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January 25 Why Surfing The Internet Is EnlighteningI tend to use my Sundays (when football isn't on) to just pick something random to learn about, or just visit topics I'm interested in, and just see what happens. Today it seems to be movies and historical.
I started off by reading about 3:10 to Yuma which I watched last night, and then explored the western genre. Of course, I would come across Clint Eastwood, and read wikis of Unforgiven and Pale Rider (where it has a quote of an interesting interpretation/observation by Eastwood about Preacher being a ghost or dream).
Most of it has been driven about me eventually making the decision on what movies I want to buy on Blu Ray, either to have since I've never owned (in the case of Pale Rider) or to upgrade in my current DVD collection.
As I was surfing Amazon's offerings, I came across one of my favorite movies of all time: Patton. As the WWII buff that I am, I began to wiki Patton and many others in his life. I decided to read about Omar Bradley, and something hit me that blew my mind.
Ninety years ago, Omar Bradley was the ROTC instructor at South Dakota State University (known then as South Dakota State College).
An eventual five-star general taught at SDSU. It blows my mind that someone who helped change the world was here.
Then again, I grew up six blocks away from George McGovern's house, so what do I know?
Stuff like this fascinates me. June 05 Crash Course In Brain SurgeryThe last several weeks, I have somehow become an expert on installing and uninstalling certain major software products that everyone knows and love to use.
For me, it's know and loathe.
The first is Adobe. Yeah, yeah, everybody loves Adobe Reader and Flash Player. I do. But here's the problem.
There's a family of Adobe products called Creative Suite. The most famous element of this is Photoshop (Photoshop Elements is the poor man's version that you can buy at Wally for like $20). Flash and Reader are a part of it as well.
There's other stuff in it that I have zero clue on what they do, but there are different versions for different environments (everything from photo editing to webdesign (Dreamweaver) to video editing).
However, it's a messy process, and I've learned a lot from several people on this. It was a little frustrating at first, but now I've learned that if you are migrating an entire work group, to do it slowly.
Best way to put it: even when I upgrade Adobe Reader to Adobe Professional, I use the same steps as I would use for migrating CS2 to CS3.
Today, I discovered that Nero is kind of the same way, but it's not as much of a nightmare. It's a little more straight forward, but still has a couple of steps that basically means "you need to know what you are doing."
Seems more and more, I'm diving into realms I never thought I would ever go. I felt I was rather well-prepared for the hardware side of things, because of my work history. But I never really dabbled on the software side. And now after two crash courses in brain surgery, I actually want to learn on how these programs work in order to help fix them.
I don't really want to learn how to code the stuff, but if I knew how to run the programs, and see what problems occur, then I'll add them to my database.
Fun times, eh?
March 13 Food For ThoughtDecember 17 The 12 Threats of ChristmasI don't know if someone needs a life or not, but this is hilarious...:)
It ranks up there with the Chewbacca site that has him doing Silent Night..:)
November 29 BotNetsThis is something that we all need to understand why internet security is important.
July 19 Advice to Employees on the Proper Use of the System Administrator's Valuable Time(In following examples, we will substitute the name "Ted" as the System Administrator)
Figured to share some humor. Friend of mine found this today at work, and it's hilarious. Sad, and also SO true, unfortunately! July 13 The Curse of Friday the 13thOy.
It hit me more like on Tuesday, the CURSE! Note: lots of tech-babble here for the uninitiated, so I will explain it in simple terms as I can.
A gal came in with a computer, and asked me about the BSoD (Blue-Screen o' Death---that blue screen that tells you that there's something majorly wrong). The computer kept on rebooting upon itself, and appearantly, it had a history of this, but it was fixed via Recovery Console. It's a tool that I am unfamiliar with, but it can be handy, but you REALLY need to know what you are doing in some cases.
We couldn't get into the console, and we brought in a USB SATA Drive connector that we could hook up a hard drive externally to another computer to see if we could see the files. We could, so we lifted the guy's profile off of it, and placed it in a safe spot.
This week became a crash course for me in both the use of RAID (which is a technique of making redundant use of multiple hard drives to prevent the loss of data...that's the SHORT version), and the use of SATA drives, which is the newer drives of the past few years.
Well, it turns out that to build an image on a RAID configuration, it has to be done from the ground up, with the version we were using (there are several versions. The one I needed to do was 'mirroring'...which is exactly what it means.) We didn't know that, since most of us had never used that version of RAID (if any version at all). What I was doing was imaging one hard drive, thinking we could do the other later, but it kept on BSoD ramdomly.
It seemed that everytime something was going right, I went to go tell the gal that things went smoothly, then five minutes later, I gave her bad news. After awhile, sarcasm took over for both of us, LOL! I was beginning to feel like we were Han and Chewbacca in The Empire Strikes Back when the hyperdrive kept on dying on them. Harrison Ford is the source of my sarcastic nature to begin with, and I when I get sarcastic, I tend to either go Han Solo, or Indy Jones.
Then, late Wednsday, right before I was about to leave, the CMOS battery died. It's basically a watch battery, and its job is to help keep the basic settings of how your computer boots up, the date/time, and other important tasks. First thing yesterday morning, I replaced it, and everything seemed great. Until about an hour later, I got the same error. When I went to tell the gal this, appearantly, the look I had on my face more or less made her say, "I do NOT like that look! What happened now?!!"
That means the motherboard was bad. Heck, my boss was shocked when I told him I changed the CMOS battery (it's a very drastic step. Not usually done, considering how long watch batteries last.) He agreed about calling in the board in. Nothing I could do with the computer, since (unfortunately), all the like models were in use, so I had no spare to work with.
Today, I got my board, and put it in. I went and informed the gal of this, and that if she could babysit it for awhile, I'd appreciate it. I had a meeting to attend, and she was more than willing to look after it.
Unfortunately, the USB floppy drive we were using to load the special SATA drivers for the RAID configuration died, and I thought it was the disk. So I got a new disk, and it too didn't work. I got a new drive, and just before leaving work, and all seems peachy.
So far. I'm letting that mofo sit there all weekend to let it run. If I come back to errors, I've decided (sarcasm) to make a Photoshop image of either the T-800 or Sarah Connor destroying the computer, and have em say,
"You're TERMINATED!"
So, boys and girls in the peanut gallery, how was YOUR day?
At least I've kept a sense of humor about the whole situation.
July 04 A Different TakeI love www.jibjab.com because they're refreshing. They brought us parodies of the Bush/Kerry presidential run, among other things. Someone, however, had too much time on their hands to sift through hours of presidential speeches for this one:
Enjoy. October 27 This Proves Why Politicians Are IdiotsThat was back in July, but the reason I came across it was I found a link this morning that made me laugh about President Bush's use of "The Google" on "The Internets".
A classmate showed us this one in lab after I told him about the Bush one. All too funny.
It boils down to that our politicians truly have no clue on what the hell they're talking about...LOL!
Chuckle away...:) September 14 Virtural LabsThis week, we finally managed to get something REALLY cool set up.
I can now practice my Cisco Certified Network Associate Module 2 labs at home without having to take a router home, take up space in my room (or my dad's kitchen table), and have to be responsible for thousands of dollars of equipment.
Basically, we have accounts set up. Physically (at our tech center), we spent a lab day essentially setting this up to where I can virtually simulate working with a router without screwing stuff up on the router at the data center.
If this is over your head, then here's an analogy: The Matrix.
I might not be physically hooked in like Neo, but my computer is. I can manipulate my router's "matrix" all I want, without fear of screwing up the equipment at the school. Worst scenario is it's logged, and my instructor will see my mistakes, etc.
It's new and exciting, and honestly really cool.
I can also reserve time to play around, and monkey with the "router" without it affecting my hands on grade. If I know I need to practice something before I do the actual lab exercise. That's awesome, IMHO.
Again, it's fun and exciting. August 15 First Day and Security StuffageOkay! First day of school is over with, done, kaput, finished!
What did I learn?
Well, there's 25 first year CST students. Most of them have some computer experience. Several of them are older folks (over 40).
The second years (the ones that were first years when I was second year last year) I discovered were treated like crap from my original class. One guy just came back from training in the Mojave Desert, and was caught up in all of the flight stuff from last weekend. He said that people's luggage was placed on the tarmac, and they had to find their stuff.
Since I was the only workstudy to work this morning (second year didn't have to come in until this afternoon), I was attempting to fix a problem in one of the other buildings while Mark and Tim were in essence getting all the new students their email accounts set up. Unfortunately, my task required a new switch, as the old one was fried.
Then I come home, only to read this:
I knew this stuff for years. One method I've always used was to put myself on my buddy list. If I saw another me, I knew I was hacked.
Not so fun stuff. July 27 Learn Something New EverydayWell, considering that there's not much real work for me to do (a LOT of waiting whilst portables are being imaged), I decided "What the hell" and did some job idea searching.
Being the fact that I'm heavily into gaming (as in table-top pen and paper old-school Dungeons and Dragons, video games, and online games) I've been perusing various websites for online game companies (most notably Blizzard for World of Warcraft and Sony for Everquest, Everquest II and Star Wars: Galaxies) for job ideas.
One major qualification:
Have a passion for video games.
*Raises hand*. Qualification met, heheh.
The main "problem" is the "X years in the IT/Administration field."
The one thing I saw on one job description was "*nix in a networking environment."
I was like, WTF does THAT mean??!
So I did some web searching, and all I kept getting was stuff from IEEE (which you need to be a member of to access some of their site). Finally I found something.
Basically it means that you know how to deal with Linux/Unix in a network, both on their own and mixed with a Microsoft environment.
Well now...definately going to have to play with Linux more,heheh.
But, I learned a new term. *nix (generally * is a wildcard character used in searching for files on your computer or network.)
Ahh, the fun, eh?
July 07 Portables, More Portables, Even MORE PortablesToday, at about 8AM, about 1000 portables showed up at the highschool. YAY! It kind of reminded me of a Gateway manufacturing storage area
I also found out just how restrictive the things are going to be for the highschool students.
More or less, they can run the software we put on them, surf approved sites...and that's about it.
No music. No games.
And when they leave the school district (either moving, or graduating), they have to return the computers.
The kiddies are going to have a rude awakening, methinks.
Heck, I didn't know the whole deal with the program until today.
Fun, fun, fun.
June 14 YAY! MUSIC!Ok, I created a new Filelodge account (wonder how long it will last, eh?) and to celebrate, I put System of A Down up. Figured, what the hell. Prolly not everyone's cup of tea, but oh well. Not bad from a band whose ancestors are Armenian. And very, VERY political. June 13 Killed My PowerToyBecause FILELODGE SUCKS, I've temporarily disabled my Media Player in order to make my site look alittle nicer. If there was music there, yeah, peachy. But there isn't (since my folder on filelodge is now unreachable for some stupid reason), so there's no sense on having it up there taking up like half of my blog space.
When I find another hosting site (anyone know of any good free ones that can hold tons of files?), I'll pop it back up. It kinda sucks, cuz I wanted to share some of the stuff I've been recording...grrr. May 25 Virus Alert and HackingIt involves the corporate version of Norton Anti-virus, more than the personal home users version. However, I just want people to be aware. There are a couple of good links near the top to the right of the bold text for you research types. I urge everyone to utilize these tools. The more information you know (even if you're not a computer literate person), the better to protect yourself. If you don't understand the information, and you know someone else who does, then PLEASE pick their brain. Heck, even leave me a question at Chloe's Desk (thanks Marge for helping fix the code!), and trust me, I'll do my best to help answer your question(s).
As most of you prolly know, this is my field of choice, and I like to warn folks of such vulnerabilities.
Hackers for the most part won't go after someone's "personal information", unless they "dis"honestly target your network. What they tend to like to do is use others' systems to mask their origins on attacking such things as corporate and/or government web-sites for whatever means they want.
May 24 Hrm....First Day ThoughtsHrrm....To Do List for my workstudy:
1). Rewire the entire school district. The wiring closets are in need of proper labeling. Gonna be a nightmare.
2). Image 1200 portables for the 7-12 students.
3). Inventory all the desktops in the school district. Least a thousand. This includes documenting the seriel numbers, MAC addresses of each network card, and the IP address of each system. Sherry (who is in charge of the elementary schools) wants to make each IP static, or non changing.
4). Re-image certain schools. If you don't know what I mean by image, it's basically taking a mirror of stuff on a server and 'making a mirror image' based on what the configuration of the computers being loaded. You can load 5-10 computers at a time this way.
My co-workers are really cool. Another CST student, and three really cute CSS students. We've already had fun in one of the vans. Put it this way: one of the vans got fixed, and Armor-All cleaned inside. Was stinky, we got high off of the fumes, and the leather was slick. Watching speakers get placed in the van, and watching them slide under the very back seats was funny. Tommorrow: we get to play around at the highschool.
I love my new job. Getting paid to do something you actually like DOING is awesome! Why that education kiddies is so freaking important.
Oh the fun! May 01 MAC Users: Beware!I've really never used a MAC since the early 1990's, but this is something important to those who use one. April 24 Network Security And EthicsTechnically, I was supposed to graduate in a few weeks from Mitchell Technical Institute. But alas, health (and some depression problems) prevented me from going to school.
One thing my program head wanted to have us do is write a one page paper about the ethics behind computer network security. Because, just like a police officer or a lawyer, a person who has knowledge of the law knows how to break it. The question is, knowing the difference between right and wrong, and also knowing that you are responsible for your actions.
Now, if I was asked to just hack, I would say no. But, if I were working (either freelance or full-time) with law enforcement (which is something I want to do), I know that they would tell me specifically where I needed to go on the hard drive, or see if I could recover data.
On the network security side, think of Tank in Matrix. In that movie, I'd prolly would be Tank, or Cypher (without his bad qualities). The guy who can just sit there and read code. A guy who could see something. Try to fix it.
But the sad truth is, the antithesis of me is the one who wants to break in and do what they intend to do. Steal records. Identity theft.
Stupid thing is, those abilities could be used to save someone.
Nice thin line I'm beginning to walk. Novel IdeaThis is interesting. I hope that whomever is in charge of the city-wide network is good, because there's a shitload of security issues here.
1). How are they placing the WAPs/WEPs ( Wireless Access Points/Wireless Encryption Points; there's a difference). Distance and connectivity is a factor. At school, there are around thirteen of them. And that's just a building. Physical issues. You have to make sure that the routers (wireless) are placed in such a way that the signals aren't impeded. Walls do matter.
2). Will the city require residents to have an ecryption key to gain access? This would add some protection. HOWEVER, unlike a private network, this information would be known to the public. Which means easy access to hackers.
3). For 28,000 people+busineses+schools=subnetting from hell. Theoretically, I would think (if they were smart) to have servers (to help with #1) placed stategically around the city. Then they could (each neighborhood) have their own subnet. They would also have to consider what private block they would need to use (default for most internal networks is 192.168.0.0). In essence, this city is a giant internal network. You have to subnet further for internal (home, schools, businesses) if you use wireless to connect printers and other devices around the home, etc. Unless they decide to subnet the entire city in Block A of the IP addresses...wellmanageabiility.
Just my thoughts on this novel idea. |
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