It's always hard to write these posts - that is, a holiday post should be a "gimmie" - you mention how much you like the holiday, and you find some lame way to tie it into network engineering or network monitoring, and you have a post and can spend the rest of your day doing whatever else needs to be done.

But I realized that the only thing I could really tie into St. Pat's Day was a lame comparison that St. Patrick drove all the snakes out of Ireland, and NetQoS Anomaly Detector helps you drive worms from your network. In my notes, I got as far as pointing out that St. Patrick also drove out the entire fossil record which would have shown that there were once snakes in Ireland, but, by way of contrast, NetQoS Anomaly Detector keeps detailed logs.

My mother is Irish, by the way, and going further down this line of comparing Ireland's patron saint to a piece of enterprise network monitoring software - well, it's just not a road I want to go further down if I ever want to be invited back to Thanksgiving dinner.

So, St. Patrick's Day then. Well, not anything really interesting except that today is not St. Patrick's day. Technically, we missed it, on March 15th. The Catholic Church moved it back two days this year because it fell on Holy Week.

That probably won't stop people from heading out to their local bars and drinking green beer tonight, and I urge everyone who does to get designated drivers. (Or, if you're lame like me, and don't like the taste of beer, green or otherwise, nor the company of inebriated peers, don't hog the last copies of "Waking Ned Devine" or "The Quiet Man" at the video store if you've already seen it.)

Just be careful, stay safe, and remember that ideas formed while drunk may, indeed, be brilliant, but they can be acted upon once sobriety takes hold again.