but I do expect to be thoughtfully represented and properly informed. That means I look for candidates… Read More »
The estimated 7 million people who turned out for the October 2025 “No Kings” protests in 2,700 communities across the United States added up to a record crowd seeking to protest the actions of a sitting president. It points to a lot of discontent and motivation by citizens frustrated with the state of national politics,… Read More »
My cat Tucker is a somewhat predictable animal who likes to curl up in predictable spots around the house, so he’s the perfect subject for surreptitious video surveillance and just the sort of motivating force I needed to rework a Raspberry Pi project I’d been putting off for some time. [Read more]
I’ve always been a bit hesitant to add cellular networking to my IoT projects because I figured the cost of bandwidth and the hardware requirements were more trouble than they were worth. But after some experimentation, I got over my fears and found cellular wasn’t nearly as expensive or as complicated as I thought. [Read… Read More »
One of the things I like best about running a Linux desktop is the bash shell, which is great for connecting to other boxes, editing files, running Docker containers — you name it. So, when Microsoft introduced the bash shell for Windows 10, I was skeptical. After all, I’ve used cmd.exe for years and it’s… Read More »
Take a look at some practices that can help you get a running start with your Chef automation and the principle of Policy as Code. This post is designed to be beginner-friendly. You don’t need any coding experience to follow along — just an interest in automation, and curiosity about how best to implement it… Read More »
For anyone working in a traditional sysadmin role, automation — and a larger DevOps conversation — can be disconcerting. Modern automation means “code” and some sysadmins insist coding is outside their job descriptions. In fact, when I was an IT director, I had a sysadmin tell me, “We don’t code.” He was content with maintaining… Read More »