Techno babel, decoded.

YES.  IT is a very good field to go into.  There is still a high and growing demand for information technology professionals.  Programming, troubleshooting, developing, data mining and analytics.   All huge. If you want to pursue a career in IT you should look for my series about getting into IT. I'll be making some Youtube videos in the near future (once my newborn starts letting me get some sleep, so next year ish).  I work as a system administrator have been help desk, desktop support, network admin, system admin, network engineer, support engineer, team lead, support manager, cloud architect, and security administrator.  Let me tell you, some days it's amazing, and some days it's a nightmare.  But when you help your customer it is rewarding.   Sometimes it's just one person and they are thankful, sometimes you are helping a rocket company keep to their launch timeline, or military field teams solve problems that help the action in combat zones.  The wo

The cloud is a fancy name for someone else's computer.  That's really what it comes down to at the highest most basic level. There are several major "cloud" providers and different types of "clouds" for various purposes. For example, at my day job I am building an entire virtual computer infrastructure in one of the major cloud provider environments (Google, Amazon, Microsoft).   I'm building multiple virtual servers and routers and firewalls to duplicate our existing aging physical infrastructure while me transition to more modern architecture. You, if you are an entrepreneur or just want to have more computing power for your projects, can go to one of these providers and build apps, or servers on those systems directly. I mean, literally if you wanted to build yourself a video editing server, you could log into Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services and create an Extremely powerful server in about 30 minutes (including time to setup your init

Apparently the FCC lied to us.  (Shocked and appalled I am!) Okay, I've been doing some digging and the FCC didn't really lie, but commented in such a way as to let the press make exaggerated claims and twist words easily for their own media bonanza. I'm not sure how much is the media or political here but from what I can piece together the FCC did in fact see a HUGE spike in traffic.   Much of which was BOT related because people (myself included) often use bots to post comments to sites like the FCC.  Claiming that this is a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service attack) is frankly bullshit.  Now, if they had said that due to excessive traffic the site is going down to a high number of automated postings, then it would be more accurate.  So was it a DDOS?  Not really.   DDOS implies intent to deny service.  What happened was SO many bots and users were hitting the site with automated and non-automated messages that the site couldn't handle the traffic.  This happ

How to use Google pbotos to organize and search your digital pictures. A few posts ago I made this  How-to-back-up-your-personal-photos-and.html Well to build on that post, you can use the Google photo assistant to help you organize and find photos. It uses facial recognition to identify people in your photos if it knows who they are.  It also tags things like water, ocean and uses any geotags on the image to help organize them for you. I've used this feature several times to find the photo I was looking for then go to my PC and search for the filename so I can use the full resolution original. You can also create collages, animations and movies/slide shows from your photos and videos. You can also create and sort photos into albums on google photos to organize your pictures. This is one of those where I will (eventually) get around to doing a video tutorial on.  I have a newborn baby so I'm barely able to get these blog posts done right now.  In fact, I'll

In short, NO.   Assume nothing you post is private unless it is to a Bank.  Then you can expect a reasonable level of security precautions. Okay, that's not fair to a lot of sites.  Most Major websites have taken reasonable and many exceptional security precautions to safe guard your information. But understand, once you post something, it is OUT THERE.  FOREVER, or until we get hit by a planet wide EMP. Anything that existed on the internet probably still exists, somewhere on some server.  Companies take lots of precautions to safeguard your information, but comparing the internet to the wild west isn't really bad except that the bad guys are GLOBAL and can attack you from anywhere in the world.  So, if you aren't comfortable with something you post eventually becoming public knowledge, don't post it online.  Everything is hackable one way or another. The biggest weakness isn't the tech, it's people.  When I make posts on my FB, IG, Linked in, e

If you own one of these devices listed below you need to reboot and do a hard reset of your router. Remember when I mentioned that the FBI issued a warning about Russian hackers targeting home devices.  Here it is.  There are about 500,000 of these which have been infected and need to be cleaned.   Resetting to factory default settings is the ONLY way to be sure you have Cleaned and Removed the infection.  See manufacturer website for details!  New analysis suggests MANY more manufacturers have been affected.  My own router is not yet on the list but I'm going  to do a factory reset and change all the settings.  Sigh.  Better safe  than hacked.  List as of 6/11/2018 2:20pm ASUS DEVICES: RT-AC66U (new) RT-N10 (new) RT-N10E (new) RT-N10U (new) RT-N56U (new) RT-N66U (new) D-LINK DEVICES: DES-1210-08P (new) DIR-300 (new) DIR-300A (new) DSR-250N (new) DSR-500N (new) DSR-1000 (new) DSR-1000N (new) HUAWEI DEVICES: HG8245 (new) LINKSYS DEVICES: E1200 E2500 E3000 (

I'm warning you this is a stream of consciousness post.  You have been warned. I.T. has evolved.  We are long past the days of dial-up modems, AOL, and "you've got mail." Email is a regular form of communication.  Chats and text messages are faster more immediate means of communicating via text.  Phones are no longer phones they are pocket computers and cameras which also act as phones.   The world is becoming more connected everyday.    Refrigerators, Ovens, air conditioners, light bulbs, ceiling fans, door locks, cars, are all being connected to the internet.   Privacy feels like a thing of the past.  None of this matters to your children.    For them, all of this is normal.  All the tech in the world doesn't matter to them.   They need Love.   They need you.  MAKE TIME, EVERY DAY to give them your undivided attention for at least 30 minutes.   EVERY! SINGLE! DAY! Sometimes it's taking th

Honestly, for a lot of people, you probably don't need a traditional desktop anymore or even a laptop. Tablets can handle most of the workload of traditional computers and with the rise of cloud services and cloud based apps, you don't even need the power of a traditional computer for things like video editing.   Truly though, it depends on what you do day to day.   The reality is that smart phones are in fact computers. They have more power, connectivity and capability than a room full of computers I learned to program on 30 years ago.  Think Commodore 64. I know people who run $100,000 businesses from their phones. Do you need a computer?  No.  You really don't.   You can do basically everything from a mobile device now.  Computers are still easier (in my humble opinion) for certain things but I do use my phone more and more and am considering a much more powerful phone for my next purchase.  Being a system admin I still need the power of a workstation for

IT SECURITY, is an ever expanding and rapidly growing field.  As cyber threats increase on a daily basis, information security professionals are becoming more valued and necessary across all businesses.  What do IT security professionals do? Many things, but really we are always trying to balance these three things: Availability, Integrity, and Confidentiality.  Think of each of these as points on a triangle.  You try to keep your data accessible, to the people who need access to it, but on one else.  You also try to make sure no one else manipulates it incorrectly or downloads it who shouldn't have access to it.  Mostly we try to take steps to keep bad people and malicious software out of our systems.  We build and work with network teams to isolate network traffic in order to minimize exposure and mitigate risk.  We create firewalls to segment, filter, and detect malicious intent. We monitor the inflow and outflow of data in our environments. We test our environ

Assume all goes as scheduled by the time this posts I will be the father of two children. I'm taking a break from tech for today because I'm short on time, resources, preparedness and sleep. Being the father of one autistic child and father to a very pregnant wife who is having an extremely rough pregnancy has been hard! I'm worn out.   I know our house isn't ready for two kids, but it isn't the complete disaster it was before my wife's mom intervened and helped us reclaim the kitchen, part of our bedroom and part of my sons room. One of the hardest things for me to learn over the years has been to learn when and how to ask for help.   It's not easy.  I like to be self sufficient.  I like doing things myself. I like fixing things myself. I can't do everything. I'm not an expert in everything.  I don't have the time to do everything. Even now while I type this post, anxiety is telling me I should be cleaning kitchen, doing laund