Techno babel, decoded.

Has someone done something nice for you?  Random act of kindness or inspiration that gave you a little pick me up when you needed it?   Did they help you overcome one of life's many hurdles?  I'm going to say something weird, don't worry about paying them back for their kindness or generosity.  PAY IT FORWARD!.   Help someone else out in their time of need.  Smile at someone who is frowning.  Compliment someone who looks like they are having a bad day.   A little bit of kindness can go a long way.  Recently I had a dog who was shot by a crazy neighbor and he had to have a leg amputated because the femur was shattered at the hip joint.  I didn't have the money for the surgery.  We started a fundraiser to help us cover most of the cost of the surgery and we raised a little over $3500 to cover most of the surgery.  We still had about $2000 in Emergency and post care bills, but we were able to cover that.  I now share stories about other people and their situations and wh

The Heartbleed bug has been in the news a lot lately, and there are a lot of technical and poorly worded non-technical explanations.  So here is a brief summary of what you NEED to know. The vulnerability affects versions of OPEN SSL which means that sites containing HTTPS may have been affected.  (Not all sites use open SSL.) For a list of sites that you NEED to change your password on, please visit.  http://mashable.com/2014/04/09/heartbleed-bug-websites-affected/ If you have a Cisco home router check this site to see if you are affected. http://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20140409-heartbleed The bug basically was a vulnerability in an ongoing communication timer to make sure that the connection stayed open.  It allowed nefarious individuals to use this timer to steal data in small packets over time.  The length of time this vulnerability has been on the market is scary.  Please change your passwords soon. If you need a way to ke

The journey of our lives is never quite what we expect.  All of us have encountered a myriad of pitfalls, speed bumps, and other hazards as we try to make a living and work on having a career and family.   I've fallen victim many times when too many things go wrong, but the one thing I can control is how I act and react to the challenges I encounter.  I do my best to find the positive in everything even when it is sometimes impossible, but I try.  I have found that I am much happier focusing on the positives in life rather than the negatives and the only thing I have changed is my perspective. Sure it sounds easy to say. Just think positive!  The reality is that it takes a lot of conscious, continuous effort to truly change your outlook on life. (Also good e-mail and social media filters help!) But the effort is worth it.   Your biggest impediment to happiness is looking at you from the mirror.  Stop beating yourself up over the mistakes of the past!  Learn from them, don't r

This is a practice I do every day at some point.  Sometimes, I'm driving, sometimes I'm walking, sometimes I hear something on the radio, regardless, I take a few moments every day to appreciate something I see.  Everything we see on this beautiful planet of ours was forged in the heart of long dead stars.  Every atom of our bodies, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the earth we stand on are the result of billions of years of evolution. Our lives play out on a tiny spec of dust orbiting giant nuclear ball of gas in an average galaxy in a universe of billions of galaxies.  We are but tiny pieces of the universe trying to understand itself.* So take a moment to appreciate something you see, a mother and her child playing in the park, a flight of birds migrating, a squirrel looking for its next meal, whatever you see that makes you smile. Stop and appreciate it the fact that 14 billion years, countless long exploded stars, and 4 billion years of natural selection has lea

Memo to management, When your System Admin tells you the data copy will take 2-5 hours, IT WILL TAKE 2-5 hours!  SHUT UP AND LEAVE THEM ALONE!  Nothing you do is going to speed up the process. For the rest of you, files take time to move.  There are a lot of steps in the process of a file copy, the original must be read, checked for errors and then written in the new location.  Easy and fast on the same computer.  Not so fast when you are doing it over a network, or between sites, or across the internet. We are an impatient group as IT professionals.  We want it now, management wants it yesterday, but realistically 100 gigs of data, over a 10 meg link takes time to move.  So in this scenario, you would be looking at 3 hours, if you were able to use full bandwidth with no errors.  Now lets be realistic, you are in business, you are using your internet, so maybe you get about 25%, of the pipe to dedicate to the data move.  12 hours.  Now consider errors in the transmission, lost pa

I don't know how I can stress this enough.  If you are a system administrator, developer, IT manager, Security tech, or any other back office type technician or administrator, you NEED to keep good documentation.   If you are the SME (Subject Matter Expert) on sanything and you have tips and tricks and special ways of keeping the application running, WRITE IT DOWN! I've worked in many places, and some were excellent in their documentation, others were terrible in their documentation.  Guess what, I worked 3-4 times longer for places that had good documentation as opposed to bad documentation.  If you are a manager or leader, MAKE DOCUMENTATION PART OF THE JOB DESCRIPTION!  Good documentation can save you hundreds of hours of extra work in training new employees and employee headache trying to figure out what someone who left actually used to do. 

Lets talk about leadership for a moment.  Feel free to extrapolate to your current situation is this scenario is not exclusive to IT departments.  When you are in charge of an IT department at a medium to large size organization, there are many things you need to consider before proceeding on projects that would advance your companies mission.  Things like, budget, resources, how it affects ongoing projects, transitioning to new systems, training, etc.   But if you are already paying for the license for software that would make your IT staff functionally better at their jobs, offer better reporting, more efficiency in ongoing maintenance and growth, don't you think you could re prioritize a little bit to make things a little more hectic in the short term but much better in the long term?   When your System Administrators, Developers, Analysts and Mid level managers come to you, LISTEN TO THEM!   If you don't understand their point of view, ASK QUESTIONS!   Your job as a man