David L. Farquhar on technology old and new, computer security, and more
One of my clients has a problem. We’ll call him Melvin, because I like changing names when I tell stories.
Melvin doesn’t like network guys, and takes every possible opportunity to tell anyone within earshot. “You network guys don’t understand what’s going on over that wire, and you don’t want to.”
We do understand, but not the way he thinks network guys should. Melvin is wrong.
So what would you rather have: a steady, full-time job with benefits, or a year-to-year contract with minimal benefits?
Yeah, I thought so. But sometimes in IT, the first option isn’t immediately available. I’ve settled for the latter a couple of times and lived to tell about it. So I might as well tell.
When I was a young kid, my dad’s favorite baseball player was George Brett. Anyone who saw Brett play knows why. Dad’s second-favorite player was debatable, but it was probably Willie Aikens.
Well, until the scandal.
Pro-Mubarek protesters: Beating up foreign journalists who are trying to get both sides of the story doesn’t advance your cause at all.
CNN anchors: When you put extremist imams on the air to give their point of view, why not just let them say their peace, then get them off the air, rather than argue with them? I want to know who they think will get power and why they think that. I’m not all that interested in listening to the two of you argue. In fact, it made me change the channel to PBS. You and I agree, and we both disagree with him, and I’m pretty sure you’re not going to change his mind.
That is all.
If there was ever a cult following in Lionel-dom, Lionel Super O track has it. Super O was Lionel’s answer to American Flyer 2-rail track. Invented in 1951, patented in 1954 and finally introduced in 1957, it featured numerous plastic ties with a molded-in woodgrain, a 36″ diameter, and a thin copper center rail.
Lionel introduced Super O track in 1957 as a more realistic track system to replace its traditional toy-like 3-rail track. The thinner center rail and additional ties didn’t look exactly like real track, but it was closer.
I have to confess I’m paying minimal attention to technology these last few days. I’ve been watching the goings-on in the Middle East. I saw the headlines that Intel’s newest chipset is buggy, but that won’t go down as the biggest news of 2011. A revolution in Egypt stands a chance. And it could have a domino effect.
Should this site go dark for a few days, know that it’s not entirely unexpected. There’s some nasty talk of thundersnow this week, and before that, anywhere from half an inch to an inch of ice, followed by gusts of wind. The last time we got that much ice was in late November/early December 2006, and similar conditions then caused widespread power outages.
We’ve taken appropriate safety precautions. We’ve dealt with this before, so we know what to do.
Spinrite 5 is an old friend. It got me out of some jams in the late ’90s, but as new versions of Windows that defaulted to NTFS came into my life, Spinrite 5 ceased being an option, since it only worked on FAT-formatted drives.
I’ve had occasion now to use Spinrite 6, its successor, which still runs under old-fashioned MS-DOS but now understands a multitude of filesystems. Other than that, it hasn’t changed much: It’s an obsessively thorough repair and maintenance tool for hard drives.
SSDs will eventually make Spinrite unnecessary, but there are still a lot more conventional hard drives being shipped each year than SSDs. Read more
Dvorak was in rare form this week, as he writes something that reads more like an e-mail virus alert chain letter. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2376702,00.asp
Read on for the money quote.
I was working in a data center, where we had a couple of Cisco VOIP phones. I don’t know who put them in or when–it’s possible they predated me. We never got them working, but nobody ever really tried, either.
The idea was that two guys working on servers in different datacenters across the WAN might need to talk. The reality was that we didn’t do that very often and usually had other ways to do it–a cellphone being the most obvious option. Our networking guys always had much more pressing issues than getting the VOIP phones working, so the phones just sat there and looked pretty. Until the wrong guy noticed them one day, that is.