The blog that will not die

I’ve gone back and forth about trashing this thing.  I have a new place that I blog, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the right place for everything I might want to blog about.  But what goes best there and what goes best here?

I think one of the reasons I don’t trash this thing is there are a couple of entries that get hits almost every week.  I just think it’s funny to get hits through searches reading “easiest cars to steal” or some variation thereof.

What I might do is just dual post the entries that could fit in both blogs.  I dunno.

Still alive… for now ;-)

Yeah.  It’s been forever since I wrote anything here.  I guess a little update is in order…

I have changed jobs.  I’m no longer a consultant and now do my thing for just one company.  Well, that’s not entirely true — I helped another local division with an Active Directory domain rename last month.  I started here back in September on a contract-to-hire basis and finally got hired on in March.  Yep:  I’m now just a speck in the corporate turd.

I’ve started a quest to read some books I’ve wanted to for a long time.  Currently, I’m taking my time with the Lord of the Rings books.  After that, I want to go through The Chronicles of Narnia.  This is going to take me quite a while because most of my reading time is currently devoted to technical material.  I’m going to update my technical certifications over the course of the year.

Hmm…  I don’t really have anythign else to say.  Not that there will be anyone reading this who’ll be terribly interested 

Moved on

As of this past Friday, I’ve moved on from my long time client.  I went out there in June (20th?) of 2005 for a 5 week gig to fill in for their Wintel Technical Lead who had just given notice.  My last day there was August 18th, 2006.  That’s 14 months.

This week has pretty much sucked as far as billable hours goes.  However, I start a nearly 3 week project on Monday and have some other projects lining up so I should be fairly busy for a little while after this week.

The upshot is this has given me more time to work on the team blog at work.

Why no posting?

So, I’ve been rather lax on my posting and it’s been for a variety of reasons.  First, I’m a major procrastinator.  Second, I watch too much TV and play too much World of Warcraft.  I also went to Chicago last weekend for Wizard World (yes, I am such a geek).

However, I’ve also been working on some work stuff.  I’m trying to write another article but I’m having trouble finding the information I need.  The first article hasn’t been published, yet, but we’re working on it.  I’ve been told it will go out in my group’s newsletter at work.  I’ve also been working on my group’s blog.  If you know me, get in touch with me and I’ll tell you where it is.   At least for now, I’d like to keep my personal blogging as seperate from my employer as I can.

Cabling prices are weird

Wow. I’ve been extremely lax in posting lately.

I’m not going to go on a rant about Monster Cable’s ridiculous prices because that would be beating a dead horse. Plenty of others have gone on and on about it.

I was looking for additional optical audio cables about a week and a half ago. When I bought most of my home entertainment center stuff two years ago I was able to find some 6 ft. GE brand cables at Circuit City for under $10. This was great because almost every other brand I found was well over $20. Some were over $40.

Since I had such luck at Circuit City last time, I decided to try them again. No dice. They had GE cables but no optical audio. Their other brands were $20 – $40+ for 3 ft cables. I went on to Microcenter and found both 12 and 24 ft. cables for about $25. I don’t need cables that long so I decided to continue looking for cheaper, shorter cables. I then went to Best Buy. At first, it looked like I was going to have the same problem as at Circuit City. The cheapest 3 ft. cables I found were about $25. The cheapest 6ft. cables were about $30.

Disgusted, I just about gave up hope. I then remembered the optical output on my Xbox and Xbox 360. It was a standard optical output as I was able to use one of the cables I bought 2 years ago on either of them. I decided to head over to the video games section to see if they had any cables. I ended up finding 9 ft. optical audio cables branded as being for the Xbox 360.  $15.  I doublechecked to make sure they looked like standard optical cables and sure enough, they were.  Craziness, I tell you.

Spammers have a sense of humor

One of the clients I work for has several brand-name products that are fairly well-known in many parts of the world.  Today, I did some investigation of some spammers trading on one of their brand names.  I checked the WhoIs information of the spammer domains I found while Googling.  The address information of one of them was listed as:

1060 W Addison
Chicago, IL 60618
US

If you don’t see the humor in that, check out the address in Google Maps then go rent The Blues Brothers.

Office Space Moment

I had today, what I’m calling an “Office Space” moment.  For the second time in the last two months, someone got to my blog by typing “easiest cars to steal” into a search engine.  The reason my blog comes up when these words are entered into a search engine is because of a post I made in the first half of May.  In this post, I comment on a C|Net story about how the RFID remote starters from expensive cars make them easier to steal.

The first time I saw this, I thought it rather odd.  It could be a budding criminal.  It could also have been someone doing some harmless research for a paper, news story, or figuring out what cars not to buy.  When I saw this today, I flashed to a scene in “Office Space.”  The scene I thought of is where they’re trying to look up money laundering in the dictionary.  The guys are so straight laced that they don’t have the first clue as to what it means to launder money.  The point:  you’re not going to learn how to successfully boost cars by Googling the topic.  You might as well just turn yourself in to the nearest police station on the charge of stupidity.

Boston cabbies

My experience with taxi cabs in Boston while I was at Tech Ed was really rather pleasant.  I've only ridden in taxis twice before so I don't have much experience with them.  All of the drivers I got spoke great English.

My favorite ride was from the airport to the hotel.  The driver was this gentleman that was at least well into his 60's and cursed like a sailor.  There was a long line of cars to get through a toll plaza.  The driver shot to the outside and sped up the line.  The best part was when he said "Hold on boys!" (two other co-workers were in the cab with me).  At that point, he found an opening and darted into it.  It wasn't really much of an opening, though, as we still  had to force our way in.

Dude got a good tip from us. 

Comment Spam

I woke up this morning to find I experienced my first comment spam.  It took about a month for it to happen.  I think I started this back on May 2nd.  This is just a little 'nothing' blog so I don't expect to get that much comment spam.  I can't imagine what the "A-list" bloggers have to deal with.  For them, it's not just the spammers but the complete idiots that post absolutre drivel in the comments.  Lies, personal attacks — all that friendly stuff.

The other thing I don't get is the need to be able to claim first comment.  I see this all around on blogs and message boards.  What's so special about having the first comment or reply — especially when the entire content of the post is a declaration of the order in which your comment/reply came?  To me, people who do this look like big, fat idiots. 

Congratulations:  you've proven you have nothing better to do with your life than troll blogs and message boards for the latest post and are the quickest at typing out a reply.  Bravo.  Job well-done.  I'm sure your parents are proud.

Symantec is feeling the heat from Microsoft

Symantec's CEO, John Thompson, delivers a volley of marketing hype at Microsoft.

"Our strategy is to out-innovate Microsoft. We know more about security than they ever will," Thompson said.

Just because you might know more about security now doesn't mean you will in the future.

Last month, Thompson branded the software giant a "Johnny-come-lately" into the security market.

Microsoft was "Johnny-come-lately" to the Internet, as well.  Look what happened there.  I'm not saying IE is the best browser:  I'm just pointing out their market share and what they did to Netscape.

My employer participates in the partner progrmas at both Microsoft and Symantec.  I have no great love of Microsoft over Symantec.  I currently use Symantec products for my personal desktop protection.  I don't know what I'll go with when Microsoft brings their products to market but I'm certainly not going to jump right in and be an early adopter.  I'll stick with Symantec until Microsoft's products both prove themselves to be  sufficiently capable and win my desire to use them.

I just like shooting down hype and statements that are incongruous with reality.