I’ve worked in operational environments over the years as a systems administrator.  When I worked at IBM one of my responsibilities was ensuring uptime for the semiconductor design environment in Austin.  One of the most valuable lessons I learned there was about panic.

Downtime in that environment could cost millions (the rough planning figure I used was in the vicinity of a quarter of a million dollars an hour in lost productivity with the first 15 minutes of the outage losing between 4-24 hours of work.  Lots of money was on the line, and I had plenty of senior management at IBM regularly telling me how criticial it was.  I even got a phone call once from the VP in charge of the Server group to let me know how critical uptime was for a particular chip build.

Needless to say, in that environment it would be easy to panic.  Most times I didn’t because I had a strong team backing me.  The few times I did panic were very instructive.  Here are some of the lessons I learned:

1. Panic will not make the solution better.  It usually prevents the solution.
2. Panic will not get anything done any sooner.
3. Choices made while panicking will almost universally prove to be the wrong ones.
4. Panic immobilizes.
5. Panic equals FAIL.

Panic is what I see going on with the bailout.  We don’t know what to do, so we gotta do *something*.   And we do need to do something.  But does it need to be so panic driven?  What will change between today and tomorrow that will make such a huge difference?

Bold and decisive action does need to be taken, but it should also be deliberate action, not the panic driven need to do anything to show we are doing something.

Rudyard Kipling (under read in our politically correct society said this:

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you; If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too; . . . If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same . . . yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.

We forget this to our peril.

• Personal Finance Education at the Class Reunion I've returned from my 40th high school reunion weekend. I had a fabulous experience, nostalgic and otherwise. One of the advantages of attending a class reunion is that there is no benefit in  - and...
• Weekly Roundup: Tax Lessons Learned Last weekend I finally bit the bullet and paid taxes…twice. First I had to pay additional money for 2009 (more on this lesson learned later). Then I had to pay quarterly estimates on 2010 self...
• 4 Tips for Beginning Golfers If you’re just starting out in golf, or you have always wanted to know how to play, there are a few things that you will need to know before you get started. Golf is an...

Just as I am about to embark on learning OpenSer for work, the project forks.  What a pain.

Apparently, the mainline fork is now known as http://www.kamailio.org and the other fork seems to be just one of the founders at http://www.opensips.org.  I’ll probably stick with Kamailio for now.

• Increasing Your PageRank A few weeks ago I was pleasantly surprised to learn that my blog had reached a PageRank of 0 in less than 30 days since having created it. I blogged about some of the things...
• Off for the Day - Health Blogs That I Read Today is Saturday and I am taking the day off. No working out, not blogging. Just chilling, watching college football, and possibly playing some Monopoly. But before I do that I wanted to list some...
• Twitter Hashtag Introduction If you are looking to increase your awareness on Twitter, one of the best things that you can do is to explore the capabilities of Hashtags, which are capable of helping you to add significant...

I like the fact that it is very light, portable, and doesn’t connect to the internet.  It doesn’t have any distraction potential.  I can just write.  Plus, it will be hard to edit more than a sentence or two back, which should help keep me from letting the evil bastard who wants to keep me from writing internal editor out.

• Money Making eBook – How To Write Quality eBook For Money ? How to write money making ebook ? Yes, it is really possible that you could write an ebook and earn money from the work. You all know that ebook is an electronic form of real...
• Technology in and for the Instrumental Music Classroom   Music education, in some form, goes back as far as education itself. While sometimes struggling for legitimacy, it nonetheless has had its champions. More recently, as technology has flourished within education, technological applications designed...
• Tips To Help You Start Making Money On The Internet. Some time ago I found myself in troubles. I had a big problem – I didn't know how to make money on the Internet. I have never done this before and thus it appeared to...