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How we learn

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , ,

An article on Lifehacker this week explained a lot about how I initially became a computer professional. Its advice was to fly by the seat of your pants, try things without guidance or manuals, not be afraid to fail occasionally, and learn before you go to sleep.

So when I spent many nights in my late teens disassembling and reassembling obsolete IBM PC/XT clones to learn how they worked, I was unwittingly doing all of it right.

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Wookie suits at work

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , ,

I have a coworker who owns a Darth Vader costume. If you ask him really nicely, he might dress up as Darth Vader to scare your kids. He’s proud enough to own that costume that he keeps a picture of himself in it on his desk.

Someone–I forget who–had the idea this past week that his cubicle neighbor ought to get a Chewbacca the Wookie suit. Because nothing goes with Darth Vader like Chewbacca, right? Several of us even reached for our wallets in anticipation of taking up a collection to fund this Chewbacca suit, and then someone threw out a stipulation–that the two of them need to wear their costumes to work.

For some reason, I still have my copy of the corporate dress code, so I got it out to see if it would be legal to wear Chewbacca and Darth Vader costumes to work. Read more

A war story in progress

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized ,

It was a long day at work yesterday. Some days things don’t go as planned, because something blows up, and that was the case yesterday. I’m sure I’ll write it up someday. Right now I fear it’s still in the early stages.

But it’s a turning point of sorts. Read more

The price of Amazon

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , , , , , ,

Slashdot posted a link to a New York Times piece that asserts that the full extent of Amazon’s existence hasn’t been felt yet, but it asserts that book pricing is becoming whimsical.

My experience disagrees with that. The market will stabilize. I think the cost fluctuations are because the market hasn’t stabilized yet.

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I’m going to have something really good coming up later this weekend

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

I’m working on a new writeup. I have two coworkers who, when they start talking, I know I’d better start listening if I know what’s good for me.

I had lunch with them on Friday. I don’t know if it was the lunch discussion or after-lunch discussion, but they talked about a little-known security product. It’s free. It’s a little off-putting–one of these guys experimented with it and had difficulty figuring it out–but the other raved about it.

The problem is that we rarely live in an ideal world. We’re forced to run insecure, outdated software for business reasons, whether they’re good or bad. This mitigation, which he explained succinctly, is one of the best mitigations I’ve seen in my professional career, and it won’t cost you a dime to implement it.

I’m going to take an extra day or so to write up my own findings with it. So please stay tuned. I think this is going to be very good.

Looking to hire IT talent? Write a good job description

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , ,

I had lunch on Friday with the recruiter who placed me at my current gig. We talked about a lot of things, including our families, but we talked a lot about the tech labor market. It’s growing, finally, and going to grow a lot more in the next few years as Boeing relocates its IT operations to St. Louis, but the market still isn’t what I’d grown used to it being over the last seven years.

One problem he runs into is with clients. They’ll submit jobs that, for example, I’m a perfect match for, and he submits me, and we get no call. Then he follows up weeks or months later, and finds out something completely different. Read more

Cnet tackles the Gigabit Internet question

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized ,

Cnet questioned the motives of cable operators this week when it comes to offering truly high-speed Internet.

Cable operators argue that the demand for those high speeds isn’t there. It’s not gigabit that consumers oppose nearly so much as paying more than $100 a month just for Internet. The problem is that by the time you pay for super high-speed Internet, cable, and a couple of cell phones, you can easily spend $300 a month, if not more, and that’s the price of a car.

We’re still coming out of a recession, and a lot of people are still trying to get their heads above water after the excesses of the previous decade. But if prices are within reach, people are willing to buy, after a half-decade of austerity.

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Something strange is going on

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

I’ve been noticing a lot of slowness that I’ve traced to DNS issues lately, typically with the caching DNS in routers. It happened to me, and it happened to my mom. We have different routers from different manufacturers, and they probably even use different embedded operating systems. Hers almost assuredly runs Linux; I have an oddball one that runs FreeBSD.

But the caching nameservers aren’t working well lately. I haven’t investigated why just yet. The solution I found was to hard-code the DNS settings on all my computers rather than letting them pull it from DHCP (my oddball router won’t let me specify external DNSs to use–lovely). Be sure to pick the best ones for your network.

Making that simple change fixed my mom’s dog-slow computer, and fixed my unreliable one.

 

Who are the 10 people you’d call if you were laid off tomorrow?

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized , ,

I found some good advice on Lifehacker today about building a professional network. Not just having 500 connections on Linkedin, but having a real professional network made up of people who help one another advance their careers.

I stumbled into this completely by accident. Read more

How to help the tornado-struck community of Moore, Okla.

Dave Farquhar Uncategorized

I’ll put what I was going to write about this morning on hold for a few days. I was writing about something that disappoints me, but it’s nothing compared to a mile-wide tornado hitting the town you live in, which is what happened to 55,000 residents of Moore, Oklahoma yesterday.

Now, aside from a year or so in Ohio as a toddler, I’ve spent my entire life in Tornado Alley. There are seven states that get more tornadoes than Missouri, but only seven. Oklahoma gets more than any state other than Texas. I know the drill, and even my three-year-old knows it. When the sirens blare, everyone goes to the basement, and I turn on one of the weather channels to see what’s going on. I even have a battery-operated TV that I can use if the power goes out. It happens several times a year, and we’re used to it.

What we’re not used to is the bad stuff happening. That happens every year too, somewhere, but you never really get used to that. Read more