I must admit, I’m not taken in by well written missives pining for the past, but this one over at Wired really spoke to me.

Lore Sjoberg of Wired’s Alt Text column writes a wonderful article about the noises our computers made back in the day - to quote:

In particular, I miss the warm, grumpy sounds of the floppy drive. I remember sneaking into my grandparents’ computer room — that’s right, my grandfather got me into computers; he is an awesome man — at 6 in the morning, unable to wait until everyone’s awake for another round of greenish videogaming. I extract a floppy, an actual floppy that flops, from the treasure-trove of pirated games and slide one into the drive. I switch it on and I’m greeted with a startled beep and a clatter from the hard drive, followed by a series of mechanical grunts as the machine wearily rummages for data.

I think I might just have to subscribe to the Alt Geek Podcast and learn about what else I’ve been missing!

Computer World has an absolutely fascinating article about Henry Malmgren, the IT manager for Raytheon’s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.¹In it, he chronicles all the trials and tribulations that he has to go through - from walking in the pitch black darkness at -100 F to an RF building and swapping out a router, to the greenhouse that they use that allows them to have a fresh salad every 2-3 days. There are also a set of pictures that go along with it.

Interested? I am - so much so that I’m researching this a little bit. Sure, for 8 months I’d be locked in Antarctica, but man the experience! I see they are looking for Network Administrators²too. Also looking for admins that will travel on the South Pole expedition vessels several times a year, working in Colorado the rest of the time³.

I haven’t been outside the country much, and I’ve never been off of the continent - with my love of going from one extreme to the other this would be perfect. To see something that so few people get to see - to experience something that so few people get to experience. It would be absolutely amazing.

I think this just might be the thing I’m looking for - the little bit of excitement and the ability to do something positive in IT. I’ve been craving it for awhile, and boom, here it is.

1. Via Slashdot [↩]
2. Not a direct link - it’s the typical peoplesoft system companies are using now - bah! [↩]
3. Though it does say expect an 84 hour work week while on the boat. That’s a helluva lot of working. I bet the pay and experience is totally worth it, though [↩]

I wanted to blog about how Google maps now has Street View for the Twin Cities, but all my friends have beaten me to it. Screw them and their promptness. Anyway, it’s true. Yay. Look - it’s our place!

No, not The Office, but the office. Workshop. Datacenter. Server room. Den. Library. Whatever you want to call it - it’s the geek sanctuary inside of your home. The place you can leave PCBs strewn about and know they will still be there tomorrow. The place where no one questions why you have 27 90mm and 30 80mm fan grills¹. The place that gets your blood flowing, makes you want to complete that project, or maybe start one of the many projects you’ve been meaning to get around to².

I used to have one of those, but no longer.

And it sucks. Srsly.

At one point in time I had a nice 2 bedroom apartment. The larger one with the bigger windows was where I put the bed and other bedroom furniture, and the smaller one with the single window that gets deliciously blocked by a tree outside was my office.

I had a nice little shelving unit setup to act as a server rack. It held a half dozen computers, from an ancient Mac SE to a modern Proliant server. It also held all the networking gear, from a beautiful 24 port gigabit switch with all those pretty blinking lights and fiber optics, down to a wireless access point and the keyboard video and monitor needed to play with all those machines.

It also had a long plain table, about 3′ wide by 9′ long. That was my workbench. It held my soldering iron, soldering supplies and and anything I was working on - and would hold it in perpetuity, until I decided it was done or otherwise got rid of it.

Then, my lease was up, so I decided to move to a new place. At the last minute, that fell through, and I tried to stay where I was - but they had already rented it out. So I was stuck with what they had left, a 1 bedroom.

Oh, I tried to make it work - the living room was more or less the office now - minus the capability to leave things out for months or years at a time. I could try it, but when you live with people you need to be a tad considerate of them, and understand that although I have a method to all this, they don’t get it - and really probably never would.

So I did what I could to make it ok. I couldn’t really complete any projects - my style is to work on multiple projects concurrently, switching when I get stuck/bored/waiting on parts/etc - and I couldn’t start any new ones, because of space issues, and because I’d have to put the stuff away when I was done. That isn’t acceptable to me.

Then, I decided to move us to a loft. I thought it’d be great, and don’t get me wrong, I do love it - it’s just there’s even less privacy because it’s so open. There are partitions making 2 rooms of sorts, and one is acting as an ad-hoc office for me, but sound travels and I just feel so trapped in there sometime.

I really need to find us a new place when the lease is up, or rent a place I can call my own and move everything over there. Not sure what I’ll do yet.

So, do you have a sanctuary?

1. Really good deals on both and poor reading skills. Separate purchases, but I thought they would work together. I don’t know why I thought that. [↩]
2. I have a baker’s dozen of projects to start [↩]

So I’ve tidied up the blog a bit and streamlined some things¹.
I removed the tag cloud because, well, they’re stupid and no one really uses them like they should, anyway. In its place sits a new blogroll of TC people. Blogs of people in the area I come across, I’ll just keep adding them to it. If you want yours added to the list, just leave a comment. I don’t really like how there isn’t really a definitive separation between individual links, I’ll have to see if I can’t fix that later.
I’ve also added a new “Minnesota Links” page - just a set of URLs I like to hit up that involves my home state. I’ll add to that as well when I come across new resources.

I went to bed last night seeing a dusting of snow outside. Thought I’d have a picture of the snowfall for you today, but when I woke up it was all gone. Though supposedly we’ll have up to an inch of snow tonight, so maybe tomorrow I’ll have the picture²

Also, I’m working on a long term story now. In my quest to prove “You can never really hide yourself on the internet” I’ve created a second blog. I’m using a completely new login ID, one that has nothing to do with me. I’m writing posts about things that are more out of scope then I normally do, and I’m rewording things currently happening or not writing about it at all. Nevertheless, in 6 months time or so, I will have an exhaustive article on performing internet forensics.
Read the rest of this entry »

1. Plus added a sweet footnotes plugin so I can do this [↩]
2. Damn, I remember trick or treating in the snow [↩]

Here’s a new web ad from Apple, and I’ll admit, it is pretty clever. It even looks like Mac and PC are interacting with the leaderboard. Have a look:

Apple: Because you’re to dumb to use a PC.

I’ve taken an informal poll around my cube area, and everyone agrees: We long for the olden days in IT, the outlaw days. The time when we got things done.

This was back before Enron and it’s accounting fraud debacle which ended with Sarbanes-Okley lockdowns. In a nutshell SOX is required for all public company in the US, and allows strict auditing of all procedures. It’s the bane of IT, as it means that systems under one groups control usually can’t actually do the work needed, but have to call an entirely different group. To simplify it, it’s basically this:

Person A: Opens door, enters room. “Hey, it’s dark in here.”
Person A feels around and finds the light switch. Via candlelight they write the number of the light switch down on a piece of paper.
Person A opens a service ticket and assigns it to the Lighting Control group requesting that light switch 309189 in room 204, building D, 11th floor, be moved from the current state of OFF to a new state of ON. To clarify, the ticket also includes the reason for this: To correct an ocular error.
Several hours later, after a few back and forth calls, Person B comes to the room and flips on the switch, then leaves.

That’s it. Honestly. Very few departments escape the clutches of SOX - monitoring is the exception. I can run my tools with complete authority and act as I need to. This has made me remarkably more efficient then my coworkers. Which means I end up getting bored a lot, waiting for them to have someone flip the switch they need, so I can do my thing.

Before Enron, the Dot Com bubble, and all that jazz, IT had a Wild West flair to it. It was, as I like to say, the pre-nuclear days.

You were assigned a job and you did it - no matter what needed to be done to accomplish it. You ordered the parts, you wrote the software, you decided which vendor, you created the infrastructure, the documentation was yours - you did it all. In short, it was a bit like before the first nuclear bomb was tested.

Before that initial nuke test, nations (in my example, nations are the departments within IT) basically went and created weapons as they pleased. Nothing was to crazy - the damage was all contained locally. People outside the defense departments didn’t really know nor did they care what the governments were spending their money on.

Then, we went and entered the atomic age. We created nuclear fission. Enron faked data in their electronic accounting books. The outcomes were the same.

After the nuke, nations really started to watch what each other was doing, with a finer degree of precision then they used to. Sure, Russia created an X ton bomb, so we can create an X+1 ton bomb and we’re better. But now, Russia created an X ton bomb of material X, and where did they get those materials? And how did they interface the prelaunch thrust vectors to the launch boosters and other things I don’t know.

After Enron, SOX came along and said we really need to know exactly how you do things, and we want to make sure that the people in accounting can’t manually change the data unless they file tickets with the SQL people and the SQL people can’t do anything unless they ask the SOX compliance people and the SOX compliance people refer to some extremely thick 3 ring binder that contains, in excruciating details, how thing A is supposed to be done.

And before, during, and after the nuke test we had a shit ton of activists sounding the alarm about this new technology. I’m not against activism, if you know me I’m about as activistic as you can get - but at least attempt to be knowledgeable about what you’re protesting. These pioneer anti-nuke activists had little more knowledge about nuclear physics then you could glean learning that Peter Parker was bitten by a radioactive spider and then voila - he shoots webs. This was what they went on the airwaves and in the streets with, this tiny amount of knowledge that might be based on a bit of truth if you allow theoretical situations. They scared everyone and caused more harm then good.

In IT, we had the dot com bubble, which made the public aware of these ‘interwebs’, which made people see kids becoming millionaires overnight and people being paid $250,000/year to design web sites with AOL’s page designer. Well, as could be expected, droves of college kids with dollar signs in their eyes switched from History, English, and Mythology majors to CompSci and engineering. Man, they can’t wait to be 6 months into their degree then snapped up by a hot young startup for an easy 6 figures and a boardroom table that converts to a billiard table. These kids, with the tiny amount of knowledge that they gleaned from the 75 point font headlines in the World Weekly News about Batboy Creating Internet Startup thought this was the way for them to make a ton of cash. Almost all of them were wrong, and they did more harm to the industry then good.
Now, 8 years later, we can look back and laugh - those who were in before and are still in are seeing a spike for our skills. We’re getting in demand as the new school IT people switched back to their liberal art degrees, leaving us techies alone to bask in the electric sex that was the soft glow of our CRT screens.

But now we need to fill out 37 forms to do anything. We’re making more money, and doing less work.

I wish for an IT circa 1995. I want pre-nuclear technology.

So I’ve been debating on saying screw it, and turning the front page into a new blog, keeping it more local, and seeing if I can’t stir up a few things. So I might be doing that, I’ve been messing around with MovableType - once I can get the damn 500 errors to stop, I can check it out.

I’m also working on an article about how Google is the new Microsoft and alternatives for everything they have. Coming eventually.

I’m an incredibly more ornate writer then I am orator. I can’t speak at all. The words, I try, but they all seem to jam together and want to come out at once. So alas, I write instead of speak.

I’ve been soul searching. It’s an interesting ride - I’ve stirred up a lot of sediment that forgot about.

The above is the ad I was shown while checking my email today. In case you can’t read it, it says “Congratulations! - http://www.google.com/cmp?lex=&url - This is an ad with a complex URL [site:w3.org URL encoding] French”

Where does the link send you? To here.  Yes, to a Google search for “site:w3.org url encoding” and it’s in French.

While searching Microsoft.Com for ‘download powershell’, I came across not only the download I wanted, but a How To on how to download it. Says a lot about the user base, doesn’t it?