Personal

tech to bring on vacation???

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So I am getting ready to pack for my island vacation. The question is what to pack tech wise. I will bring my mobile phone. It wonít work in Barbados, but it will work in the airport before and after the trip. No charger is needed for it though. I checked. No service provider has a ROAMING agreement down there so no cell phone would work. I would have to get one down there. Not going to do that, so I am out of luck.

I am bringing a laptop so I can get some work done, and more importantly watch some movies on the plane. The question is what laptop do I bring? I can take the work thinkpad. It has a DVD player, and I can play with vmware on it. I can also take my Powerbook. The powerbook also has a dvd player on it, but it also has all my personal files, and I can download and edit the photoís I take on the tirp while I am down there. It will probably be a last minute decision. Not sure what to do just yet.

Besides that I am bringing my Pocket PC just because it is handy to have around, and my digital camera. My sister is bringing theirs, but I want to bring my own anyway.

Cards, cards, cards, and gifts

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I need to get birthday cards for my dad, brother in law, and my cousin Cerina today. Cerinaís birthday party is tomorrow and I donít have a present yet. Not happy about that. Also my dad, and brother in lawís birthdayís are both next week and I need to get something before we go away. I am going to try and do cards before work this morning.

Cerina’s birthday

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Went to Cerina’s birthday party. She is my cousin celibrating her first birthday. I went to my cousin Synde & Waynes for the party. I thought more family would be there, but we had a decent turn out. They had tons of friends over. The house was packed. We hit tons of traffic, and it took like 2 hours to get to their house in south jersey. I went with my sister, morgan, and my parrents. My sister’s new jeep is awsome. Morgan slept most of the trip so it was not bad. Any trip when a baby sleeps is a good trip.

Cerina was walking now, compaired with almost walking when I was out to the house in early may. Arielle and merric were both good at the party.

Synde made some cracker chocolate pieces. They are hard to discribe but they are good. it is just butter melted chocolate on a salty cracker. They are SO bad for you, but so good. I got a doggy bag. They rock. I didn’t have cake. I am not a big party cake eater. We did the trip for the day so I got home like 11pm or later, not sure.

I don’t know if my parents can make that trip again. they both have bad backs and the sitting in the car kills them. Surprisingly they are less comfortable in the jeep than they are in my dad’s accord. I guess the honda is comfy.

I couldn’t think of anything creative to give as a gift. Synde said something about a water raft for Cerina but I couldn’t find anything so I got her a gift certificate at gap kids. I never know what to get for little kids. Bigger kids just tell you a list of what they want.

Computer security in the office, I am a hypocrite

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I got an email from my friend Sean today. He is a good friend from college. He does GIS database work out in Las Vegas. I haven’t spoken to him in a while so it was good to here from him. He is online less now a days because they are monitoring web habits and frown on IM use. I of course gave him some tips on getting around the web police. As far as non IT guys go, he is very computer savvy, so I hope he can get on the internet at work without the corporate police getting on his back. Come on sean, IM me. Remember when you are at work, I am home. Gotta love that time difference!

I admit that I am a hypocrite. Things that Sean tells me that his company is doing are things I am either implementing or talking about deploying at my company. Yet I will tell him how to get around the system, while I am forcing it on others! Oddly I don’t seem to care. He is a friend, and I have a job to do!!!

My company is currently looking at proxy server software that will monitor web habits. We also deployed Jabber to all our employee’s. Jabber is an open source standard for IM. We purchased a windows based server from Tipic. Their are plenty of free distributions on linux/unix, but when we did our deployment I was not (still not) a linux expert so we stuck with a windows based product. With jabber we can limit IM access to internal use only. For some of our corporate staff we allow AIM to talk with people outside, but our call center is locked down. I actually love jabber. I think it is awesome and I use it all the time for talking to people in my company, but it is restrictive to some.

So for my friends not working with me I feel compelled to give them advise to get around security blocks a corporate IT staff may impose. For people in my company, I AM the corporate IT police. And yes it is kind of fun to lock stuff down. Not because you screw over people, but because it is a challenge. Restricting access to something always spawns people trying to break your restrictions. That cat and mouse game can be very interesting. Thankfully (or not) the users at my company are not much of a challenge, except for our development staff. And those guys don’t have many restrictions on web use, so they don’t count.

Other flavors of linux

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I am a newbie to linux, even if I have “looked” at it for almost 2 years. I have not done much with it but install it to look at. Well that all changed recently when I was tasked to actually “do” stuff with it. So in the past year I have built a DNS server. it just slaves zones from a windows box, but it is a start. I have built an apache server, and am playing with FTP now. I have done this all with different versions of the Red Hat distribution of linux. I have used version 6 – 9. Since I am new I want to stick with one distribution, and at work we will continue to use Red Hat, but I wanted to try something different.

I downloaded last night the mandrake 9.1 version of linux. I want to put it on a desktop and play with it. I also might put it in vmware and see if it is any good. I don’t want to use it as a server or anything, but to use as a desktop for a while may be cool. I want to see what they do similar and different to red hat. I will let you know.

This may be successful or it may fail terribly like my attempt to install BSD 5.0.

The dentist, again

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I went to the dentist again yesterday. It didn’t hurt as much as I thought. They did two fillings. One with Novocain and one without. The one without wasn’t that bad. Only a minute of pain and then I was fine. I think I am good till my next checkup in 6 months.

I will see them both (bruce & richard) soon since bruce’s wife is having a baby soon. I did mention that both guys are my dentist (depending on who is available) and they are brothers who are very close with my family. Bruce drilled me this time, and he was gentle, so the baby gets a nice gift:)

Secured Commuting

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I work in New York City. I take the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) to work every day. Because of this I have to pass through Penn Station twice a day. It is a peaceful commute most of the time. Ever since 9/11 their has been a significant presence of police and national guard troops in NY Penn station. Right after 9/11 you would see troopers ever 20 feet or so stationed around the place. Even thought they probably would be useless if something major happened it made you “feel safe”. as time went by you saw less troopers. There was always some, but noticeably less. In the past month or so I have noticed again more troops. One thing different is that they now carry M-16 riffles. In the past they had pistol’s only. Again I don’t mind the idea of armed troops around. They are not rounding people up en mass or anything. They are just making a show, or that is what it feels like.

All these troops hanging around brings up the question of if something did happen would these guys be any useful at all? And do people know that something is possibly going on that they armed the troops with riffles now instead of pistols? I was just wondering.

The only thing that did get me a bit nervous was the bomb sniffing dog unit at my train station for a few months in the beginning of 2002. The first few days were weird, then you got used to the K-9 unit just hanging out there during the morning commute.

The changing world we live in!!!

FTP on linux @ home online!

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So I took the information I learned at work with building an FTP server on red hat and went home and built one. I sort of hope I secured it well enough. I checked things out and it looked good, but their is always something you forget.

The next step is to customize the configuration enough so I can use it at work in a production environment. Gus and I are sitting down tomorrow to look at it.

Robocopy is coming along well also. I am going to replicate an entire website tomorrow with a developers help. I need someone to test it after I am done.

DVD’s

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I don’t hide the fact that I am a fan of Science Fiction. I like it. In this day and age it is ok to be geeky!!!! Now I draw a fine line between liking sci-fi and dressing up in a costume and going to some convention. That is just weird to me, but to each their own. Just don’t classify me in the weird category. I have enough trouble with languages that are actually spoken in this country, so I am not planning on learning made up sci-fi ones! With that being said I can discuss DVD’s.

I just finished watching season 2 of Babylon 5. That was a great show period. Well done, great stories, and good effects. In my opinion one of the best shows I have ever seen. Now that I am done I need to wait for season 3 to come out. That was probably the best season they had. Until then I am trying to catch up on other DVD’s I have gotten. I am getting season 3 of Star Trek Deep Space 9 while I am away. Now for some reason I keep buying these Star Trek DVD’s but I still can’t stand the dam series. The action is so fake. Who would stop and want to talk through a problem when the enemy is actually shooting at you. Come on, blow the bastards up already. But I still buy them. At least in the deep space 9 series they do get down to some fighting. I refuse to buy any other Star Trek series. This is the last.

I heard that the simpson’s season 3 is coming out after the summer. Now that I will get. The simpsons is also one of the best series ever made in my opinion. That show is funny on so many levels. By season 3 it started getting great. I was not a huge fan of the first 2 seasons.

The last of the “best series I have ever seen” front would probably be Homicide life on the streets. They haven’t made that into DVD yet, but I would get that in a heartbeat if it came out. It was always underrated but it was a great show.

Ton’s more I want to get on dvd. Including the family guy, band of brothers. Both are out already but I am trying to budget my DVD spending.

More on my useless DVD opinions later. The train is in the tunnel to Penn station. That is my signal to wind down my writing…