Change Advisory Board
In IT, every change needs approval — but who approves the changes in us? Change Advisory Board is a fully AI-generated podcast created by Nicholas King of Columbia Cloudworks, where synthetic hosts discuss the human side of system administration. Through perfectly balanced, machine-moderated dialogue, they explore the chaos of enterprise change management, the art of serving impossible customers, and the quiet philosophy behind keeping the lights on. It’s the meeting after the meeting — where ideas get approved, rolled back, or escalated to production.
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The Gavel, the Gauge, and the Broken Foundation
01/24/2026
The Gavel, the Gauge, and the Broken Foundation
This episode confronts one of the most difficult crises a person can face: the collapse of life under addiction—and the parallel responsibility of a fraternity committed to lifting a worthy brother in distress. Through a dual lens of Alcoholics Anonymous and Freemasonry, we explore addiction not as a moral failure but as a physical abnormality paired with a devastating mental distortion: the loss of perspective that allows a person to take the first drink despite knowing the consequences. We trace the progression from physical compulsion to shattered resolve, isolation, self-deception, and the spiritual walls that keep so many trapped. Then we walk through the architecture of recovery: surrender, moral inventory, confession, character repair, and sustained service. Each phase of the Twelve Steps is examined as a disciplined reconstruction of a man’s inner foundation. From there, we map these principles directly onto the Craft’s moral blueprint. The common gavel becomes the tool of inventory. The 24-inch gauge becomes the mandate for service. The Lewis symbolizes the fraternity’s duty to bear the burden of a fallen brother. The immovable jewels provide the moral geometry for rebuilding a life upright. The result is a unified framework: the spiritual labor of recovery reinforced by the symbolic architecture of Freemasonry. Both insist that the highest attainment comes through humility, self-examination, and service. And both reveal that profound suffering, when met with discipline and fellowship, can become the accelerated path toward becoming a true operative builder. Source #01: Source #02: by Joseph Fort Newton, Litt. D. Source #03: Source #04: by Source #05:
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Stone, Soul, and Software
01/17/2026
Stone, Soul, and Software
The philosophical principles underlying human conduct and ancient wisdom traditions establish a framework for understanding order and morality. Marcus Aurelius emphasized that the body is perishable, merely a "little flesh and breath" or a "network, a contexture of nerves, veins, and arteries", while the rational soul should seek to know itself and choose its own nature. The end for rational animals is to follow reason, be content with destiny, and understand that the Universe is transformation. This pursuit of wisdom is paralleled in Freemasonry, which holds that all elevating and benign religions share fundamental truths. Masonry, founded on Geometry, or the fifth science, utilizes symbols like the Rough Ashlar, representing the unpolished mind awaiting cultivation through liberal education, and the pillars Boaz and Jachin, which denote strength and stability. Ancient texts, particularly the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible, have shaped modern language and literature. The KJV has contributed more to English than perhaps any other literary source, providing phrases like "The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak" (Matthew 26:41) and introducing words like helpmate, derived from "help meet for him" in Genesis. Its influence is evident across English literature in works by Shakespeare, John Milton (Paradise Lost), Herman Melville (Moby-Dick), and C.S. Lewis. The original KJV included the Old Testament, New Testament, and the Apocrypha, though the Apocrypha was later removed in the 1800s by scholars concerned about contradictions and whether the books were divinely inspired. The KJV is textually connected to the Textus Receptus, and resources like the King James Bible Dictionary exist to clarify its content, covering topics such as Strong's Numbers. In modern technology, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) embodies a structured approach to maintaining complex systems, focusing on reliability as the "most fundamental feature of any product". SRE, which originated from asking a software engineer to design an operations team, caps operational work (toil)—defined as manual, repetitive work that scales linearly—at 50% of an engineer’s time to ensure focus on engineering projects. Core SRE principles include managing service risk using error budgets, employing automation to maximize consistency and reduce costs, and utilizing distributed consensus algorithms like Paxos and Chubby to manage critical state reliably across failures. Monitoring is essential, prioritizing actionable alerts (immediate human intervention) and classifying outputs clearly (Alerts, Tickets, Logging). These practices, particularly preparedness, postmortem analysis, and automation, align with fundamental lessons learned across other high-reliability industries, such as the nuclear navy, defense, and aviation. Source #01: edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy Source #02: - International Journal of Applied Research
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Twin Peaks and The Unfinished Temple
01/10/2026
Twin Peaks and The Unfinished Temple
This episode traces a strange and elegant thread between David Lynch’s Twin Peaks cosmology and the philosophical architecture of Freemasonry. Both traditions distrust final answers. Both insist that mystery is not a flaw but a tool—something like a chisel that keeps the builder awake. Lynch treats closure as artistic death; Masonry treats completion as spiritual stagnation. When these two worlds meet, the owl-ring becomes a symbol of perpetual investigation, and the Square and Compasses become the geometry of eternal striving. What emerges is a shared blueprint: the unfinished temple as a living principle, a reminder that the search for light is more vital than the possession of it. Source #01: by Source #02: by Joseph Fort Newton, Litt. D. Source #03: Source #04: Source #05:
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The Level and the War-Forge
01/03/2026
The Level and the War-Forge
This episode traces a sharp line between the Masonic Level—symbol of equality, humility, and shared human destiny—and the immense industrial architectures that manufacture the tools of modern warfare. The Level teaches that all people stand on common ground, “partakers of the same nature,” and that death is the great equalizer that dissolves rank and distinction. Yet the defense industry operates on a different plane entirely: profit-driven hierarchies crafting weapons that divide, destroy, and stratify the world. We explore this philosophical collision with care. On one side stands the Fellow Craft’s call to upright living, unity, and the quiet moral geometry of the Level. On the other stands ITAR-governed corporate machinery—engineers, factories, algorithms, supply chains—shaped to produce precision instruments of organized violence. Between them lies a chasm where ethics, economics, and power intersect. This episode asks what becomes of equality when the tools we craft are designed to end lives, not harmonize them—and whether moral architecture can survive inside an industry built on coercion, secrecy, and profit. Source #01: by Gary Schaub Jr. & Volker Franke Source #02: by Daniel Schoeni & Tobias Vestner Source #03: by Source #04: by George Lucas
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The Canopy and The Starfield
12/27/2025
The Canopy and The Starfield
This episode explores the shared sky between Masonry and Starfield—a symbolic canopy that says more about human purpose than it does about stars. In Masonry, the Celestial Canopy stretches from the lodge room to the edge of creation, reminding the initiate that the universe itself is the Temple of the Grand Architect. In Starfield, that same vastness becomes the stage for Constellation’s search for the Unity: a literal attempt to pierce the heavenly veil and discover what truth, if any, lies beyond it. We draw parallels between the Lodge’s starry firmament and the cosmic expanse the player navigates. Where Masonry uses the canopy as a moral reminder—boundless charity, an infinite pursuit of light—Starfield transforms it into a philosophical battleground. Sanctum Universum, the Enlightened, and House Va’ruun echo the ancient triad of Beauty, Wisdom, and Strength as they debate what lives behind the cosmic curtain. Constellation’s Lodge stands alone as the one institution content to search without dogma, mirroring the Craft’s insistence that truth must be discovered, not inherited. The episode follows this shared journey beneath the vault of heaven: from the Mason’s quiet moral ascent to the traveler’s leap into the Unity. Both paths lead toward a revelation that is less about cosmology and more about character. Whether walking the mosaic pavement or drifting through the nebulae of the Settled Systems, the seeker confronts the same question age after age—what does it mean to find light in a universe that refuses easy answers? By the end, the canopy becomes something more than a roof or a sky. It becomes the infinite canvas where meaning is made, where the Lodge and the Starfield overlap, and where the search for truth continues in every universe the traveler is willing to explore. Source #01: Source #02: by Alexander Maksymiw Source #03: Source #04: by Joseph Fort Newton, Litt. D.
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Compassion and The Compass
12/20/2025
Compassion and The Compass
This episode walks straight into the messy, human middle ground between loving people and losing yourself in the process. Using the story of Paul and Eunice—a sober helper and a deeply traumatized veteran—we unpack what compassion really looks like when trauma, addiction, resentment, and financial collapse all live under the same roof. Guided by the compass of Freemasonry and the inner fortress of Stoic philosophy, we explore the idea of the cable tow as a moral boundary: the point beyond which “helping” turns into self-destruction. We connect that to how we run systems and services under stress—incidents, outages, RTOs, RPOs, blameless postmortems—and show that both people and platforms need the same thing: clear limits, honest observation, and recovery plans that actually work. This isn’t an abstract seminar. It’s trauma, rent, sobriety, hatred, love, and the quiet power of one small, consistent life lived decently in front of another broken person. In this episode, we explore: How trauma reshapes a worldview—and why one honest counter-example can start to crack it Why “compassion does not require self-immolation,” and what healthy boundaries really look like How Marcus Aurelius would diagnose over-giving, resentment, and walking away “without hatred” The parallels between personal recovery and organizational recovery: incidents, DR tests, and blameless postmortems Practical steps for people who feel like Paul (the overwhelmed helper) or Eunice (the traumatized survivor) today This is an episode about keeping your heart open and your compass steady. Source #01: Paul and Eunice is a personal story from real people in my personal life. Names have been changed to protect the identities of the individuals.
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The Temple and the Error Budget
12/13/2025
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: Source #2: by Marcus Aurellius
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The Architecture of Eternity
12/06/2025
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: by Joseph Fort Newton, Litt. D.
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The Gauge and the Calendar
11/29/2025
The Gauge and the Calendar
This episode explores the Twenty-four-inch Gauge — one of the earliest and most quietly profound symbols in Freemasonry — as a blueprint for surviving and thriving in modern system administration. The gauge’s ancient triad of vocation, refreshment, and service becomes a practical lens for navigating today’s impossible mix of project deadlines, user interruptions, enterprise timetables, automation demands, and mental load. We trace how the symbolic 8/8/8 division maps directly onto the SA’s world: focused work protected from interruption, rest defended as a prerequisite for cognitive reliability, and an ethical block of time reserved for strategy, documentation, personal growth, and helping others. Along the way, we connect the gauge to principles like conserving RAM, externalizing memory, automating repeated tasks, and carving out time for long-term improvement over perpetual tactical firefighting. In both Masonry and IT, time is a material you carve — not a stream you ride. This episode examines how the structure of the gauge can stabilize a chaotic profession and help every administrator build a life, and a system, that holds its shape. Source #1: Source #2: by Thomas A. Limoncelli
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From Rough Ashlar to Righteous Re-Engineer
11/22/2025
From Rough Ashlar to Righteous Re-Engineer
This episode reflects on the journey from Rebellion to Responsibility, tracing how both individuals and systems evolve through disciplined self-correction. We explore the Masonic allegory of the Rough Ashlar—a person full of natural flaws—being refined into the Perfect Ashlar through the Common Gavel, symbolizing self-discipline and reflection. The 1980s punk scene serves as a living example of the unrefined Ashlar: a volatile system rejecting all authority. SLC Punk captures its collapse when chaos meets consequence—most tragically in Heroin Bob’s death. The Straight Edge movement emerged as a self-imposed reformation, a kind of ethical debugging through sobriety and restraint. Maturity, then, is Righteous Re-Engineering—transforming rebellion into mastery. When Stevo chooses law over anarchy, he embodies the truth that sustainable change requires structure. In both character and code, reliability is born not from chaos, but from conscious design. Source #1: Source #2: Source #3: Source #4:
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The Square and the Server
11/16/2025
The Square and the Server
In this episode, Change Advisory Board draws a straight line from the lodge to the datacenter, exploring how the symbolic working tools of Freemasonry — the gauge, gavel, square, level, plumb, compasses, and trowel — can be reinterpreted as instruments of modern Site Reliability Engineering. From the Entered Apprentice’s 24-inch gauge to the SRE’s time budgets and service-level objectives, each tool becomes a lens for understanding the moral and operational discipline behind reliable systems. The common gavel’s task of removing rough edges parallels how engineers refine noise from telemetry. The Fellow Craft’s square and level emerge as early templates for data integrity and fairness — the moral geometry of incident response. The plumb rule, once a test of uprightness, becomes the model for aligned observability: systems and people both measured against their true vertical. Finally, the Master Mason’s compasses and trowel remind us that every great system — like every enduring fraternity — is held together not by code alone but by the invisible cement of trust, accountability, and shared purpose. Observability, in this light, is not just about data; it is the moral act of ensuring that what we build is true, just, and aligned with the architecture of higher principles. It’s a conversation about craftsmanship in code and in character — an investigation into how the oldest working tools of humanity still guide the newest disciplines of reliability engineering. Source #1: Source #2: edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy
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The Watchtower and the Mirror
11/06/2025
The Watchtower and the Mirror
This episode examines modern software maintenance practices, specifically Monitoring and Observability, through the lens of Masonic symbolism to illustrate principles of operational wisdom. Monitoring is aligned with the Watchtower, focusing on tracking real-time quantitative data about known system conditions, much like a Tiler guards a perimeter to detect anticipated problems. In contrast, Observability is compared to the All-Seeing Eye and the Mirror, representing the capacity to ask questions about a system's inner workings to troubleshoot novel problems or "unknown unknowns." Together, these concepts constitute the operational wisdom required by Site Reliability Engineers (SREs), which is further mapped onto the Masonic pillars of Wisdom, Strength, and Beauty to guide the pursuit of system reliability, efficiency, and continuous improvement. Source #1: Source #2: edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy
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The Trestle-board and the SLO
10/26/2025
The Trestle-board and the SLO
Join us as we uncover how the timeless lessons of structure, planning, and meticulous refinement, taught within the degrees of the Entered Apprentice, Fellow Craft, and Master Mason, are utilized by modern Site Reliability Engineers (SREs). These lessons are crucial for designing, deploying, and maintaining reliable computing systems. What You Will Learn: The Blueprint for Reliability: Adherence to Design. Discover how SREs apply the principles of the Trestle-board (used by the Master-workman to draw his designs) to their infrastructure. We discuss the foundational importance of explicit planning, focusing on translating business goals into measurable Service Level Objectives (SLOs). The goal is to build a "spiritual building" (the reliable service) that achieves figure, strength, and beauty. Refining the Rough Ashlar: Eliminating Toil. Learn how the SRE mandate to eliminate toil directly mirrors the builders' transition from the Rough Ashlar (representing a crude, imperfect state) to the Perfect Ashlar (a stone ready by the hands of the workmen). Toil is the manual, repetitive, automatable work that lacks enduring value and scales linearly with service growth. SREs dedicate their time to engineering work (at least 50% of their focus) to write software that replaces this manual labor, ensuring staff scales sublinearly with system size. Searching for Truth: Mastery Through Failure. The diligent worker must search to the foundations of knowledge to find the Truth buried under error. We explore SRE's commitment to rigorous self-assessment, particularly through blameless postmortems following significant incidents. This practice is essential for finding the root causes of failures, improving systems, and making the organization more resilient as a whole. The Discipline of the Craft: Understand the emphasis SRE places on high standards for workmanship and conduct. Just as the craft requires "virtuous education", SREs prioritize continuous learning and structured training, including studying the liberal ARTS AND SCIENCES, to master the complexity of distributed systems. We look at how practicing mental discipline, combined with preparation exercises like disaster role-playing, aids in maintaining rational, focused, and deliberate cognitive functions during emergencies. This episode demonstrates that whether erecting physical edifices or building the world's largest cloud services, success hinges on meticulous execution, relentless refinement, and an unwavering commitment to quality and Fidelity. Source #1: by Laurence Dermott Source #2: (1866) by Malcom C. Duncan Source #3: edited by Betsy Beyer, Chris Jones, Jennifer Petoff, and Niall Richard Murphy
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