Sunrise or Sunset?

Posted on March 16, 2011 by bluedepth

I feel like the answer really has more to do with which direction the largest body of water is oriented to my current position. In this case it would have to be sunset because Lake Michigan is to my west. Both are equally as important to witness so that you remain tethered to the real world and get to appreciate some of the inherent beauty in the world that is effortlessly free.

As for where to watch the sunset? I imagine if there was a lakeside gazebo or dining area that would be perfect. Sitting in a comfortable chair, eating delicious food and enjoying a great bottle of wine. Preferably there would be some perfectly placed clouds on the horizon so that the overwhelming brilliance of the sun won’t blind you. Then you can sit back and enjoy looking directly at it as it drops “into the water”.

Then after the sun is down, which is the first real treat, you really have to stay to watch the sky slip into gradual darkness. If you really wanted it utterly perfect there wouldn’t be any light pollution, the sky would be crisp and clear and the perfect capstone would be a meteor storm as well as a nice thick belt of Aurora Borealis. That would be breathtaking. The sunset, the meteors streaking through the sky, and the Aurora playing in the darkness.

Travel Woes

Posted on March 14, 2011 by bluedepth

I’ve been thinking about the places I’d like to go to this year. My work trip to DC is pretty much a foregone conclusion but I’ve been thinking about visiting my folks in South Carolina for Mothers Day. So I looked to compare three methods of travel and what I found was hilarious (all computations were for two adults):

By Air

ORD – CLT = $658.60
MDW – CLT = $658.00 on AirTran / $489.80 on Southwest, but Southwest only flies to Greenville SC, a two hour car ride from Rock Hill, SC.
AZO – CLT = $1123.40
GRR – CLT = $720.60

By Automobile

The trip is 736 miles each way, my Santa Fe gets 374 miles per tank, that’s nearly 2 tanks of gasoline. With an average cost of $3.60 per gallon that’s $71.28 per tank. Each leg of the trip is $140. Total is $280.
Trip time is 12h 31m.

By Train

Amtrak can get two people from Kalamazoo to Charlotte. They do it by sending us to Chicago, then DC, then Charlotte. It’s $678.00 and each trip takes 35h 44m!

So, with money being tight I have to be very picky about where I go and how I get there. For this plan, if it actually comes, the most convenient and cheapest by far is to use my car. The train prices and times were comically absurd and flying out of AZO? With prices like that, why do we have an airport even? It’s laughably bad.

If I Were a Teacher…

Posted on March 12, 2011 by bluedepth

Little Miss Chatterbox

I’d teach common sense. I’d teach practical knowledge and getting out of the classroom and into the real world is the most important thing anyone can do. I’d teach a lesson on “Fake It Until You Make It” and watch as people are thrown into the deep end and are forced to either sink or swim. I live with and work with people, in general, who *should* have a passion for learning and expanding themselves, bettering themselves. People who should welcome change with open arms and if something seems logical and right and worthwhile, to embrace it fully. I say *should* because for a great number of them, they are just like everyone else. They are change averse, they have worn a procedural rut into the ground and following it day in and day out is easy and simple and doesn’t require much energy beyond the basics.

I’ve found that time and time again I’m wishing that people would be open to classes like “Common Sense 101” and “Common Courtesy 101” especially in the workplace. There are certain things you do not do, certain behaviors you identify in yourself and then endeavor to change for the greater good. Sometimes it’s important to sacrifice a measure of pride, or a measure of willpower to make investments in other people so that you can come to depend on the relationship somewhere down the pike. It’s also vitally important to own when you’ve done something foolish, make amends and never do it again. In many regards a lot of this comes down to raw communication.

Perhaps the classes I should be teaching are “Communications for Information Technology Professionals 101”. 🙂

On Dancing…

Posted on March 12, 2011 by bluedepth

Valentine dance, school

I do enjoy dancing. I do it when I’m very intoxicated and almost always on my own. With other people I’m absolutely mortified and couldn’t / wouldn’t dance. I’ve been known to resist so much that I’ve dislocated the shoulders of people who thought all that was necessary for me to enjoy dancing was being pulled up onto a dance floor.

So yes, sometimes the music does move me, but it never moves me enough to be seen by other people. Remember that No means No, unless you have a fondness for dislocated shoulders.

Languages I Speak…

Posted on March 12, 2011 by bluedepth

Paris Exposition: Eiffel Tower and Celestial Globe, Paris, France, 1900

I can only truly speak English. I can muddle about with French and I can understand only a basic amount of German. I keep on having this fantasy that I’ll have enough money to plunk down on Rosetta and really learn French well, but then it struck me that even if I were to somehow acquire French as a true language, how would I use it? The nearest native French speakers are in Quebec or Montreal, cities very far away. I would love the idea that we could revisit Paris again and put my French to very good use, but I can’t justify a trip to Grand Rapids for fuel costs, how can I justify a trip to Paris?

If there was a language I would be proud to learn it would definitely be French. I feel very confident that my rudimentary French knowledge could serve me well, especially if I picked up something as supposedly advanced as a Rosetta training disc.

Instead of saying no, I’ll just state that it’s unlikely and leave it at that.

Worst Case Scenario / Sleepless in Kalamazoo

Posted on March 12, 2011 by bluedepth

My night was going very well. I was very pleased with how practically flawless my afternoon progressed. At work I have two very small computers in a very public setting and they are performing as usual, wonderfully. Around 2am I woke up with a start because a nagging feeling that I was forgetting something hit me square between the eyes in that fuzzy zone between being awake and just falling to sleep. I had exposed two of my machines into the cold dangerous world without getting their MAC Addresses or Serial Numbers!

In many ways my work computers feel a lot like beloved pets. I care about them and look after them, and in this case worry about their safety. They were rather far away and in a particularly exposed condition where it’s terribly infeasible to go to them, flip them over, and get the information off their cases.

ARD to the rescue! Once again Apple Remote Desktop saves the day and quiets my worried mind. I opened my MacBook, connected to my workplace VPN, opened ARD, found my two little ones happily chugging along and remembered that ARD has some rather good reporting features baked-in to the software. I clicked on the first machine’s icon and went to Reports. I asked for Serial Number and the MAC Addresses for both the Airport wireless network adapter and the wired Ethernet adapter. I did this for both machines and printed the results as ‘PDF To Evernote’. Now I have all the information I forgot to get earlier stuffed into my Evernote archive.

Now, if, light-forbid my two exposed machines get stolen I won’t be sitting there facing the police with my pants around my professional I.T. ankles utterly unable to conjure on the spot Serial Numbers and MAC Addresses.

Now perhaps I can get some sleep!

P2 or Not P2

Posted on March 10, 2011 by bluedepth

Today has been an odd silly day. It started out with an odd fanciful notion to investigate WordPress.org and possibly host it on a Mac Mini. My design was to create a workplace blog, theme it with P2 and whip it out on my coworkers and see how it worked for them. It’s not really a Wiki, we have that, and the Wiki software we use is Apple’s own that comes with their Server OSes, but the blogging component leaves something to be desired.

I saw WordPress.com pushing P2, a theme that fits into WordPress.com or WordPress.org and enables Automattic, the company behind WordPress to communicate more efficiently. My interest was piqued.

So I started with that original idea, then my assistant reminded me that I have a huge monster HP 1U server that I never use and it has Ubuntu on it. I had a little Eureka moment and decided I could work with that. I downloaded the WordPress.org software and went over the installation manual. I got everything edited and in-place and looking nice in the terminal window but couldn’t get the wp-admin/install.php screen to appear so I could finish the WordPress.org installation. I futzed and putzed and figured out I was missing some things, like a different kind of PHP, as well as PHPmyadmin. Once I added all of those various bits I tried it again. No dice. I finally figured out that when I created the “wordpress” MySQL database and user that I botched up the name and host information and didn’t see it until I blundered my way into PHPmyadmin. With that tool I fixed the problem and then everything was fine. I installed JetPack Plug-in, which promptly exploded in my face. JetPack needs to chat back and forth between WordPress.com and whatever machine you are installing WordPress.org on. This server here is firewalled on the wire and can’t be seen by any outside-to-WMU system, so that put the kibosh on JetPack. I still wanted to try P2, so I installed it and it worked like a charm. Then I ran into the same headache I always run into with these systems: SMTP. Here at WMU there is a huge barrier to access any network services, especially SMTP. So how could a WordPress.org P2 blog ever really work right if the server it’s running on can’t ever send out email properly? Oh, I tried to be clever and I failed. I tried to forge a CA, I tried lots of hints to try to masquerade into smtp.gmail.com using TLS, and I tried sendmail and postfix. Bloody hell. I would rather eat glass than have to see sendmail.cf again. I’d rather massage the tongue of a rabid wolverine than futz with postfixes main.cf file again! I mashed my head up against that brick wall until I took a step back and asked myself why the hell I was going to these lengths for something so tangential.

So then it struck me, if we’re using WordPress.com for the heavy lifting for most of our content management, why couldn’t I just create a new blog for our workgroup, slap P2 on it and carry on? That had its own problems. In the beginning I set everything up with Western Express and set my “Gravatar” to be associated with my work email address of andy.mchugh@wmich.edu. All fine and good until you try to use that address anywhere else! WordPress is picky. So I logged into WordPress.com thinking I could change my accounts email address in WordPress, as it turns out, you can’t. You have to go to Gravatar and change it there. It’s not so much change as put in a new address, switch it to primary, then rip out the old address. A lot of work for something that was supposed to be easy. Blargh!

So I got everything switched around and freed my work email address then re-approached WordPress as if I was a new user. I logged in using my work address (which is the most appropriate address for this pursuit) and created an account. I got the automated email verification message and clicked on it. WordPress refused with the error: “Could not create user” and so I emailed support at WordPress for help. Still waiting to get some TLC from the support people as of the writing of this blog-post.

Along with all of this I’m wondering if P2 will be well received? Will my coworkers see this as one more silly thing that I’m making them all use? I’ve pounded Wiki use into their heads, I’ve done a lot of things behind the scenes that none of them see now but will that will also radically change their working lives (for the better I assure you) and then I sit and wonder. I wonder if P2 is a solution that could work for us? If it works for Automattic, shouldn’t it work for us as well? I’m on the fence on this. I’ve whipped out so much new technology on these people, will they accept another massive change to how they communicate or will I be facing open revolt? I see this idea of mine shaped this way:

A private group blog that everyone can log into anywhere they are in the world, obviating the need to use any kind of VPN system as WordPress.com is available ubiquitously. It would enable people to hold online communications, post instantly like Twitter, post without limit to text (unlike Twitter), include rich content such as YouTube embeds and such all the while managing the conversations and using categories and tags to track different sections of our communication infrastructure. I imagine using P2 as I would have maybe used Google Wave if it was matured properly and supported by Google and not killed in its infancy. That we’d use several big tags such as “Donors” and “Help Desk” along with a constellation of other tags and not have to struggle with email distribution lists and missing information and delayed communications, all of that could be eliminated. On the flip side of that argument is “This is one more thing that you are forcing on us and making us learn.” I’m struggling with how P2 could fit in with our lives and whether this is a valid pursuit or just so much “chasing after the shiny”.

There are several of my coworkers that I’m nearly certain would go stark raving mad if I whipped just one more thing out on them. I just can’t deny the allure of all of these services, WordPress, DropBox, 1Password, Evernote… that their ubiquity online and their omnipresence in the mobile computing sphere is terribly attractive to me. That a workforce that I deeply suspect will be forced to become more mobile and nimble almost demands that I continue this breathless rush towards the bleeding edge.

So what I really would like is to find anyone other than Automattic who found P2 to be useful. It would gratify me immensely to know that P2 was a ‘game-changer’ and serve also as confirmation that I am on the right path and that this whole charge towards shiny actually serves a true and honest business purpose beyond my wanderlust for novelty.

As always, I would really love people to comment, I’m looking for evaluations, opinions, you name it, every bit helps. I thank you all in advance. 🙂

Robin Hood's Barn

Posted on March 9, 2011 by bluedepth

Yesterday I attended a meeting with other like-minded individuals and this merry band of people got to discussing password management. There are a lot of different (and all equally valid) ways of managing your passwords and as I listened to some of these people describe their solutions it struck me, again, just how good I really do have it. I have to admit that once I switched over to 1Password and integrated it with Dropbox I’ve been spoiled rotten. The solution is such a perfect match that I stopped thinking about password management altogether, freeing me to concentrate on other things.

Then I heard about some of the things that my work peers have elected to do. One of them manages it with a password-protected Excel Spreadsheet and then uses Sysinternal’s SDELETE program to securely delete the file after he’s done using it. I sat there, stunned as I followed his description of the procedure that he has to follow and grinning-on-the-inside as others around the table brought up a series of criticisms of his procedure and pointing out pitfalls and the like. I sat back marvelling at 1Password, how I didn’t have to worry about any of this, and I discovered in that moment a hidden value to 1Password that just reinforces the perception of value that product has for me – I don’t have to think about this stuff anymore! It saves me time, brainpower, and attention-span. Just for that I couldn’t imagine not having 1Password in my digital life.

All along this meeting I heard comments peppered throughout that all had to do with a paranoid fear of security loss by taking advantage of cloud services. This isn’t the first time I’ve come across this, it was the central axis that featured prominently in my Webmail Plus v. Google argument that I so spectacularly lost so many moons ago. People fear the cloud. They fear what these companies will do with the data once it’s entrusted to their care. This has always mystified me and left me speechless. Now, don’t get me wrong here, I’m not saying that it’s wise to simply put 50,000 Social Security Numbers in a plaintext file and send them right up to Dropbox, hell, I wouldn’t do that with Amazon S3 service or any other provider for that matter. But what I would do, and perhaps this is what boggles my mind, that people don’t already do this, is encrypt the data using AES. With the data in this format, even if the file security is compromised, without the password, what they have is just as good as noise.

This is where 1Password is great, the central database file is encrypted using AES, so I can put it up on Dropbox and then access it from every device I use that can reach the Dropbox service! This has saved me innumerable hours and a world full of worry. Even if one site is compromised I don’t have to worry because each site has its own unique 16 character random password assigned to it and managed through 1Password. I don’t even care if a site forces me to regularly change my password, because every new password will be a random 16 character entry from the password generator that is already in 1Password. I can’t express how much time, energy, and attention-span I’ve been able to save with using this product. When something like 1Password is built, and built well, I can’t help but rave about it. Everyone should be using this software, it would make everyone so much more secure.

Bluedepth's Journal

Thoughts & Opinions

Author Archives: bluedepth

Sunrise or Sunset?

Travel Woes

If I Were a Teacher…

On Dancing…

Languages I Speak…

Worst Case Scenario / Sleepless in Kalamazoo