Hi. I’m Bob Plankers, and this is my new blog, Plank You Very Much. Take that however you want. My wife and daughter rolled their eyes but my son thought it was funny. I started blogging in 2005, over on The Lone Sysadmin. I was angry, and stunk at writing, and all this newfangled virtualization stuff was going on. Nowadays the kids call it “learning in the open” but back then it didn’t have a label. It was just “blogging.”
It’s really hard to believe it’s almost 20 years later. Time flies when you’re having fun. Or having something. Kids, mostly, nowadays.
I was burned out on blogging, and writing in general, when I joined VMware in December of 2018. My old blog fell completely to the wayside as I poured most of my willingness to write into VMware blogs, presentations and talks, conferences, videos, and more. My hobby had become work.
My last interesting post there was in March of 2019. I wrote it on a plane somewhere over Colorado. It made Hacker News, and was mocked by some toxic Chicago infosec clowns. People who I found later were putting my ideas from that post in their presentations, I might add. I hope I meet them someday.
That was the final nail in the coffin for my own blogging. I was just… done. Lately, though, I’ve been missing my own voice. Plus something needed to be done with the old site, and with the transition of VMware to Broadcom I want to make sure that some things don’t get lost.
So here we are. Starting anew. And it’s interesting — a lot of the cool stuff from back in the day is gone. One thing I really miss is del.icio.us, for example. Being able to save and post links to other stuff was great. It’s all walled gardens and protectionist now, partly because of the abusers out there, other bloggers who steal content, to AIs and LLMs that steal content, too. However, it’s not all bad. I did initially hate the new Gutenberg editor in WordPress, but I got over it, and kinda even like it now (the trick, as I see it, is to remember to use the Document Overview). It’s also an excuse to use AI to illustrate the posts, as seen below. I have spent many hours with Midjourney, mostly trying to get it to replicate some of my favorite artists’ styles with topics they never even dreamed of. Georges Seurat, for example, painting about information security.
At any rate, Plank you very much for sticking with me all this time. 🙂
Posted in “Blog Administration” and “Storytime with Bob” — you might be interested in other posts in those categories.
