a.k.a. Little L

Jaz hits beauty double to far left field for double. Steals 3rd. Comes in when they try to get Cole as he steals 2nd. PT up 6-2

Jaz throws lots of strikes. Gets a strike out. But a few are hit hard. Including in the park home run. PT up 4-2 after 3 innings

Jaz walked. Then he scores first run on a single by MJ, coming in from second. Good hustle!

First batter walked. Next batter singles. He’s thrown out when next batter singles. A couple more strike outs. Good inning.

He was eventually tagged out trying to steal 3rd. Jaz batting last in the lineup.

Jaz pitching well. Struck out first batter. Next 3 popped up. One of them reached first on a dropped fly.

Go PT!

Looks like Jaz is warming up in the bullpen. He’ll be starting pitcher for today’s game in Ridgefield. 59°, overcast, breezy

We have about 30 printers at work. I have an OmniOutliner doc that I use to keep track of printer models and locations.

I can get into the printers, remotely, via a web browser. I can also admin some of them with a vendor’s utility. 

But, both of those can be clunky when I need to work on more than one at a time, or when I need to adjust a group of staff’s printer settings.

I found this article on Mac OS X Hints whilst looking for some SNMP tools.

Managing multiple printers via the command line - Mac OS X Hints:

For a couple of weeks, about the same time every day, I would get a call from the lab coordinator that the computers were having problems connecting to the Internet.

The network pref pane said that the Ethernet connection was Connected.

Symptoms: A user would try to get to a website, like ixl.com or pbskids.org and the progress bar would stall about mid-way, and the browser window was blank.

I could remote in via ARD and look at the Network settings. All were correct. They all had a unique IP address, within the range of 192.168.0.2-192.168.1.253.

Using Terminal, I could ping outside servers.

I could launch VMWare Fusion, and using a browser, running on Windows, I could reach those same sites.

I tried resetting Safari, clearing the caches in Firefox, reinstalling the browsers.

Then I found this thread: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4093878?start=0&tstart=0

Solution: Turn off IP6 (!)

Open the Network Pref Pane, unlock using the pref pane

Click on "Advanced..."

Change the value for "Configure IPv6" from "Automatic" to "Off"

Click "OK"

Restart the iMac.

It works!

My metal moods eventually incorporate the middle era of Skinny Puppy.

This video has the album version of the track, but it’s video from a live show.

But it also feels like the tamest performance. No makeup, no spewing body parts, no whips, no chains, no giant bugs with knives. Crazy visuals and vocal effects, though.

It is a true representation of the song, but not the performance.

Skinny Puppy “Tin Omen”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTIq2HyLThA&feature=youtube_gdata_player

This video is more like the Skinny Puppy I know and love. Same song, different time & place.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngQP8-gjK_k&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Daring Fireball is always a good source of commentary and thought.

Gruber picked this gem from Via Michael Lopp. It’s a post from The Guardian’s Ben Goldacre.

On Linking to Primary Sources: "

Ben Goldacre:

But more than anything, because linking to sources is such an easy thing to do and the motivations for avoiding links are so dubious, I’ve detected myself using a new rule of thumb: if you don’t link to primary sources, I just don’t trust you.

I know that my internal radar is always suspicious of blogs and news sites that don’t link. The Web = Links.

Woohoo!!

I just revived my home network! A power outage last week borked an access point in the front of the house.

This meant that half of the devices in the house could not “see” the ‘Net. This included the AppleTV, which meant we were Netflix-less. (Just as I’m starting to sell its virtues to the rest of the family.)

That also meant that there was almost no wifi signal in the front of the house. Which not only sucked because I couldn’t get on the ‘Net, but, I also couldn’t control the AppleTV, which meant we couldn’t stream any of our music or videos or photos. It drove me crazy all weekend, since I kept fiddling, but I couldn’t get it to work. Eventually, I had to reset the access point, and re-configure it. And now it works!

Time for bed–Hey look at the time!

Update: Just as I was going to publish this, I saw that it was 1:11 on Jan 11, 2011. (1:11 1/11/11). But as I hit the Publish button, it failed. It took me a few minutes to re-authorize this iPod, bit the moment passed. Sigh. Time for bed!

On the way to school, The Boy mentioned that the girls in his 4th grade class would choose a song every week, and then they would sing it over and over.

It was annoying, as that what girls are (of course).

I asked if they were singing the new Lady Ga Ga.

“Which one?” he asked.

“Y’know, ‘My Photograph.'”

“Which one is that?” he asked, perplexed.

Me singing… “My-my-my-my-my Pho-to-graph. My-my-my-my-my Pho-to-graph.”

He had this quizzical expression, the way a dog looks at you when you are showing off your use of opposable thumbs.

“You mean ‘Pokerface?'”

“Uh… yeah…”

I’m so cool.

One of the things that I really like about this, is that it helps to illustrate an arcane topic. In the past, I’ve seen people’s eyes glaze over when I start to explain TCP/IP. (Makes you want to hang out with me at parties, huh?)

This is a clever way to help show the different parts of an ingenious invention. Coolness.

Hal Pomeranz, Deer Run Associates Tell me what this is: If you said, "Hey! That's a TCP header diagram in Lego(TM)", or perhaps, "Holy &^%@! That idiot made a TCP header diagram in Lego(TM)!", then you're exactly right!  This is another one of those wild, wacky ideas that we dreamed up in the middle of one of my SANS classes (note to the S … Read More

via Righteous IT

Today was pretty busy from the get-go. My compadre was off today, so I was flying solo. I had to setup (and tear down) the sound system for a couple of events (thankfully, I was able to call on the Facilities guys to help with the speakers).

The sound system is a weak area for me, so it always makes me nervous. But the more I do this, the better. Although, today, there was no fry bread. (the photo, above, is from when I was running sound for our powwow)

I’ve been dealing with some login weirdness all day, too. (Seemingly) Random drives dropping off of people’s machines. Hmmm…

But, now, as the day comes towards the end, I have some time to look at a couple of our servers that we’re using for an internal project.

We had a little blip in our power today, and it knocked one of the two servers down. I was able to bring it back up, but it took more time than I thought it should have. Also, everytime I fiddle with either of these machines, I think “I need to do a better job of managing their power usage and also remote admin stuff.”

I can ssh into one of them, the other machine, I can only use VNC into it.

In the process of checking out ways to manage power, I’ve found a couple of good resources. One is ServerFault.com. Lots of tech sites have become cluttered messes. ServerFault is clean, with a nice signal-to-noise ratio. Lessee what happens…

I had a dream last night.

I was at the Canadian border and the border guard came to my window. It was a cold night. I could see his breath as he approached.

I rolled down my window and he bent down and asked "Is that your music?"

What? What did he mean? I was expecting him to ask me about any produce or contraband.

But now, with the window down, I could hear the music. It was familiar. I heard loud guitar riffs, zipping along, drums hammering. Was that... Scatterbrain?

At that time, I woke up and realized that I had fallen asleep with my iPod shuffle playing.

We recently added an AppleTV to our home entertainment setup. I love it. It solves multiple problems we have encountered with our “home media experience.”

Our CD collection used to be right next to our CD player. It was easy to browse and select something to play. Our collection now has almost 2000 CDs and they’re now in a room at the other end of the house.

It’s really cramped the music listening. As a result, we don’t listen to our music as much. We listen to the radio (which, in my opinion is not always desirable)

Another thing, we have thousands of photos. But we only have a few dozen printed out and on display.

The AppleTV has made it easy to browse our collection of music, photographs, and movies. And it’s done it without adding (a) stacks of discs to our living room, or (b) lots of big electronic boxes to our living room decor. (not that I’d mind, but I’m not the only one who lives here.)

As much as I dislike most traditional radio stations, I love the medium. So, I’m turning to internet-based stations. On my desktop computer, which is in the office, at the back of the house, I can use iTunes to browse and listen to tons of great stations.

I know that there are others in my house that are turned off by the list of hundreds of stations. So I created a playlist of about a dozen internet radio stations in iTunes. I was a bit irked when it didn’t appear in my list of playlists on the AppleTV.

But, just now, I went to the radio section of AppleTV and at the top of the list of genres, is my playlist! It made me laugh! I love it!

Baseball season is starting up and I was searching for the location of our practice field. It happened to be near our house. Since I was "in the neighborhood," I decided to scroll over to see what our house looked like.

Based on the arrangement of the table on hte back porch, this photo was taken two summers ago.

That also means that those light patches you see in our front yard mark where The Boy & I stood when playing catch.

This captures the summer before the year he actually joined a "real" baseball team. We would stand on either side of the driveway and toss the ball back and forth.

As this was a new activity for us, and accuracy was still an issue, I stood just on one side of the driveway. (I'm the upper light spot). The Boy stood across the driveway (his is the smaller light-spot, near the red car).

Nowdays, I'm under the tree, and The Boy either pitches from the same spot, or does diving catches a little south of the driveway. (towards the bottom of the picture).

As I’ve mentioned before, our network at NAYA is busy. Dealing with network issues is one of our biggest headaches.

The students are doing their quarterly standards-testing. And once again, network traffic looks like it might be an issue.

This article, UNIX network performance analysis, came over Twitter as I was scarfing some gumbo between troubleshooting sessions.

Some good, basic tips for analyzing your network.

I also found a podcast, The Root Cause, which talks about system admin issues. I’m loading it up on my iPod shuffle. I’ll let you know how it goes.

We’re talking about solid state hard drives at work and I remembered this video.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs&hl=en_US&fs=1&]

I like the style of the video, as well as the content. A good example of using new media channels to advertise. This commercial was never put on TV (to my knowledge) and was only released “to the ‘Nets.”

It works on many levels. The demographic for this product will have all the easy-sharing tools at hand; YouTube, blogs, email, Hi-speed connection.

It’s an impressive demonstration of the technology.

Crafty Samsung. Very crafty!

This week has been very busy on our network. With a staff of approximately 100, plus around 80 students, and about 100 other networked devices, our network is busy.

In fact, we’re exploring ways to increase bandwidth, which is amazing, because this current setup was supposed to be enough to handle the organization for another year.

Since I started, about 4 months ago, spam has not been much of a problem. But the past few weeks, we have been getting more and more.

As soon as we get some spam, we track down the IP and add it to our firewall. We do some research to see where it’s coming from.

Last week, most of our spam was from Russia. This week, we’ve been receiving spam from Mexico, Brazil and Japan.

Most are innocuous “male performance” enhancements, but we have had a handful of messages with Trojan Horse attachments.

They appear as a fake message from DHL. The subject line indicates a problem with delivery of a package. This is apparently the Bredolab virus.

This snippet comes from a Symantec security blog by Daren Lewis, “It comes from the Cutwail (aka. Pandex) botnet, which is one of the largest mass mailing botnets in existence, with over one million ‘zombie’ machines under its control.”

Spammers are scum.

rentzsch.tumblr.com: Twitterrific+MarsEdit Script: Blog a Tweet

Studied network naming best practices…oriented new employees… in the process of reviewing our Electronic Communications policy (26 pages!)… start presentation for staff meeting on said policy… salvaged memory and hard drives from dead laptops… worked on an internal web server… installed new work request forms… setup A/V for several meetings…sent email to wrong person…got a new hat!…it was a good week!

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs : A not-so-brief chat with Randall Stephenson of AT&T.

Fake Steve Jobs rips Randall Stephenson a new one over the new plan that AT&T is going to start charging more money. FSJ uses a Beatles analogy to demonstrate why AT&T should be building out their network, instead of complaining. Love it!

I’m pretty sure that execs at this level never speak to each this way, but it’s very satisfying to imagine this is true.