Monday, March 29, 2010

Iris' first rule of Unix Sys Admin

Send the client out of the room so they don't know how easy it is.

Backstory:
In my never-ending quest to offload household duties, I am teaching Iris some basic sys admin (computer system administration) skills in the hope that she will take over the routine stuff for me.  I told her how much she could charge clients hourly for that kind of work and she was all ears.

She already has grandiose plans to start a computer sys admin co-op (like a babysitters' club, only higher-paying) with two other girls in her school.  For some reason, she thinks she should be the boss.  The other girls may have different ideas.

Is anyone interested in reading the kind of things that I am teaching her?  It applies mostly to Mac OS X and Unix.  We are also doing some things in Mathematica, csh/tcsh and perl.

I imagine the other two girls' moms can teach them more.  After all, they actually hold degrees in EE and/or CS.  One has a PhD in EE and founded her own start-up (with employees and patent applications).  I've met so many parents at her school who have start-ups in their garages.  No wonder there is a shortage of street parking in our neighborhood.

5 comments:

  1. Marie-Christine00:23

    Oh, how cute! I'd love to hire a girl's sysad coop to do my routine tasks :-). Now that's being a good mom..

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  2. Wow - get them started young! Good work!

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  3. Yes, tell me more! These are the types of chores that I think my 7 year old would love.

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  4. Yes, please post what you're teaching them!
    I might learn something, and in any event I'm kind of curious how it goes.

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  5. Have you told her about the hours yet?

    I dated a sys admin once, and that stupid pager (showing my age, yes, it was a pager not a blackberry) would go off at all hours.

    Now that I manage a sys admin at work, I'm constantly trying to think of rewards to make up for the odd hours he ends up having to work.

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