Monthly Archives: August 2018

Locked Out

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As I’ve mentioned, not only am I fascinated by disasters and their root causes and how we react, I’m also fascinated by how we take steps to prevent them.  In my book IT Disaster Response: Lessons Learned in the Field I discuss the idea of blue-flagging on railroads.  The important concepts were two-fold: 1) a method of indicating that the train should not be moved and 2) controls on who could remove that indication.

During my recent power outage, I came across something similar.  It should be the featured image for this article.  It’s basically an orange flag locked to a utility pole.  Note the key word there, locked.

The photo doesn’t show the fact that this utility pole contained circuit breakers (I believe that’s the proper term in this context) for the overhead power lines. They had been tripped as a result of a tree further down the road taking out all three supply lines.

Close up of orange flag on utility pole, along with tag with lock-out information

Close-up with tag and flag.

So let’s analyze this a bit:

The orange flag itself was VERY visible. This ensures any other crews that might be in the area that there is something they need to notice.

There is a tag with detailed information. It’s hard to see in the above photo, but it includes who tagged it, the location, and date and some other information.

What’s not clear, is it’s padlocked to the pole.

Now, to be clear, this is NOT a physical lock-out like you see on some power panels (i.e. where the padlock physically prevents the circuit-breaker from being opened or closed).

In this case, a physical lock-out would most likely have to be placed 30′ in the air at the top of the pole where it wouldn’t be easily noticed.

But that said, this served its purpose. It alerted other crews to a danger in the area and presumably can only be removed by the person who put it there. And it contains information on that person so they can be reached if there are questions.

Since power was restored within 1 hour and I didn’t hear of any reports of line worker getting electrocuted, this appears to have worked.

Today’s take-away: when you have a change from the normal state of operation, what steps can you take to ensure that others don’t try to return items to a normal state of operations without confirming things first? By the way, for a good read-up on how bad things can go when intentions about a non-standard mode of operation don’t get properly communicated, I recommend reading up on the events leading up to the Chernobyl disaster.

Procedures are important. Deviating from them can have serious consequences. Do what you can to minimize the possibility of deviations.

 

Conspiracy Theories

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If I told you I thought the Earth was flat, you’d probably think I was off my rocker. What if I told you that we never landed on the Moon?  Probably a similar reaction.  What if I told you for decades the government ran a medical experiment on black men and denied them the proper treatment for their disease, a treatment that once discovered basically had a 100% success rate in curing the disease?  If you’ve correctly guessed that I’m referring to the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, you’d be right.  But what if I told you this in 1952? You’d probably think I was nuts.

And yet.. that was the truth. The US Government knowingly withheld proper treatment to see what would happen. And didn’t really tell anyone.

If you think about it, this has all the hallmarks of a typical conspiracy theory. And at the time, most likely it would have been dismissed as one.

Now, to be clear, I’m convinced that the Earth is roughly an oblate spheroid, that we did land on the Moon and that vaccines do not cause autism. I also believe that there are over 1 billion people living in China.

But the truth is… how does any of us really know any of that? At some point we have to make a decision to believe certain facts.  Yes, we can say, “but there’s overwhelming evidence” but even then, much of the evidence is something we end up having to place faith in.  Someone can show us the multitude of studies that show no correlation between vaccines and autism, but ultimately, we have to believe THOSE studies.

Some things we can verify for ourselves, or hopefully we can build enough of a logical framework that it makes sense to believe what we’re told. For example, a good question to ask about the Moon landings is, “if they were a hoax, why didn’t the Soviet Union expose it?” (And by the way, I did once get talking to a moon hoaxer who simply and calmly explained that in exchange for them not revealing it we agreed to lose Vietnam.)

But even then, logic may fail us or steer us in the wrong direction. For millennia geometry was based on Euclid’s original 5 axioms. Until someone tossed out the one on parallel lines and we suddenly had various forms of non-Euclidean geometry.

For millennia we believed that we had an absolute reference frame. Until Einstein (and others) tossed out that idea.

Ultimately, even with logic, we have to make some assumptions, and occasionally question them.

For example, you have to believe that I’m really Greg Moore and I’m writing this. Perhaps even that is a lie.

But it’s not. 🙂

So my takeway here is: don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but sometimes it’s worth questioning assumptions and sometimes some conspiracy theories MIGHT actually have a grain of truth to them. You decide.

 

 

Sharing and Building

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I’ve mentioned in the past that I think it’s important to share and give back knowledge.

This week’s blog post will be short (sorry, they can’t all be great works of art.) But first I want to mention an event that just happened. I’m the leader of the local SQL Server User Group: CASSUG. We had our monthly meeting last night and I was grateful that Hilary Cotter was willing and able to drive up from New Jersey to present on Service Broker.

When I arrange for speakers, I always hope my group gets something out of it. Well, last night we had a new member visiting from out of town. So, it’s probably rare he’ll make future meetings. And today, I read from him: “Hilary’s presentation was very informative and interesting. “ and “Now it has piqued my interest and I’ve started a Pluralsight course to learn more.”  To me, that’s success.

At our July meeting we had lightning rounds. Instead of a single presenter, we had four of our local members present on a topic of their choice for about 15 minutes each.  One of them, presented on using XML results in a SQL query to help build an HTML based email. He adopted the idea from I believe this blog post. Twice now in the last month I’ve used it to help clean up emails I had a system sending out. Yesterday, I finally decided to cleanup an old, ugly, hard to read text based email that showed the status of several scheduled jobs we were running overnight.  A few hours later, after some tweaking I now had a beautiful, easy to read email.  Excellent work and all based on an idea I never would have come up with it my colleague had not shared it from his source.

And that leads me to a bit of self-promotion. When I created this blog, my goal was not to have lots of posts around SQL Server. Several months ago, a mentor of mine (I don’t know if she considers herself that, but I do, since she’s the one that planted the seed in my head for my first book: IT Disaster Response: Lessons Learned in the Field) approached me at SQL Saturday Atlanta and mentioned she was now an editor for Red-Gate’s Simple-Talk blog section and asked me if I’d be interested in writing.  I was.

So I’m proud to say that the first of my blog at the Red-Gate Simple-Talk site is up. Go read it. I’m excited. As of today it’s had over 2000 views! Far more than I get here. And there’s more to come.

And here’s the kicker. Just today I had a client say, “Hey, I need to get this data from this SQL 2014 database to a SQL 2008 Database.”  I was able to say, “I’ve got JUST the answer for that!”

Sharing knowledge is a good thing. It makes us all far more capable and smarter.

 

Less than our Best

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I’ve mentioned in the past that I participate a lot in SQL Saturday events and also teach cave rescue. These are ways I try to give back to at least two communities I am a member of. I generally take this engagement very seriously; for two reasons.

The first, which is especially true when I teach cave rescue, is that I’m teaching critical skills that may or may not put a life on the line. I can’t go into teaching these activities without being prepared or someone may get injured or even killed.

The second is, that the audience deserves my best. In some cases, they’ve paid good money to attend events I’m talking or teaching at. In all cases, they’re taking some of their valuable time and giving it to me.

All the best SQL Saturday speakers and NCRC instructors I know feel generally the same about their presentations. They want to give their best.

But here’s the ugly truth: Sometimes we’re not on our A game. There could be a variety of reasons:

  • We might be jet-lagged
  • We may have partied a bit too much last night (though for me, this is not an issue, I was never much of a party animal, even when I was younger)
  • You might have lost your power and Internet the day before during the time you were going to practice and found yourself busy cutting up trees
  • A dozen other reasons

You’ll notice one of those became singular. Ayup, that was my excuse. At the SQL Saturday Albany event, due to unforeseen circumstances the day before, the time I had allocated to run through my presentation was spent removing trees from the road, clearing my phone line and trying to track down the cable company.

So, one of my presentations on Saturday was not up to the standard I would have liked it to be. And for that, to my audience, I apologize (and did so during the presentation).

But here’s the thing: the feedback I received was still all extremely positive. In fact the only really non-positive feedback was in fact very constructive criticism that would have been valid even had I been as prepared as I would have liked!

I guess the truth is, sometimes we hold ourselves to a higher standard than the audience does. And I think we should.

PS: a little teaser, if all goes as planned, tomorrow look for something new on Red-Gate’s Simple Talk page.