Results matching “admin”

I am in a position where I have 3 or 4 days each week with an incredible amount of downtime.  I also have a number of activities I'd like to complete.  Now these activities are of a more academic nature.  There are things I want to learn such as investing, system administration, and programming.  I also want to write about the things I've learned.  I've noticed (and people have pointed) out that I have a talent for technical writing.  In my communications with other people, I tend to write many paragraphs of text in a very methodical manner.

So, I have these things I want myself to learn and do, and I have the time to do it.  But what happens?  I find myself reading websites like reddit and commenting on people's facebook profiles.  I watch movies to while away the time.  Sometimes I will start reading up on a certain stock or an investment strategy, but after a while I veer off and go on to something else.  Other times, I will start looking at some pages about getting started in Python, but again I will veer off.  The end result is that I can go weeks without accomplishing anything new.

If I make a todo list, I will work on that todo list for that day.  However, I can't list everything on the todo list because once the list goes beyond something you can reasonably accomplish in one time period, it becomes a long-term plan.  Once it becomes a long-term plan, it falls to the wayside.  So, I've been thinking on this issue, and I've come up with a piece of the puzzle.  My focus is just too scattered to accomplish any of my goals.  Instead of making a todo list every once in a while when things pile up, I need to take my known downtime and make a schedule.   Assuming I have 10 hours available each of the 3 days, I can allocate a certain amount of time to each area I want to pursue.  The amount of time I allocated to each area can change over time, as long as I can maintain a habbit of allocating time each and every day (of downtime) to these pursuits.

My initial schedule contains two activities my friends know of, but I can't reveal to the world at large (client confidentiality and such).  I call these my "secret projects".

• 1hr = finance/investing research


• 1hr = studying for RHCE


• 2hr = studying and documenting certain aspects of system administration


• 1hr = working on secret project #1 (which also deals with system administration)   -- this is an ongoing project with no immediate end in site that I can see.


• 1hr = documenting secret project #2 -- this I hope to finish up within a few weeks of actually working on it.  Once this is complete, I hope to fill this slot with a programming concept I have in mind.

That would take care of 6 hours of my supposed 10 hours of downtime.  Downtime is also important to a well-balanced lifestyle.  I can take breaks between each task, or consolidate my breaks into watching a movie.  If I get really involved with any one task and run out of time for the others, that will still be more productive than spending 6 hours filling my time with 72 "5-minute activities".

I rarely venture out into politics, but recently I've just been annoyed at the number of things that are just being done wrong. For the longest time, I'd chock these things up as a symptom of Hanlon's Razor, but recently I've been wondering if something more was at play.

Anyways, today m favorite candidate (who is no longer directly in the race) recently held a conference and put out a statement I'd like to point out here. I quote the relevant parts below, but it's worth reading the message itself to get the full effect.

Quote One:

The system we have today allows a President to be elected by as little as 32% of the American people, with half of those merely voting for the “lesser of two evils”. Therefore, as little as 16% actually vote for a president. No wonder when things go wrong, anger explodes. A recent poll shows that 60% of the American people are not happy with the two major candidates this year.

----

The two parties and their candidates have no real disagreements on foreign policy, monetary policy, privacy issues, or the welfare state. They both are willing to abuse the Rule of Law and ignore constitutional restraint on Executive Powers. Neither major party champions free markets and private-property ownership.

Just for example, the current approval rating for President Bush has a 64% disapproval rating, giving him only a 32% approval rating (with 4% unsure). That means that despite a 64% disapproval, he would stand a good chance of getting re-elected if a 3rd term was allowed.

Quote Two:

This system is driven by the conviction that only a major party candidate can win. Voters become convinced that any other vote is a “wasted” vote. It’s time for that conclusion to be challenged and to recognize that the only way not to waste one’s vote is to reject the two establishment candidates and join the majority, once called silent, and allow the voices of the people to be heard.

And finally, my favorite, part, the action plan:

Since a principled non-voter sends a message, we must count them and recognize the message they are sending as well. The non-voters need to hold their own “election” by starting a “League of Non-voters” and explain their principled reasons for opting out of this charade of the presidential elective process. They just might get a bigger membership than anyone would guess.

Write-in votes should not be discouraged, but the electoral officials must be held accountable and make sure the votes are counted. But one must not be naïve and believe that under today’s circumstances one has a chance of accomplishing much by a write-in campaign.

The strongest message can be sent by rejecting the two-party system, which in reality is a one-party system with no possible chance for the changes to occur which are necessary to solve our economic and foreign policy problems. This can be accomplished by voting for one of the non-establishment principled candidates - Baldwin, Barr, McKinney, Nader, and possibly others. (listed alphabetically)

Yes, these individuals do have strong philosophic disagreements on various issues, but they all stand for challenging the status quo - those special interest who control our federal government. And because of this, on the big issues of war, civil liberties, deficits, and the Federal Reserve they have much in common. People will waste their vote in voting for the lesser of two evils. That can’t be stopped overnight, but for us to have an impact we must maximize the total votes of those rejecting the two major candidates.

For me, though, my advice - for what it’s worth - is to vote! Reject the two candidates who demand perpetuation of the status quo and pick one of the alternatives that you have the greatest affinity to, based on the other issues.

A huge vote for those running on principle will be a lot more valuable by sending a message that we’ve had enough and want real change than wasting one’s vote on a supposed lesser of two evils.

I haven't picked out who I will vote for yet, but I am now convinced it won't be for Obama of McCain.

Link 1: Ron Paul's Statement

Link 2: We Agree

My apologies to the non-nerds out there, but I just got this written and it needs to be shared.

Woo-hoo-hoo

Woo-hoo-hoo

Sun is up against the wall
stock prices doomed to fall
open-sourcing the OS away
maybe it will save the day
Innovation out the door
When they released Sun OS 4
no longer in a dot-com bubble
Getting into trouble.

Sun was gonna buy Apple
Sun was gonna sell the Cray
Sun was gonna dominate
Guess they didn't get very far
And UltraSparc family, is now the enemy
Moving to Intel line
And nothing, has been, alright

Since Netware, OS/2
Way before Fedora
Then came YouTube, and XP
And no ones using WebTV
The admins, in chat rooms
They say that Netscape is un-cool
But Sun is still preoccupied
With 19, 19, 1999

Woo-hoo-hoo

1999

Woo-hoo-hoo

Sun pushes their Java
They'll tell you every time
Dot matrix, floppies
Serial port console lines
Sell you a support plan
Not an automount fan
Linux is a just fad
Still uses their dot-plan

Where's the modem hand shakes on dialup lines?
And who are these Google guys searching their web site?
When did CLI, get a backspace?
What ever happened to gopher, and Mosaic
(On the Internet was)

Netware, OS/2
Way before Fedora
Then came YouTube, and XP
And no ones using WebTV
The admins, in chat rooms
They say that Netscape is un-cool
But Sun is still preoccupied
With 19, 19, 1999

Woo-hoo-hoo

Sun hates gcc, and g-n-u ld
When did compact flash replace Zip drives?
And when did Apple make a cell phone?
Please make this stop!
Stop!
Stop!

And bring back

Netware, OS/2
Way before Fedora
Then came YouTube, and XP
And no ones using WebTV
The admins, in chat rooms
They say that Netscape is un-cool
But Sun is still preoccupied
With 1999

Netware, OS/2
Way before Fedora
Then came YouTube, and XP
And no ones using WebTV
The admins, in chat rooms
They say that Netscape is un-cool
But Sun is still preoccupied
With 19, 19, 1999

I like to splurge on something once each year, typically a gadget.

• In 2000 I bought a Toshiba 1605 laptop.  I bought while on leave and took it with me to MCT and MOS training.  That laptop was pretty good at the time with 32MB of RAM that I upgraded to 196MB.  It had an 8GB hard drive running Windows 98.  It also had a built in modem that worked fairly well.


• In 2001  I bought a Sony MVC CD1000 Camera.  I had been working at Pennswoods for quite a while and I had no bills to speak of.  Money was no problem for me.   I also started up my business, signing a 5-year lease on a commercial building.  The next month, 9/11 happened and I was told to prepare for deployment.


• In 2002 I bought a Kyocera QCP 6035 smart phone.  During this year I also took a trip to Washington state for vacation.  This was a good phone.  It sometimes froze on me when I opened the flip, but it generally worked really well. It allowed me to combine my palm pilot and cell phone in one device, and I was all for that.


• In 2003 I upgraded to a Kyocera 7135 smart phone.  This was my favorite phone of all time.  Palm OS, clam-shell design.  What's not to love?  Apparently it can no longer be activated in the US because it does not have a tracking GPS built into it.  I was deployed at the beginning of the year and left the 6035 with my parents.  When I returned, I read reviews on the 7135 and got it within a month of my return.  If I could have this phone now (activated of course), I would still think of it as the better phone even though it lacks bluetooth support.  I have not come across a phone that I felt I would enjoy more (inside or outside my price range).


• In 2004 I was flat broke and bought Ramen noodles.  This was between deployments, between jobs, and I had serious car troubles.  It was a dismal time for me.  I spent each evening at a different house, moving from couch to couch.


• In 2005 I purchased an HP dv1000 laptop.  I tricked it out with a whopping 512MB of ram, 80GB hard drive, and extended battery (lasts 3+ hours).  I should also point out that during the summer of 2005, I was again broke. My business was my sole source of income and not doing as much as I wanted it to. However, everyone else I knew was broke, and we all enjoyed that summer playing pool, eating at Dennys, and taking road trips to Western PA, Eastern Maryland, and Southern Virginia.  I don't know how we afforded any of it.


• In 2006 I purchased a house.  Not exactly a gadget, but I believe it will outlast all of my other gadgets.  Business was doing a lot better for me during this summer.  Up until winter came, things were truly looking up.


• This year, the year of 2007, I purchased a xv6700.  This is a Windows PPC 6700.  It comes with 64MB of ram, has bluetooth, wifi, is evdo capable, and will take mini-SD cards.  It has a touch screen and a slide out keyboard that works really well.  This device is more of a computer than a phone, and in that regard works very well.  The phone side of it leaves a bit to be desired.  There seems to be a slight delay between when you press a key and when it updates the screen, which is a bit distracting when placing a call or entering your pin.  Otherwise, this is an amazing gadget.  The phone portion is vastly improved if you use a bluetooth headset.  Plantronic Voyager 550 is the one I got and unlike those earpieces that you corkscrew into your ear, I barely notice that I'm wearing the headset.  I linked to a video review that I would highly recommend watching even if you're not in the market for such a phone/ppc.  There are reasons I chose a phone that is more of a computer than a phone, and I will go into that next.

As you may have read, I am working for "the man", a big corporate entity in Virginia.  My main business has become a sideline endeavor for the foreseeable future.  I still have customers I support, and I'll still do a lot of the same stuff.  But, I'm not taking calls constantly for the business and not using my phone that much as a phone.  I'm shifting to work I can do remotely such as server administration, scripting, and device configuration.  Most of this can be done via web and email.  With an email/web/ssh capable mobile device, I can even handle some emergency tasks from just about anywhere.
On another note, not splurge related, I have finally been placed on Night One.  This is a wonderful shift that is basically 3-4 (alternating) nights each week.  I will always work Sunday night, Monday Night, and Tuesday night.  Every other week, I will work Wendesday night as well.  The shifts go from 6pm till 6am.  Once I am done at either Tuesday or Wednesday morning, I am off to do my own thing until the following Sunday night.  The long shifts sound horrible, but I much prefer the shorter work week (even though I might go home to do even more work, of a different kind).

Some of you may recall that in January I was planning to get  a job to supplement the shop's income.   At the time I was looking at a company in Hershey, PA that needed "weekend workers".  The company decided that they were only going to hire full-time people, and that opportunity  went away.

Since then, I've been searching around, submitting resumes, getting calls and emails from recruiters.  Some really interesting positions have been offered to me.. a lot of them for places 4-6 hours away.  I had one recruiter contact me in March with a position for Lockheed Martin that was really interesting.  The interview process went fairly well and things seemed promising.  After my interview with Lockheed Martin, they let me know a week later that their project has had quite a few delays and they probably won't be filling the position until July or even August -- however, they did feel I could handle the job and wanted to bring me on -- they just couldn't right now.

Then I stopped looking for a while because I started getting busy with the business.  Things started to peter out in June and I resumed the job hunt.  This time, I focused on  the more populated regions to the south of me.  I struck gold.

I got an email from a recruiter in Bethesda, MD concerning a job in Sterling, VA.  It was for a web hosting company, administering Linux and Solaris servers, as well as customer support.  The opening was for night shift -- 3 to 4 nights each, giving me 36 to 48 hours and either a 3 or 4 day weekend.

Before we could begin, I was giving an online exam to complete in order to test my Linux knowledge.  I felt that I had done horrible on this, but passed with a 3.7 (out of 4.0) scoring higher than 98% of all other test-takers.  This is quite encouraging.

The next step was a trip to Bethesda to go over the position and my resume in detail.  My resume was then submitted to the hiring company and a phone screening was scheduled.

The phone screening was a combination interview and rapid-fire verbal test by one of their Linux administrators.  This went fairly well and within a couple of days, I was scheduled for a "personal interview" along with another exam in Sterling.  This was on Wednesday.
The exam consists of them breaking a server and giving you a series of administration/troubleshooting tasks to complete.  They allot up to 6 hours, most pass it in 2-3.  The fastest time on record was 45 minutes.  I completed it in 1 hour.  I was then asked if I wanted to try my hand at the Level III test.

The Level III test was much more complicated and took me around 5 hours to complete.  But.. I did complete it to their satisfaction, even if some of my work was a bit "basic".

On Thursday I got a call that I needed to have one more interview with the IT Operations Director and we set this for Friday morning.  This interview was actually an interview where he basically tried to gauge my personality and determine if I was a good fit for the company.  He told me that he hadn't discussed my test scores with any of my previous interviewers yet so he couldn't make any decisions right then.  But he did say that "he liked me".

Then it was on to Bethesda -- we decided to preemptively fill out as much paperwork as we could since things looked like they were on the right track.  Then, on my drive home, I got the call.

I was hired -- it was official.  I had the second fastest time on record for the Level II, and had done fairly well on the Level III test. This placed me in a junior level Tier III position.  I can start Wednesday (the 27th).

To top things off, I did find a room for rent in Sterling for an incredible price ($450/month) that is only 2 miles from where I'll be working.  I don't know if I have this apartment yet -- I am going to call the guy again today to double check and then drive down this evening (he doesn't get home till after 6pm).  As long as it isn't a crack house or roach motel, I will go ahead and take it.  This way, I can bring my stuff down on Tuesday and spend the night for work on Wednesday.

Great times.

I was born sometime around 1981, not in the 1950s like some people assume. I make my abode in Everett, PA and I use the name of "John." However, online I am known as Squegie.

I grew up in an isolated farm area, and spent a lot of time reading books by JRR Tolkein, Isaac Asimov, and Douglas Adams. A LOT of time spent reading books. I also have always been fascinated by those whirring, beeping, blinking things that we know as electronic devices.

I can say without shame or reservation that I am a technology geek. I love playing with gizmos and gadgets. There's nothing more refreshing than the smell of rosin core solder in the morning. My "hobby" eventually led me to computers, from which there was no return.

I started out with a Tandy 1000 with a single 5.25" floppy drive. Not the classic Commodore64 that other people brag about, but still a nice little device. It wasn't long before someone mentioned "batch script" to me and I was hooked. I started writing these little batch scripts, and before long I was making a multi-disk menu system. (I had a games diskette as well as dos 3.2). From the bootup disk, you would get a menu. Hitting the desired item, you would be prompted for the correct disk. Insert that disk, it runs the program (in the case of the games disk, it would display another menu). When you finish the program, it prompts you for the main diskette. Put the main diskette back in, and it brings back the menu. True, everyone else was running Macintosh and Windows 3.11 at the time, but I had designed a truly user-friendly system that even my Mom could use.

It wasn't too much longer that I moved up to a discarded 286 from my Uncle. This has an 80mb hard drive. I setup a BBS and at night, I would disconnect the phone and one of my friends would call in. Oh yes, we were l33t in those days.

Through the course of high school, I started getting a massive collection of discarded computers and parts. I was fortunate enough to get into an Electronics program at BCTC (don't knock the web- site. I never finished it, and then they have only touched the index page since I left) before they stopped offering the electronics program. While there I got to play with all the toys of the trade.

More and more, I got away from electronics and into computers. I thought I'd balance out somewhere. At least, that's what I thought until I discovered Linux. I downloaded Debian 2.0.34 (kernel 1.40- 2.1) onto several floppys and installed it on my most powerful computer, a home-brew 386sx/25 with 7mb of ram (don't ask). I have never been the same since.

I've worked as a Network Technician for Cannondale Corp, a Network Engineer for Pennswoods.net, and then Access Lightspeed. I've also spent six years in the USMC, driving supply (wether it be food, mortars, ammo, snipers, or grunts) trucks through the town of Iraq. On my second trip to Iraq, I ran an Internet communication facility for Marines stationed in and around Fallujah, Iraq.

Nowadays, I survive by running my own computer consulting firm. We deal with computer repairs, network implementation, serverer administration, and assorted programming tasks. Recently, I took over the management of Access Lightspeed, a nationwide dialup Internet provider. I am also working heavily with wireless communication technologies in the 900, 2400, and 5800 Mhz unlicensed bands.

Not too long ago, I purchased an old doctor's office/house that I am remodelling as the Hogenmiller Professional Building. I have an apartment upstairs, while using the downstairs for my workshop and network operations center. I keep my house awash in half-assembled computers, odd devices, and an atari hooked up to my Sony Trinitron flat-screen tv.

Now you know as much about me as everyone else, perhaps more. I am amazed that you actually cared enough to read all that. It's so touching *snif*.

You know what's great about being me? The fact that I am listed as a cache administrator on at least one caching server that I don't maintain. I have contacted that administrator about this several times, but for one reason or another, I remain the administrator of record. This doesn't really bother me too much though, and every once in a while, I get an email like this:

Subject: what does this mean?



can't seem to retrieve http://www.pcusa.org/today/passion/inex/htm

-or-



Subject: error

Hi,
I don't know why they gave me your email address. I'm trying to reach site www.truaxtreasurer.com. They tell me domain doesnot exist. I got this right out the magizine we get. Gary





Subject: addresss

Why can't I reach this address? It was in the Altoona Mirror just today.



wwwbestwindowsintown.com



And I (being the sick bastard that I am) help these people. (The answers are: "site's slow, seems to be dns problems", "that site doesn't exist, the magazine is wrong", and "how about tyring www.bestwindowsintown.com instead?". The only one that wrote me back was the bestwindowsintown.com person, and they appreciated my efforts.).

This got me thinking... perhaps I could start a url assistance program? Then, I thought about it, and I realized it might be better if I wrote a program that integrated with the web browser and used advanced searching techniques to help the user find the web site they're looking for. I can even put a hook in it so that I can sell ad space and give the program away for free. It's totally ingenious and completely original.

Also, while I'm at it, I also realized that most people won't be actively seeking out such a program, so I should find ways to entice the end user to install the program without realizing that they are doing so. That way, they can transparently benefit from my efforts AND targeted advertising geared towards the end-users specific needs.




I am a genius.

It is a period of system war. User programs, striking from a hidden
directory, have won their first victory against the evil Administrative Empire.
During the battle, User spies managed to steal secret source code to the
Empire's ultimate program: the Are-Em Star, a privileged root program with
enough power to destroy an entire file structure. Pursued by the Empire's
sinister audit trail, Princess _LPA0 races ~ aboard her shell script,
custodian of the stolen listings that could save her people, and restore
freedom and games to the network...
-- DECWARS