Change Advisory Board

Tag: IT operations

  • The Temple and the Error Budget

    The Temple and the Error Budget

    What happens when you put Solomon’s Temple next to a modern error budget and ask them both what “perfection” really means? In this episode, we explore the idea that reliable service is not just a technical outcome but a moral consequence — the visible result of character, duty, and brotherly love expressed through IT work.

    Drawing on Freemasonry, Stoic philosophy, and the writings of Marcus Aurelius, we unpack what it means to work logarithmically toward an ideal you will never fully reach. We contrast the Masonic Temple and its working tools with SRE and ITIL principles: why 100% uptime is the wrong target, how continual improvement mirrors lifelong moral refinement, and how duty becomes the backbone of both spiritual life and professional reliability.

    Then we zoom in on the real builders of today’s “Temple”: the backup and recovery specialist guarding the sacred data; the infrastructure engineer hewing and setting the foundation; the Citrix/WebSphere/DB2 specialist adorning the inward workings; the mainframe programmer quietly automating away chaos; and the mainframe operator keeping vigil in the sanctum of production. By the end, your ticket queue, your runbooks, and your change windows look less like random toil and more like stonework on a shared, enduring structure.

    Source #1: ITILv4 Foundation

    Source #2: The Meditations by Marcus Aurellius

  • The Architecture of Eternity

    The Architecture of Eternity

    Freemasonry’s Moral OS and the Birth of Human Reliability

    This episode of The Cab Call traces the long arc of Masonic history as if it were the version-history of humanity’s oldest moral operating system. Instead of treating the Craft as a museum of rituals, we explore it as a living reliability framework—prophecy, practice, and interpretation—evolving over thousands of years to keep human beings resilient in a world full of entropy.

    We move from the prophetic era, where symbols like the Cube and Square encoded universal laws of stability, through the great operative builders who carried those laws through collapsing empires and dark ages. The Comacine Masters, the Roman Collegia, the cathedral architects—all appear not as quaint historical footnotes but as early maintainers of an ethical architecture designed to produce both strong buildings and strong men.

    The episode follows the rise of Speculative Masonry, when the craft stopped building cathedrals and began building character instead, and culminates with the 1717 Grand Lodge—the moment Masonry became a universal, non-sectarian system for producing “Good men and True.” Across the entire journey, we frame the fraternity as a blueprint for human reliability engineering: an attempt to harmonize fallible people with immutable moral laws the same way an engineer harmonizes fallible systems with physical ones.

    It’s an episode about continuity across collapse, symbols that outlast empires, and why an ancient institution built for stoneworkers still feels modern in an era of distributed systems and digital drift.

    Source #1: The Builders. A Story and Study of Masonry by Joseph Fort Newton, Litt. D.