Tag Archives: library

Amazon should not be the library

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Edit (7/24/2018): Quartz reports that Forbes has pulled the article.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Forbes ran an article suggesting Amazon should replace the public library as a way to save taxpayer money. This is a bad take from anyone, but particularly from the Chair of the Economics Department at LIU Post. Apparently the good professor does not realize that Amazon exists to make money, so there’s a good chance that savings would be funded in part by a loss of service and local accountability.

Or maybe he doesn’t realize poor people exist. Or even that the well off sometimes like to have public spaces where they are allowed to exist without having to buy something. When I was a kid our house wasn’t air conditioned. On hot summer days, my mom would take us to the county library. We could sit and read in comfort for a few hours and no one cared.

I’d check out a dozen or more books. A few weeks later, I’d bring them back and get abkther armful. Imagine how much my parents would have had to spend on Amazon. And libraries don’t just provide books. Ours had music and movies and paintings available for checkout. It had genealogy records and newspapers. It had meeting spaces and community programs. If the Internet had been widespread then, it would have had that, too.

My current local library has digital subscriptions in both text and audio format. It has state park passes available for checkout. It has a mobile library to visit the elderly, infirm, and others who can’t make it to one of the three branches in the county. If there was profit to be made in doing all of this on a broad scale, Jeff Bezos would be doing it already.

A library is more than just the books. It’s a part of the community. Removing it from the commons in favor of a private corporation is a terrible idea. My friend Doug explained it well a year ago.

Everyone, just by the act of existing, gets aceess to this valuable resource at the cost of a fraction of a percent of the assessed value of local property. A few years ago, I looked at the detail of my property tax bill and realized I was getting way more value out of my library than I paid for. So I started donating to the library foundation. If Professor Mourdourkoutas can’t get more value from his library than he puts in, that’s on him.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life

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The title is a quote from Joseph Addison, according to the good folks at the Richmond Public Schools.  Addison was a 17th and 18th century poet, but were he around today, he might have said it is a basic tool in being a good sysadmin.  If you don’t spend a good portion of your work week reading, you’re either doing it wrong or you’re overworked.  So what should you read?  Why, a little bit of everything, of course.

Each morning, I read through my log reports.  I get a lot of important information from a LogWatch report generated by my central log server.  I can see who logged in from where, and where failed logins (read: SSH attacks) came from.  A list of packages that got updated is given, as well as miscellaneous messages that I might want to know about.  Of course, I could look at the report for each individual host, but a centralized server makes life much easier.

Keeping up on the news is important, too.  Technology news is important too, but general news of the world.  Why?  Well, because I like to know what’s going on.  I guess you could do without it, but why?  Fark.com, Slashdot, and Reddit are all good places to get both nerdy and non-nerdy information, as well as discussion by people who (sometimes!) can bring more information to the table than the article itself will provide.

Since this is a blog, I am morally required to mention that blogs are absolutely necessary for sysadmins.  There’s probably a blog or several from the vendor of your OS of choice, as well as your critical applications. Plenty of other sites have blogs, too, but what may be the most interesting are the personal blogs of your peers.  When you’re a new sysadmin, you probably don’t know much outside of your own environment.  Reading what others are doing is a quick and easy way to help expand your horizons.  I have to mention specifically Matt Simmons’ Standalone Sysadmin blog.  I found it by accident a few weeks ago, and have since become an avid reader.  Having worked in academia all of my professional life, I often don’t see things from the perspective of someone working in the private sector.

There’s another source of information that can be very helpful.  There’s probably a building in your county that your taxes fund and it’s full of dead trees.  That’s right: your public library.  I’ve been visiting the library fairly regularly to check out books for recreational reading.  Today I had a sudden revelation: the library has technical books, too!  So I’ve decided to check out a technical book when I visit.  I’d like to read at least two per month, in order to expand and deepen my knowledge.

So what’s the point of all this?  READ!