About

the name

Admittedly the spelling I chose is arcane, but copacetic (/koh-puh-set-ik/) in common vernacular means “All is well”.  The first time I remember hearing it was from Larry, a fellow Tennessean, while I was in college.  Larry was a practical middle aged man.  He believed that fictional books were a waste of time and claimed to have only read one fictional book in his life.  He did, however, read every get rich quick, short cut to wealth, and how to avoid working and paying taxes book that he came across.  He only really ever learned how to avoid work, but to him nonfictional books had a practical purpose that he just couldn’t find in fictional works.

One day out of seemingly nowhere I heard Larry say  “Everything is copacetic.” when asked how he was doing.  It sounded out of place to me.  Larry’s limited reading had left him with a limited vocabulary, but he used the word with such confidence and elocution that I assumed it was a word that he somehow picked up from one of his self help books and made his own.

Over the years, I would occasionally hear the word used in a similar context.  Always thinking how odd that a word that seemed so academic had become so common, but for some reason I never thought to look it up.  I just assumed that it was some kind of linguistic anomaly like an inverse “irregardless”.  Irregardless despite its meaninglessness has made its way into formal language.  I just thought, “hey, who doesn’t need a more formal way of saying ‘Everything is OK’”.

While brainstorming for a domain name, I finally looked up copasetic on the interwebs.  Its etymology is much more American 20th century melting pot than stuffy, arcane and academic.  In fact, the word turns up in transcripts from Apollo missions.  Copasetic had been to the moon!

the blog

The blog is going to probably be 75% information technology related.  I plan to focus on people and tools that are doing things well.  Whether it be a new way to manage systems in an efficient secure automated way or the new social contracts and complex relationships that are developing between consumers, businesses, and the technologies we share.  I want to talk about what is new, where we can go, and what is awesome right now.  Evangelism yes, but a practical evangelism.

sailing rocks

A reoccurring theme of this blog will be tools and approaches to automated system management. I thought the image of the Racetrack Playa rocks making tracks across the desert was somehow appropriate. Mostly I just like unsolved problems, but feel free to invent your own analogies.

me

Over the past 10 years I have worked as a Unix Systems Administrator at startups, medium sized businesses, and large corporations spending most of my time focusing on methods to make the computers do the work so I can spend more time outside on my bike.  I am currently working at Reductive Labs.  We develop and implement sharable systems automation tools and fund the development of Puppet, an open source configuration management language.

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