We have been working on Service Level Objectives (SLO) at my work. It isn’t easy. We get into a lot of discussions (arguments?) about why an SLO is not a contractural Service Level Agreement (SLA). Some want to instrument every piece of service functionality and have a big bag of SLI parts to pick from instead of identifying groups of components that can be represented as a binary value of “User is Happy. User is NOT happy.”

After I completed my undergraduate music degree at Virginia Tech, I stayed in Blacksburg for another year because I had no idea what to do with my life. Coming off running the VT Music department’s gopher and www site on a Mac LC running MacBSD (I used to praise us for being one of the first music departments on the internet in like 1992), I had a mind to be what we called back then a “webmaster”. But really I wanted to design and build and teach using multimedia music…

When I took the SAT in high school, I didn’t study. In the past I’ve told people about it, claiming it was the fault of the standardized testing regime and my not studying was a form of protest. In a lot of ways, the SAT shouldn’t be studied for… the middle word is “Aptitude”. Presumably the SAT measured what you’ve learned in school. I argued that if that were the case, I should take it without studying.