April 13, 2007

The big news here today is yesterday evening’s car crash involving the New Jersey governor. The governor is badly hurt but we are told that his injuries are not life threatening but obviously life altering. He has a really tough year ahead of him, certainly. The governor was not driving at the time of the accident – a state trooper was and they were in a police vehicle, an SUV. (I point this out as it is possible that the governor would not have been hurt had they been using a well-handling car instead of a silly “sport” vehicle designed for soccer moms who don’t care about pollution.) The trooper was not at fault although there is some question as to whether or not the governor was wearing his law required seat belt. No one else in the vehicle was seriously injured.

The Catholic diocese of San Diego is being investigated for attempting to shield money in a bankruptcy hearing in an attempt to keep the money out of the hands of the people that were sexually abused by the church. In the article the author quotes someone as saying that the diocese’s accounting practices were byzantine! I wonder if anyone else gets the humour in this. Maybe the diocese will explain that their practices are Roman and that the Greek Orthodox’s accounting practices would technically be byzantine. It is the juxtaposition of linguistic and religious history humour that makes it so funny. I bet no one else thinks that it is as funny as I do.

In happy news: Evil corporation SCO is facing delisting from NASDAQ as they are not able to keep their stock at one dollar – the minimum allowed for trading under NASDAQ. Once a stock drops this low it is very difficult for it to come back and there is not much that SCO can do, besides starting to actually have a business model that works, that will get its price high enough to keep it afloat.

Not exactly breaking news but Germany is re-entering the space race after being the first into space with the A2 rocket in 1942. Germany has been involved in space exploration via its interest in the European Space Agency but now the nation is looking to return to space alone with an unmanned lunar mission.

I talked to the auto shop handling the BMW repairs today. There was a part supply issue and the car isn’t going to be done until Monday. So I have to extend the rental one more day. That isn’t exactly cheap but what are you going to do. At least there was no surprise damage to the BMW beyond the original estimate so we aren’t getting hit with any surprise charges. We were pretty worried about that.

I got to leave work at a reasonable time for a Saturday – about six thirty.  I was very happy about that.  It was a very busy afternoon but Fridays always are.  Nothing to complain about.  Considering all of the layoffs happening all around us just having a job is something to be thankful for.

I got home and Dominica was not in the mood to go anywhere and had ordered us a pizza from Nino’s in Harrison.  We ate pizza and watched the second DVD of Angel season four.  We are well into the episodes that Dominica has never seen.  I worked on recovering the SGL Podcast.  I discovered last night that all of my archives of the show that I knew about had disappeared and that the only copies of the show were the ones on OurMedia and the Internet Archive.  So I started downloading episodes so that I could store them locally as well.  I am very sad to report that it appears that three episodes are currently lost.  Episodes three, four and five were lost by OurMedia back when they had some serious retention problems and with my copies missing there aren’t any anywhere that I am aware of.  I do have CD and DVD backups at dad’s that just might contain copies of them but I doubt it and there is one computer that I don’t have here that could just possibly contain copies.  But those are long shots.  Most likely those episodes are just gone forever.  Fortunately they are early episodes with just me, no music and I wasn’t very good yet but still I am not happy to have lost them.  At least we have all of the Disney episodes.  Those would be awful to have lost.  But then I decided to check the AudioBlogger archives and all of my audio posts to AudioBlogger – which were many – are now gone.  Recently they claimed that they would be keeping our files up indefinitely but the very first time that I checked so that I could make copies of them the site and all of the files that all of us had there are just gone.  So there is a big chunk of stuff that I will probably never recover.  There was some good stuff there too like the “pick-a-little” girls from The Music Man singing after their performance at York Central with my cousin Sara and all of the “live” updates from Disney World that I did including the really good one from “France” when Dominica and I ran there in the rain.  I am very sad to have lost those.

Do IT: Career Growth – Growing Organically

I have found that there are two approaches to continuing IT career growth: Growing Organically (aka Pyramid Skills) or what I like to call “Going for the Jugular” (aka Needle Skills.) Both are viable methods for advancing your career and working deeper into the field.

Growing Organically means accumulating a broad base of knowledge covering many bases before moving on to more advanced learning within a specific area. This approach means that it will take some time before you have an opportunity to spend working with advanced skill sets but it has many advantages also. By growing your knowledge slowly and evenly you have the chance to get a solid appreciation across the IT disciplines. This is important because almost all job roles involve a tremendous amount of cross-discipline interaction and by understanding the technologies, functions, roles and challenges or different disciplines you will have more ability to work within your own as well as to work with people in other areas.

Taking the time grow your knowledge base, to ensure a thorough understanding of many discipline area basics will slow immediate career growth but provide a more powerful foundation for increased growth later in the career and provide more stability to allow for greater changes as the field continues to grow and change on its own. By accumulated a strong base of knowledge across many areas you will be much more capable of withstanding job changes, reassignments, role changes, etc. IT is a field that expects great changes over very short periods of time and specific skill knowledge is not generally as highly rewarded as broader knowledge and experience will be over time.

Taking the time to establish a firm foundation from the beginning will provide for safety as well as making continued education easier and faster in the future.

Going for the Jugular refers to specializing very easy on in a very select field of study. This could include XHTML Web Development, C++ Programming, Solaris Systems Administration, Cisco Networking, etc. This type of skill development allows for very quick development within a highly concentrated area of study and does not provide the obvious large base of knowledge that learning more organically will do.

I refer to this as developing “needle skills” because it is a slender vertically aligned knowledge set involved. Knowledge will go very deep very quickly but available job roles will be extremely specific. The obvious advantage to developing “needle skills” is that one can focus on areas of interest to the exclusion of other areas early on in the career and pay scales will increase more quickly during the early career years.

By going for the jugular there is a long term career consequence of reducing the ability to move into management as well as making only larger organizations with more specific available job roles good career targets. This cuts the potential job field almost in half in many cases.

Choosing between modes of study requires deciding between a tradeoff between short term financial gains and long term stability and greater total career growth. I recommend taking the time to become well versed in many disciplines – even those that are less exciting and interesting because the advantages of this method will become evident within very little time and can be critical during early career years when jobs are scarce and being picky about job role is not a reasonable option.

Do IT: Breaking In – My Home Network

To illustrate through some of my own experiences I wanted to talk about the network that I built at home in the late 1990s. When I was building my own home network it was very uncommon for people to have networks at home and “home networking equipment” was not yet available so I was working with small office equipment by default. I was on a tight budget so everything that I did had to be very inexpensive and practical.

Before I started building my home network the only piece of gear that I had was a Pentium based workstation without any Ethernet card. I had to add that myself. I bought a small five way hub and mounted it in the basement of my two story (three with basement) apartment. I ran CAT3 to each floor of the apartment. I put a workstation in my bedroom on the top floor. I added a large workbench in the basement.

I hunted around and found a shop selling used Intel 386 and 486 based Compaqs. I bought several and set three up on the metal workbench in the basement. I got an early copy of Linux and installed it on all three machines. Doing a Linux install was no small feat at the time. Even doing a Windows NT install could be incredibly challenging. Having the command line only Linux machines gave me a lot of opportunity to work with UNIX at home and made learning about IP networking much easier.

At the time that I was first building my educational home network the only Internet access that I was able to get reasonably was dial-up. Getting a serial/modem router was expensive and difficult at the time so I was forced to build my own. I was studying for the Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer certification at the time and Microsoft provided free time-limited copies of the operating system for use while studying. I used Windows NT 4.0 Server and Proxy Server 2.0 to build a high performance, caching, firewall/proxy that would manage all of the Internet access for the house while the caching proxy would accelerate the Internet access.

I was fortunate that this setup provided an “always-on” Internet connection at a time when the idea of having something like that at home was almost unheard of and all of the computers were able to talk to each other very quickly. Adding the caching proxy made a very big difference for web surfing performance. This was one of the best steps that I took during this period.

To encourage the use of the network for a wider audience and to provide artificial challenges for myself I built a MUD server that run on one of the faster Linux machines and could be accessed from anywhere in the house. I managed user accounts, tuned machines, did break/fix, installed new software, programmed, etc. This network, incredibly basic by today’s standards, was quite impressive at the time and gave me a significant advantage in interviews and on my resume. I was told my interviewers at the time that my initiate and willingness to spend so much time at home working with these technologies was one of, if not the, most impressive thing on my resume.

I found it additionally helpful that I was using commercial Compaq Deskpro desktops, even if they were old, because I would often compete for desktop support contracts and having worked directly with Deskpros put me above many people competing for the same jobs who had only ever played around with consumer PCs. This was a critical lesson for me. Consumer is not the same as commercial and companies know that. Shortly after that I decided to stop using desktop machines to work with as servers – which is still common today almost a decade later. I went out and bought an old Compaq Proliant server complete with RAID controller, hot-swap SCSI drives, etc. This took my home network to a new level or seriousness and gave potential employers something to really think about. There was very little hardware that I hadn’t worked with directly and when I talked about working with Windows NT 4.0 Server they knew that I meant on server class equipment in the way that big businesses were using it.

As the cost of older equipment drops and the cost of software continues to plummet (enterprise operating systems are very inexpensive today as are many commercial database products, firewalls, etc.) enterprising young IT professionals have greater and greater expectations to live up to. Today everyone, even non-IT professionals, have extensive home networks with switched Ethernet and hardware firewalls. Consumer class servers are being introduced by Microsoft to bring obvious data management features into the home. Media centers and the associated servers for them are beginning to appear in homes now as well. Everyone has high speed, always on Internet access. Now we expect to see even more from an IT professional’s home learning network.

A home network at first should cover basic systems and networking technologies.  As the student advances the network should advance to reflect the technologies that he or she is hoping to work with in the office.  The home network should be used as a means to push forward – to gain experience in areas where the traditional workplace may not be providing enough resources or opportunities.  Even if the career stalls the educational process should not and the home network can be used to leverage that education into a form of experience that can be invaluable when that same experience cannot be gained through traditional employment.

April 12, 2007: The Last Chapter of Slaughterhouse Five

It is so funny how Oreo really knows what his week schedule is like. He knows that he goes to daycare most days and is ready to go but on Thursdays he knows that he stays home with me and he just burries himself in the bed and doesn’t try to leave.

Kurt Vonnegut, renowned author of Slaughterhouse Five – the grim novel that gave us a vision into the horrors of the Dresden fire-bombing, died today at his home in Manhattan. He was 84 and a surviver of the Dresden bombing. Vonnegut studied at Cornell just around the corner from where Dominica and I lived in Ithaca. The main character of his greatest novel is buried in Rochester at Mt. Hope cemetery. And now he himself has died within site of my home.

It is a cold and rainy day in Newark today. I walked over to Food for Life for breakfast. Oreo is quite tired and sleeping soundly on the futon. Overall it is a slow day – very little going on.

I ended up doing lunch with Abdul at Food for Life later in the afternoon.  The rain was starting to stop around then.  I was back and walked Oreo at a quarter to three.  It was still cold and damp but we took a full turn around Military Park.

I got the chance to play a little Dragon Quest VIII before Min got home and I played a little while she watched.  She is really into the story.  It is a lot like watching a movie.  The story is very engrossing.  I have over fifty hours of game time in now so we are really entrenched in the storyline.

We ordered in from Nino’s in Harrison – we got real Italian tonight.  Pasta.  It was delicious.  We finished watching the first season of Bosom Buddies and then started watching the fourth season of Angel before heading off to bed.

April 11, 2007: To Do Today

Today was a really busy day. I started this morning trying to pay bills and trying to get new auto insurance this morning before I even left the house. Coincidentally, the insurance agent that I managed to reach in Orlando, Florida was actually a graduate of SUNY Geneseo and knew our address! Now THAT is a coincidence. I couldn’t believe it.

I got into the office and it was just “go go go” all day long. By two in the afternoon I was completely exhausted.

Dominica sent me this great link about a mystery cat who rides a bus in England to get to a fish and chips shop!

I got new car insurance today. We switched to Liberty because they specialize in BMW owners. We weren’t expecting a great rate but boy did we get one. We are saving a TON. And they operate in all fifty states so we aren’t in a position where we have to deal with switching insurance when we are in different locations. That was an issue before. Just being in New Jersey a significant portion of the time was causing major headaches. Now we don’t have to worry about that anymore. That is a lot of worry that I don’t have to deal with anymore.

I had to run out to the local Bank of America branch to cash a check today. So many errands had to be dealt with today. It is exhausting just trying to keep up with the regular day to day stuff. At least I am getting a lot done today.

Dominica and I finally decided what we are doing with some of our joint Christmas money. We have been talking about it for months now but just couldn’t figure out what we were going to buy. Originally we were going to get a Sony PS3 but then there weren’t any games available for it. Then we decided on a Nintendo Wii but Nintendo completely dropped the ball on that and didn’t keep manufacturing them in any volume so everyone stopped making games and now they have fallen by the wayside. What a bummer. We thought about getting a really nice 42″ 1080p LCD monitor for the living room but that is a lot of money and we don’t really need it yet as we don’t have any 1080p source for it – yet.

So we finally decided that we needed to get something to power the Totem speakers that we have sitting in the apartment. We had talked about bringing down the equipment from back home but that stuff is too much work and too old without a lot of features that we really want. So we finally decided to buy a Marantz SR-4001 receiver (yes, it is just a receiver but it is just for our little apartment.) It is a 7.1 receiver with HDMI switching, lots of digital inputs, upscaling, etc. It should meet our needs in our little apartment pretty well. A friend at work just bought one a few weeks ago too.

My quote for the day is from Ghandi: “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

I finally got around to getting back to the insurance company about the Motorola Q that was stolen back around November 17, 2006. I had tried to get it replaced back then but they needed information that didn’t really make any sense and I had to follow up to get a bunch of stuff for them. By that time and once I had dealt with Verizon over the whole issue it just kept getting pushed to the bottom of the stack of things for me to deal with. Eventually it just got forgotten about. So today, while doing tons of errands, I decided to get this taken care of as well. I am just knocking out “to do’s” today. I hate having so many little “things” hanging over me – even the simplest things can really cause you to lose “momentum” and get bogged down worrying about stuff that needs to be done. I especially hate things that need to be dealt with during the day because I always get busy and don’t get them done and then get home and worry about them but can’t do anything about them until the following day when I am busy again.

I have found that since switching to Zimbra for our email system it is easier for me to take care of things like this because it has a “notebook” or document management feature so I am able to collect information that I need and store it all in one place easily. That makes it easily to get a moment and jump onto a problem instead of deciding to work on it and not being able to find all of the information necessary.

After being on the phone for half an hour with the insurance place I found out that I really messed up and the Q is no longer replaceable and I have to buy a phone on my own now to replace it.  Argh.  The upside is that I am going to attempt to get a Palm Treo 700wx because the Q was crippled by being a “smartphone” instead of a PDA that it was mostly useless.  More like a Blackberry than something actually useful.  I need the power and control of a real operating system.  So I talked to someone at work who has a Treo and I think that that sounds like the way to go.  Silver linings I guess.

I got home at a decent time and we ran over to Food for Life for dinner.  I played just under an hour of Dragon Quest VIII and then we watched some Bosom Buddies.  Dominica went to bed and I worked on my homework for my RIT class.  That didn’t take too long and I was in bed before midnight.