Dr. Robert L. Milam 1936-2025

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Photo of Dr. Milam smiling and holding a fishing rod in one hand and a comically small fish he’s caught in his other hand.

Dr. Robert Louis Milam, 89, of Hopkinsville, Kentucky passed away peacefully on Saturday, December 13, 2025, at Charter Senior Living in Hopkinsville.

Graveside services will be held at 12:00 p.m., Friday, January 16, 2026 at Kentucky Veterans Cemetery West with Rev. Joe Bufford officiating. Visitation will be Friday from 10:00 a.m. until the service hour at Hughart, Beard & Giles Funeral Home. Hughart, Beard & Giles Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.

A native of Shepherdsville, Kentucky he was born on June 14, 1936 the son of the late Bernie Milam and Bertha Wise Milam. He was also preceded in death by his wife, Carolyn Poindexter Milam and his son, Dr. Michael Robert Milam.

He is survived by his son, Charles (Lindsay), and their son Thomas; his daughter-in-law Dr. Ashley Milam and her sons Jack and Ben.

He was a member of Hillcrest Baptist Church, the Kiwanis club and was a United States Army veteran.

After earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Kentucky and his Ph.D. in Economics from North Carolina State University, Robert began his career at Westminster College, teaching economics and business. He later joined the Philadelphia College of Textiles and Science (now Jefferson University), serving as a department chair.

In 1978, Robert became Dean of the College of Business and Public Administration at Governors State University in Illinois, serving until 1984. He then moved to the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, where he served as Dean of the UW Oshkosh School of Business from 1984 to 1995.

From 1995 to 2001, Robert was Provost and Vice Chancellor at the University of Wisconsin-River Falls, including a year as Acting Chancellor. After retiring to his family farm in Kentucky, he returned to academia as Chief Academic Officer at Hopkinsville Community College from 2002 to 2005, before retiring for good.

Known for his integrity, strategic vision, and dedication to academic excellence, Robert left a lasting impact on every institution he served, truly “…one worthy of remembrance.”

In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions are suggested to Pennyroyal Hospice, 220 Burley Avenue, Hopkinsville KY 42240.

Automation Epiphany

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Several Christmases ago, I was struck by an epiphany. Not the seasonal holiday, but the sudden realization we were in the middle of what I believe is the second-largest disruptive change in the Information Technology field behind the emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web.

So, what happened? I was starting a new centralized log collection and alerting project at work. At the highest and simplest level: This was a centralized syslog server that was expected to stay up under a large ingest load as well as provide analysis and alerting capabilities. This project had started, stalled, and moved around various groups like a hot potato over the years, so I was both excited and a little apprehensive to tackle it.

Regardless, I put my hand up in a meeting and said, “I can do it.”

As I began to investigate the options, it was increasingly obvious I would be building this system out on multiple Linux systems. I’ve been a Linux user since 1993, and an admin since 1995. I had been in a Windows-only environment for years, so I took a moment to catch up and survey the current state of Linux and infrastructure management.

I don’t recall how I landed on Ansible. It was likely a combination of the usual Linux/Sysadmin subreddits, the Red Hat documentation and Infosec Twitter. However I got there, I decided to learn more about Ansible over the Christmas break.

As I went down the Ansible rabbit hole, I was directed to Jeff Geerling‘s excellent book Ansible for DevOps. I was both excited and a little ashamed to discover new-to-me technologies such as Vagrant for spinning up virtual machines quickly for testing. Where had this been all this time?

I worked through the entire book over the break, then immediately took the lessons learned and applied them to my new project. It didn’t take me long to realize I would never manage a fleet of bespoke servers “by hand” again. Automation, everything-as-code, was clearly the way forward. I was saving time, preventing technical debt loads, and most importantly, felt confident to test and make changes without fear of having to recover for weeks in the event something went wrong. In short, I was sold on the DevOps philosophy. It occurred to me that if an organization was not using these tools and methodologies, then they were going to get lapped on the track by the competitors who had adopted these new ways of working.

I began to read everything I could about DevOps, the Theory of Constraints, Automation, and even business books I’d heard about but never thought relevant. Eventually, I realized I had a choice: I could stay where I was and settle for a comfortable march to retirement, or I could make a change and work with these new techniques and philosophies.

After COVID and working from home, I realized it was time for change. I left the comfort of the known, safe march to retirement, and took the leap of faith. More on that later.

Flow and the Importance of Music to Knowledge Work

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This morning I queued up one of my favorites in my “Chill Coding Flow” YouTube Playlist. As I settled into the comforting familiarity of “ADHD Relief, Deep Focus Music with Pulsation, ADD Music for Concentration, ADHD Music,” coming through my noise-canceling headphones, I took a moment to look at some of the comments on the video:

“It is so unbelievable how sounds affect your brain. This is one of my favorites. I work with headphones on and it just puts me on track with whatever I’m working on. I can finish projects without bouncing around. It’s like a you-can-do-it security blanket for your brain.”

“It took me 2 hours to write 2 paragraphs because I kept getting distracted. Just 20 minutes into this video and I have 3 pages finished and getting ready to wrap it up. These don’t always work for me, but this one certainly does.”

I’ve felt every bit of both comments. There’s something about a soothing track that keeps me on task and focused. I remember writing my undergraduate thesis to Rob Dougan – Clubbed To Death on repeat for a week straight. I’m sure there’s some interesting psychology at work here, but I’m not going to sweat it. It works for me and has for years now.

During the pandemic, I saw others in my circles reporting improved productivity while working from home. Working from my home office, I was more productive than I had been in…years. Hard to admit that, but it’s true, and I even had the metrics to prove it.

I believe a major contributor to the improved productivity was the ability to put on concentration music and get into a flow state without the distractions and interruptions common in an office environment. Returning to the office after more than a year of working in a safe, comfortable environment that favored concentration proved to be jarring. So much so, I decided to make a change and seek out more work-from-home opportunities. The office just seemed too distracting. Sometimes, headphones and concentration music can be a deal-breaker, especially for knowledge workers.