Derailment
A Train Of Thought That Jumped The Track

Recently I saw one of Shell's Real Energy TV ads. I have TiVo, so I'm used to zipping through ads, but this one caught my eye because it was a good bit longer than the usual ad. This spot featured a Shell engineer working in Southeast Asia, who was being interviewed by a local reporter about the work Shell is doing there. I won't go through the whole story, but to summarize, after the interview, the engineer is sitting in a restaurant with his teenage son, who is drinking a milkshake. The kid slurps the last bit from the glass and his dad says, "Do that again." He has a "eureka moment" which leads to a design for a flexible drill that can snake into otherwise unreachable places to extract oil.

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As any admin knows, OS upgrades can be painful. Despite the best intentions and efforts by the vendor, bad things happen. This is especially true with kernel upgrades. It's one thing to run a blanket "yum update" or "apt-get upgrade" on your average Linux desktop, but even the tamest patch can ascend to truly ulcer-inducing levels when it applies to a critical system that can ill afford any extended downtime.

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