Sheep Guarding Llama

Spy at Harrington High is a really great, technical blog post that goes into many of the technical details and some of the background on the case in the Philadelphia area’s Lower Merion School District’s spying on minors.  The article details some of the important aspects of the case including that if students did not allow the spying or made any attempt to block the spying that they would be expelled from the school – meaning that the school was additionally threatening them with a loss of education rights in addition to their other crimes.  It also talks about how the software used posed additional security risks, how the software caused police to enter an innocent home looking for criminals, how students trying to use necessary educational tools would have their personal computers taken from them by force, etc.  The level of criminal and abusive behaviour being documented against this school district is unbelievable.  Fortunately the FBI is not investigating but as almost everyone discussing the case keeps mentioning – no one is doing the necessary digital forensics here to ensure that the school district is not destroying evidence to protect itself.

I worked from home this morning.  At ten I had my Virtualization webinar with CDW and SpiceWorks.  I was one of the presenters – not the main one but I did the bulk of the question and answer bit at the end.  It was fun and I think that the information presented was pretty useful for those in attendance.  I do wish that we had had more time for the Q&A though as there were many people with good questions who did not get a chance to have them asked and discussed on the call.

This was my second time doing an online webinar with SpiceWorks.  The last one was on backup and was a panel discussion.  Nice to do some different styles of talks.  Good experience and exposure for sure.

It is really cold today, there was a tiny bit of snow in the air now and then today but nothing on the ground.  Way too cold for Texas, though.  Ugh.  We didn’t sign up for this.  It was supposed to be warm!

Dominica made a late breakfast for me that I ate while I was on the webinar and we skipped eating lunch.  After the webinar was over I talked to dad on the phone for an hour or so and then drove over to the office to work for the rest of the day.

I got home this evening at a reasonable time, just a little after six, and we just stayed in and relaxed this evening.  We watched The Suite Life on Deck and I hung out with Liesl.  Dominica cooked dinner at home.

UPS delivered some new books for Liesl this evening.  We got two sets of Sandra Boynton books that she loves.  We also got the latest Wiggles DVD.  Liesl immediately wanted to watch that.  She is getting so much older – now she can pick out the Wiggles and decide that that is what she wants to watch even when it is a video that she has never seen before.

So the new DVD, Hot Poppin’ Popcorn, a circus themed video from the Wiggles is utter garbage.  We had high hopes as the last four videos from the Wiggles have been great.  Let’s face it, we bought the DVD on release day via Amazon PreOrder.  Dominica, using my account, was the very first (and currently only) review on Amazon too.  The video is actually painful to watch.  The Wiggles have gone backwards to their old, cheap sets and the entire video is all shot in one round set with all of the dancing being just the Wiggles walking in a circle.  Really?  How could the Wiggles make this garbage.

The music in Hot Poppin’ Popcorn is pathetic too.  The Wiggles used to be known for catchy tunes but even Liesl couldn’t stand this and wasn’t able to keep watching it at all.  The circus theme was not a smart one – who goes to or likes the circus today?  The circus is creepy as it is.  The special guest that they got for this video, Jamie Redfern, is super creepy looking too.  None of this is good for children.  This might be a new low for the Wiggles although much of their really old stuff was really bad too.  We couldn’t help but wonder if there is some lack of funds for the Wiggles and they are reduced to doing stuff like this rather than the quality stuff that they used to produce.

It was a very quiet evening.  Liesl stayed up very late and could not fall asleep.  Dominica and I were ready to pass out by the time that Liesl finally went to bed.

Has anyone else noticed that there is not a Kindle application available for the newer BlackBerries?

Tomorrow I will be speaking on a virtualization webinar being presented by SpiceWorks and CDW.

Oreo had a really restless night – he is having a really bad reaction to his grass allergy and he was up much of the night itching.  That, of course, made me have a restless night as well.  So around seven I decided to just get up even though I had not had enough sleep yet.  I gave Oreo a bath in the hopes that the soap and water would help to wash away the grass oils and make him less itchy.  He has been needing a bath anyway so it was good that I got it done.

I found out this morning that Final Fantasy XIII is due to release in North American on March 9th, just around the corner and just in time for me to put in as my birthday wish!  It will be a few weeks later for my actual birthday but I don’t have any spare time to play anything before March 9th anyway.  In fact, I don’t have a spare moment free until April!

I got ready and made it off to work before Dominica or Liesl got up this morning even though I was running fairly late.

Work isn’t so bad today.  Maybe it is just Monday.  It is colder today, though.  Yesterday it was seventy two degrees in Houston and rainy.  That is some nice weather.  When I walked out the door and got hit by “summer” air I was shocked.  Today, in Irving, it is barely hovering above freezing and tonight we are expected to have a little snow again.  So much for warm Texas weather.

We did get called from our real estate agent that someone is scheduled to look at our house in New York tomorrow.  We don’t expect anything since no one who has looked at it thus far has shown the slightest interest.  But at least someone is going through the house.  You have to have foot traffic if you are going to get a nibble.

Today Dominica assembled our new television stand for the living room.  The television has been on the coffee table since we got it and that is not the best use of our space or furniture.  So now we will have a real coffee table and will have a stand on which to put the television and inside of which we can hide the PlatStation 3.

Our project this evening is to go suit shopping for me.  I need a suit for Andy and Miranda’s wedding which is less than two weeks away in Las Vegas!  We went to Men’s Warehouse and ended up spending the entire evening there.  It was two hours or more of suit shopping.

In the end we ended up buying three new suits plus shoes, shirts, ties, etc.  It was a rather expensive evening.  But I really do need some suits so this is good.  Not a great time to be spending the money but with Andy’s wedding in less than two weeks and several meetings coming up in Philadelphia in the very near future it just needed to be done.

After our shopping was done we went to Boston’s for pizza and their “cactus cuts” which are chipotle spiced fresh potato chips – they are amazing.  I can’t believe that “chipotle” was not in Chrome’s dictionary.

After dinner we just went back to the apartment and watched a little bit of Primevil which in its third season continues to get weaker and weaker.  It is no wonder that the show was cancelled.  It is too bad as the idea in the first season was so good.  But throughout the third season they keep losing the main characters and the show becomes a completely different one and all of the characters become flat and boring and all of the meaningful character interaction and relationships come to an end and the show becomes a meaningless action show that doesn’t go anywhere at all.  Oh well.  The writing was never that good so the loss is only so great I guess.

I got up around eight this morning.  That was a ton of sleep.  I am feeling much better today.  That was really scary yesterday.  You don’t realize how terrifying it is to not be able to sleep until you are facing a massive stretch of time where dozing off could be fatal.  Suddenly the ability to safely fall asleep at any time because a rather important life feature.  The feeling is not completely unlike being held underwater.  You know that you are okay for a minute or two but knowing that if you don’t figure out how to get to the surface in that amount of time you will start to panic and eventually drown.  That’s the general feeling that you get not being able to get to a CPAP when you have central sleep apnea.  You know that you have to keep yourself awake “or else” and the difficulty staying awake goes up exponentially each hour.  Here are some interesting facts on sleep loss.

I worked this morning and then at ten I showered and got on the road around eleven to go to get Brian from Houston Hobby Airport.  His flight actually got in almost half an hour early so he had his luggage and was waiting for me when I got there.

We went out to Panera Bread for some lunch but I got paged out and we had to run back to the Grices’ so that I could work for a little bit.  It did not take too long, maybe half an hour.

After that we loaded up the X3 and drove up to north Houston to take Brian to his hotel.  The trip ended up taking much longer than we had expected.  We were hoping that it would be just forty-five minutes or so but traffic was horrible and we were creeping along very slowly once we passed downtown.

In addition to bad traffic we also got caught by the BMW’s GPS system not having the address to which we were headed and Brian’s iPhone pulling maps from Google Maps sent us miles past our destination and dropped us off in the middle of nowhere.  Luckily Jen knew the hotel and had found it without a problem and was able to direct us there easily.  We just lost about an hour due to traffic and bad directions.

The hotel, the Baymont, turned out to be really nice.  We could not believe how nice it was considering that it was only $39/night!  What a deal.  We were worried that it was not going to be very nice but this was great.

Brian, Jen and I talked at the hotel for a few hours and then decided that we were hungry and drove across the street to Waffle House to get some food.

After our late lunch or early dinner I dropped them off at the hotel and I drove back down to League City to pick up Dominica, Liesl and Oreo.  The drive back down was plagued with traffic congestion as well – I have no idea what was going on, there was nothing blocking traffic ever.  It just appeared to be lots of people driving really slowly.  So it took me an hour and a half to get back down to League City as well.

Dominica was mostly packed so we loaded up the car and left in around an hour to drive back up to Irving.  All in all I am driving about nine hours today.  Quite a significant amount of driving for one day – especially when I am so tired.  My weekend turned into a rather major loss in general, here are the stats: fourteen hours of driving (just me, another three hours of Dominica driving), another fourteen hours of attempting to get a CPAP so that I could sleep during which time I was pretty much delirious, fifteen hours of sleep.  That pretty much covered the entire weekend.  Add in the few hours that I spent working with Brian and Jen and that was it.

We got back to Irving around one in the morning.  We were really tired when we got back.  We pretty much got straight off to bed as soon as we arrived.

We arrived in Houston around one in the morning this morning after our long drive down from Las Colinas.  We were about an hour away from the Grices’ when it occurred to us that we had forgotten to pack my CPAP.  Well this is a major catastrophe.

I absolutely need a CPAP in order to sleep.  It is actually quite dangerous for me to attempt to sleep without my CPAP as I could very easily stop breathing during the night.  So I had to stay up all night working in the hopes that Dominica would be able to go out and find a CPAP in the morning in the Houston area.  If we fail to do so she will need to drive us back to Las Colinas pretty much first thing in the morning.

To make the day even more challenging I have Linux server patching to do that fortunately I can do just about any time so I started doing around two thirty in the morning, I have seven o’clock deployments to be done and I have my final paper for my master’s class at RIT that is due to be handed in today.  So all of that has to be done while I get no sleep and possibly drive back to Las Colinas which takes about five hours.  One way or another it is going to be a pretty long, crappy, exhausting day.

Dominica stayed up late doing research on where to buy a CPAP in the Houston area.  Our plan is for me to stay up all night and to do as much work as possible to get it out of the way in the hopes that I will get to go to bed later on in the day.  Then, first thing in the morning, Dominica is going to get up and attempt to track down a place that will sell us a travel CPAP.  If we can get that we will run out and buy that right away and then I will get to go to bed in the middle of the day.  If we are unable to find one then we have to turn around and drive back home straight away in the morning so that I can get back to my CPAP in Las Colinas.

The night actually went by pretty quickly for me.  It was probably two in the morning when Dominica and Liesl finally got off to bed.  I set straight off to work doing my Linux server patching that had to be done today and then to work on my final paper for my Clinical Information Systems class at RIT which is due today.  That took all night and I was just wrapping up around six thirty this morning when I got paged out to go deal with a server.

I managed to get a jump start on my morning deployments as well.  It was a very productive evening and a great use of the time.  Today was going to be a really tough day but I managed to eliminate all of that extra work that I would have had to have done all throughout the day by a little after seven in the morning.  There was a lot of other work that I would have liked to have gotten done but I was so delirious by the time that I was done with what was mentioned that I could not possibly have done anything further.

I got most of my work done by eight when Dominica got up.  I was pretty much delirious already from a lack of sleep.  Dominica started calling around to places like CPAP.com to see what they could do to get me a CPAP but no luck.  So we had to wait until the next places opened up around nine.

What we learned at nine is that the state of Texas has, in their infinite wisdom and disregard for the safety of their citizens, classified a CPAP (a simple air compressor) and the plastic tubing used as a facemask as controlled pharmaceutical devices!  Talk about a state being bought out by the medical industry!  So now to get this absolutely necessary medical equipment one must get a prescription.  But, of course, prescriptions normally would come from a specialist as normal doctors are not equipped to know how to diagnose and recommend such things.

The problem with the CPAP is that it is absolutely necessary equipment for people like me who have central sleep apnea that can be triggered by traditional sleep apnea (bi-direction, in my case, meaning that my throat closes off as I inhale and exhale.)  Central sleep apnea means that if I stop breathing naturally that even if I can catch my breath that my brain is likely to just stop trying to breath and I will suffocate.  So having the CPAP is completely necessary to keep me alive.  I have not slept without it in over five years and if I don’t have it I do not dare fall asleep.

If we were in NY we would have just run to the store and picked one up.  But in Texas we had to run to urgent care, wait for a few hours, and finally get a prescription.  Of course the script was just the doctor writing up whatever I told them to write up so the Texan claim that this is done for “my safety” is obviously a lie since you can’t get a meaningful script for a CPAP in an emergency.  All the Texan law does is cost me an extra $105 and several hours and put me at extreme risk.

So we got the script and called the only CPAP dealer in the entire Houston metro that we could find that was both open today and had anything in stock.  We had them stay open late as it was an emergency and we drove for an hour and a half to get from urgent care to the CPAP dealer where we had to spend double the normal prices to get a CPAP.  Texas has really worked out how to milk this process!

It took another few hours to get the CPAP after we got completely lost trying to find the only dealer that was open.  The CPAP that we ended up getting, for $650 instead of $235 online, is pretty nice and a massive improvement over my old one.  The new facemask is quite a bit nicer too.

So, after fourteen straight hours of trying to deal with getting me a CPAP and some way to sleep we finally had a solution.  We headed back to the house and grabbed Jack in the Box on the way because I had not eaten in almost twenty four hours.  JitB does breakfast all day long which is really cool.  I have never eaten at JitB before.

The number of things wrong with how Texas deals with CPAPs is really astounding.  The level of risk that they put people at is insane.  It is only because we are relatively affluent, have a large amount of information about my CPAP (I knew the prescription details that were necessary, for example,) that it happened on a Saturday and not a Sunday and I had a spouse who was able to drive me everywhere that I needed that I was able to get a CPAP at all.  Any one of those factors being different and we would have been in an unsolvable situation.

Houston is the sixth largest metro area in the United States and for a city of this size to not have a way for a very common medical emergency to be fixed on a weekend is unthinkable.  Even as it was by the time that I needed to go see a doctor I was far too tired to drive safely.  One of the problems with CPAP emergencies is that the person being affected by it is not in pain but becomes rapidly unable to make decisions, drive, maintain their sanity, etc.  Once I can’t get to a CPAP a clock starts ticking and after roughly forty-eight hours I simply become too tired to keep myself awake any longer and I die.  Texas seems to think that doing this to me is more important than letting small air compressors fall into the wrong hands.  They claim that the law is there because some people would buy CPAPs and kill themselves by setting them up wrong.  So instead they decide to put my life and many other innocent peoples’ lives at risk rather than letting someone hurt themselves with it.  Thanks Texas.  I see where your priorities are.

The person getting a CPAP in front of me at the dealer said that they had almost died that day trying to drive around to get the CPAP since they were so tired that they couldn’t drive and didn’t have someone to drive them like I did.  So Texas is putting other drivers’ lives at risk too as CPAP owners desperately try to get a way to keep themselves alive.  Of course, deaths caused by sleep apnea and driving deaths caused by the Texan government putting CPAP owners at risk don’t show up statistically in that way.  So they conveniently put those of us at very high risk who don’t statistically show up as being “their fault” while letting an extremely tiny minority of people who do show up in the statistics as hurting themselves with a CPAP that they obtain in other ways other than through appropriate channels.

To add insult to injury Texas claims that they must protect CPAP owners from themselves so it is illegal for CPAP owners to be told how to operate the CPAPs that they have to pay a fortune to buy.  The whole law is there to keep us from hurting ourselves because only trained professionals are supposed to set up a CPAP for you.  Of course, when I got my first CPAP, the company that sold it to me wanted to make more money so they got the insurance company to pay for a C-FLEX over a standard CPAP which costs more.  They then set it up as a C-FLEX rather than in CPAP mode, even though the original prescription was clear on it being a CPAP, and I almost suffocated because the machine closed off my throat and I didn’t get any air.  So, in my case, the law in Texas not only puts me at the insanely obvious risk that they did today but also puts me, and thousands of other apnea sufferers, of a technician setting up the CPAP incorrectly.  So as unlikely as both scenarios sound, both have now happened to me in the course of my five years with my CPAP and they have only happened just twice because I learned how to set up the original CPAP myself and made sure that it was correct after that.

I was unable to go straight to bed when we got back as my final for RIT was due today and Dominica had not had a chance to proof read it yet since we had this emergency going on.  So she read it through and I made the necessary corrections and got it submitted.  I am all done with that class now.

So I went to bed around five and slept for several hours.  Oreo snuggled with me.  I slept pretty much solidly until around ten or eleven o’clock.  Then I got up for about two hours and watched Starstruck with Dominica – a Disney Channel original movie.  Then it was back to bed for me.

In the morning Brian is flying into Houston’s Hobby Airport on Southwest around eleven in the morning so I am driving up there to pick him up.  I need to be up working before that.

The new CPAP works well and I like it a lot better than my old one.  This one is going to live in the car.  One for the house and one for travel.  Much safer that way.  The risk of not having one available and working at all times is just way too great and far greater than we had realized.  We had never heard of not being able to just buy one before.  My dealer in NY had even offered to just overnight the CPAP that I needed to me but that would not have arrived until Monday and that would have been too late.

I woke up a little early this morning and got a jump on the day.  If I manage to get up and get out the door in the morning before Dominica and Liesl wake up then it only takes me about one hour to leisurely get ready and get to work – and I arrive at work just five minutes later.  Today I was up at seven and, even after taking Oreo on a longer than usual walk, I was to the office by a few minutes after eight.  If Liesl is awake before I leave it easily takes another hour to get out of the house.  I like seeing her in the morning but she cries when I leave and makes me very sad.  Sometimes sneaking away early just works out better.

With the extra time this morning I got caught up on SGL.  Finally.  Now to get to work on my paper for RIT.  That is going to be my big project.  That is going to be extra tough as I have very little time to sleep tonight between driving to Houston tonight and then having to start work at seven tomorrow morning.

To make things harder at RIT, and this seems to happen each class that I take there, I have very little feedback on my work coming up on the final.  I have not gotten feedback on my midterm or over half of my weekly coursework or my last reflection paper yet.  Not that I am concerned about my work on any of them but it means that I am doing my final mostly blind.

The major news today is that Lindy Matsko and the Lower Merion School District near Philadelphia, PA got caught using district funds to buy laptops, supposedly so kids could stay connected to school even when home, so that they could watch children in their bedrooms at home.  The school got caught when Lindy decided to yell at a boy for his behaviour at home and claimed that she had taken photographs of the boy doing “inappropriate things” in his bedroom.

The thing about pedophiles, I guess, is that they aren’t very smart.  So Lindy and the Lower Merion School District are now facing some pretty insane federal charges from some pretty irate parents and teens.  They are now looking at a minimum of eighteen hundred accounts of everything from invasion of privacy, violating constitutional rights and, of course, collecting child pornography is a real possibility (or at least the attempt to collect it.)  This is a major embarrassment for the state of Pennsylvania and the entire US education system.  Not to mention a sickening display of felonious behaviour.  How people like this aren’t caught before being allowed to work around kids is unbelievable.

If anyone ever wonders why Liesl isn’t going to public school, now you know.  This person, Lindy Matsko, beyond being sick and needing to be locked up forever, is clearly a complete idiot and having a person like this be in charge of educating anything smarter than a snail is a serious educational oversight.  What possible educational advantage does having this person running the school serve?  I realize that Lindy is likely the scapegoat for a child pornography ring being run by the school administration or some other seriously nefarious activity – someone had to approve the purchasing of eighteen hundred overpriced Apple laptops – but still, getting into that position isn’t one that any halfwit would make the mistake to do.  Maybe Lindy needs to take an anonymous suitcase and embark on a trip to China to start a pop singing career.

Today was slower than the rest of the week.  Thank goodness.  Final a chance to catch up a little bit.

I found out this afternoon that I get to take a Red Hat Architect training class.  That is pretty cool.  I have not had training from work in a few years.  Nice to take a break and take a class now and then.  Not a real class where I get to go somewhere, just one where I have to take it from my desk but better than nothing.

I completed writing another article this afternoon although it still needs to be proof read and edited.  A lot of work completed though and one less article rattling around in my head that I am trying to hold on to before forgetting what I might have wanted to have said.

I got a start on another article as well which I really hope to be able to have done by the middle of next week.  This weekend is going to be crazy so there is not all that much that I can do before Monday and writing during the week is pretty hard although Dominica’s idea of having me use the bar stool as a mini desk will help quite a bit.

I managed to finish all of my reading for my final paper so I will be able to get to work on it first thing tomorrow while thinking about it on my drive down to Houston tonight.  Work slowed down this afternoon which was great.

At just a little after six I was able to leave the office and head for home, on foot of course.  Dominica should be ready to go when I get there.  We are driving right down to League City tonight since we missed Madeline’s birthday last weekend.  It will be nice to do something different this weekend.  We haven’t been down to League City for several weeks.

It will not be a relaxing weekend for me but getting a jump on the travel by getting out of the office at a good time tonight is going to make it far better than it usually is.  Driving down to League City on a normal, two day weekend is a ton of driving for very little time spent down there but getting out early makes it not too bad.

This is our last chance to make it down for several weeks.  Next weekend I have to be in Austin and Round Rock and then the weekend after that Dominica, Liesl and I will be in Las Vegas for Andy and Miranda’s wedding!  Then back to Houston not long after that.

I am posting early tonight as I leave the office so that I can close out the post and get a jump on the weekend.