Post Something Here

*** Long post(s) ahead ***

As we bring the year/decade to a close, I can't help but join the masses to think back on what has happened this year/decade and figure out where I could've done better. Something about succumbing to peer pressure and creating resolutions that I'll break within 3 weeks seems appealing. Nevertheless, it's time to spill my mind in a stream of consciousness ramble about what's on my mind... ish.

10 years ago, I was finishing my 6th grade year and entering junior high. A brand new experience. Something I wasn't completely prepared for. The junior high I joined had a technology component that appealed to me. My home school seemed boring and I wasn't completely excited about it. So I joined this technology magnet school.

Going throughout the years, I made new friends, kept myself entertained with new "games", and made a name for myself in the school. I became the leader of the loading crew in band, vice president of the national junior honor society, and overall, a fairly well known person in the extracurricular fields.

September 11 was one of the more depressing instances of my life. What makes it even more depressing/interesting, is the fact that there are kids that are learning about this in their history books. I still remember where I was that morning. I still remember my thoughts and reactions. I remember about having a disdain towards the media at this point. 24/7 coverage for 3-ish weeks regarding the towers falling. *sigh*

Advancing into high school was yet another change I wasn't completely ready for, but I felt better prepared for this change than the previous one. I've been adjusted to a schedule of classes for a few years now and high school was preparing me for college, right? I joined the band with the expectation that it would be amazing. I wasn't disappointed.

The following year, I received my first job. I was in charge of sandblasting molar bands. The inside of these bands needed to be blasted so that the molar bands would stick to the teeth. I sat in a little room for 4-6 hours a day listening to the radio and sandblasting thousands of bands. Nice simple job.

It was also during this year that I met the girl that would become my first (and only) girlfriend. A strange girl at first whom I grew to love and care for during those high school years. I had many incredible experiences with this girl which have been talked about in depth in other places.

One of my favorite classes was AP Human Geography. The idea behind this class was to discuss the effect of humans in the world and how they work with each other. A great majority of it, however, ended up in a political debate with the teacher. He was a hardcore liberal and I was a hardcore conservative. (Sidenote: To a point, I still am, although I may have relaxed my ways slightly from the nutjob right wing to the normal republican conservative) It was great fun and I thoroughly enjoyed several of the classes.

I became heavily involved with the band program during high school and received the Quiet Hero award for my work with getting things done. It had seemed only natural to me to help out when I could. I was a band nerd. I spent my spare time either in the band hall or outside it's door. Band was my clique. And I had no regrets about it. I spent afternoons of my senior year debating with a friend over stuff we agree upon. We'd head down to McDonald's during our open period, get McFlurry's, and just talk. Senioritis hit hard and these little talks didn't help much. Whoops.

Finally, it was time to graduate. That was especially fun. Our big "prank" was for every student to give our principal a penny as we walked across the stage. Made me happy.

And then, it was time for college. Until I participated in Alumni Band Day with the Goin' Band, I had been nearly set on attending Abilene Christian University. Beautiful campus, wonderful people, and a great environment. The Goin' Band changed that. I immediately fell in love with the shows, the music, the awesome loudness of the band. As we were invited to march out of the stadium with them, I made up my mind right then to join Texas Tech.

I've just discovered that I've written way too much and will call it off for tonight. Know that I haven't covered near everything that's happened in the last 10 years and don't plan to. There's just too much stuff.

Tomorrow, I'll post the rest of the major points of this decade and hopefully draw a conclusion as to what needs to change. A resolution, if you will.

I've been meaning to write this for a while now, which adds to the irony of my topic for the night. In addition, it should be fairly obvious that I've been putting off such things as this blog. Only recently did I notice that spammers had been trying to add their insightful input on every single one of my stories (and hiding my one legitimate comment from a friend). Luckily, I had some spare time and I was able to clean it up and update the site in the process.

I'm not entirely sure what I want to do with all the new user accounts though. I'm fairly positive that 98% of them are spam accounts. Especially because they have not logged in since the day they registered. But I don't want to remove them in the off chance that any are real. Like poor viagratramadolcialis. If I deleted him (or her), I might lose the awesome comments this ... thing has to offer.

But I digress.

The main reason(s) that I'm posting something tonight also, ironically, are directly attached to this topic. I've got school work I could be working on, but I'd much rather do anything else. Senioritis has hit again. I'm fairly positive I haven't recovered from the last dosage, especially considering that it ran from my junior year of high school to my sophomore year of college. Now it's already back again, and I need to graduate and potentially continue furthering my education in some sort of masters plan.

I'm tired of school. I want to have fun. Here's where we have a problem. I am having fun. I've been putting off schoolwork as long as possible and suffering from it. Not necessarily through my grades (although in some of my classes over the past couple of semesters, it has been affected), but through my social life and my physical health.

As is apparently obvious, I spend way too much time on the internet. It fascinates me. The amount of information one can retrieve from these interconnected tubes is overwhelming. Add that to the creative commenting of millions of users and you can be entertained for hours upon end.

Herein lies the problem. When it comes to doing assigned work, I'm more A.D.D. than a squirrel. I will find any opportunity to put off this assignment in order for something much more appealing. I've even put off writing scripts for a class I love just because it was assigned.

Why?

That's a very good question. One I'd like an answer to. Best I can come up with, for many of us, being "forced" to complete something is not very fun; even if it's for an amazing job that you'll get paid out the wazoo for. We lose control and that's not cool. I like being in charge. I like knowing what I'm going to do. It makes me feel comfortable. It makes me feel safe.

It can be scary to not know what's happening.

Recently I went on a retreat with the college class at the church I attend. It was exactly what I needed. The entire focus of the retreat was on REST. Despite the fact that I was up until at least 1 o'clock that night, I felt very rested when I got home (and slept for several hours afterward). Why was it so restful?

We talked about it during one of our sessions. Because ...
1) We got away from life for a while. From the worries of the present.
2) We were able to turn our focus on what was happening in the future.
3) We were able to focus on the things that really mattered. The holiness of rest.

That entire weekend, I didn't have to worry about any of the things I had due the next week.

Thinking back to what we discussed, it further affirmed my reasoning that I need to be better organized. I've got fairly decent time management skills when I put them to use, but it takes effort for me to decide to do that. As long as I can plan out my general day, including time to rest, I should be okay. I shouldn't have to worry about procrastinating from my work, because I'll have that resting time built in.

Procrastination sucks. Burnout sucks worse. Time to balance it and make it positive.

I have a knack for breaking things. A gift, if you will. From the time I first started playing with computers and technology, I have been causing virtual destruction in every instance imaginable. One of my first memories is playing on my dad's 486 running Windows 3.1. I had opened up paint and created a masterpiece of art (I was around 6, leave me alone). There was a nifty feature that I wanted to try. "New" it said. "Do you want to save?"

I clicked "No."

Immediately, all my work was lost. Sad times.

A few years later, I got my own machine running Windows 98. Over the course of the next two years, I found every way imaginable to make that machine crash and burn. And then I would go back and fix it. One of the most dreadful errors I had ever received on that machine just felt bad. I didn't know what it meant, at first, but it felt bad.

"Himem.sys missing or corrupt"

It basically meant that I could no longer boot. A quick repair of Windows (my first!) and it all was back. This knowledge helped me later on in life during an A+ practice exam where I was trying to show up the egotistical jerk in my class. He "knew" everything and he made sure everyone knew it. He didn't know this. I did. It knocked him down a few pegs. Made me happy.

These experiences have helped me expand my own limited knowledge of computers and computer technologies. I've taken on a semi-different way of thinking. When I'm only affecting myself, I'm not afraid to try something. I'll install the latest service pack or patches without reservation or a brand spanking new program to see what it's like.

If it breaks or causes me a lot of trouble, it's a new experience that I've learned and I'll never do that particular act again. I then gain new experiences and knowledge as I work to fix the problem. It is primarily through hands-on activities that we can learn new things. I can easily attribute most of my technical knowledge through trial and error.

Sure it gets annoying fairly frequently; however, you've got to keep working through it ... albeit after a short Dr. Pepper break or something. The moment that you fix it, the moment that you realize how stupidly simple it was, is the happiest moment of the day. I know this from many different experiences.

Rule #1 of breaking things: Don't worry about it. Just fix it.

If you follow that rule, life will be much less stressful for you.

I say all of that to say this.

When I'm working on something that could affect others, say at work, I proceed with caution. Most of the time, I know whether or not something I'm working on will cause downtime. Yesterday wasn't the case. I had been working on installing a new switch and getting it set up with the appropriate VLANs so that we could expand our virtual network (VLAN is a virtual network that separates the different subnets for different network access).

I'm not incredibly knowledgeable when it comes to switches. I've been trying to expand my knowledge by looking at running configs and seeing what it's setup to do. I knew enough to know that I could potentially cause problems and was working slowly. I set up the VLANs on this new switch like was required and began comparing the configs with a previously setup switch running in roughly the same layout.

One tiny mistake caused a massive spanning tree loop and knocked out our phone system. And email. And internal connectivity. The internal connectivity came back with a quick "shut" command on this particular port. A physical unplugging of a cable connecting these two switches fixed the phones. I had no idea about email until this morning.

In case you're curious, email is working again because of a quick patch that I set up. I don't know why it stopped working and am not completely sure I want to try and fix it during business hours. Right now, I've been documenting all the fixed changes that I've made and we'll see if I have an epiphany.

It was a new experience. One that I wish would've happened after-hours. However, I have learned from this experience and gained new insight in how the backbone of our network is set up. I can use this knowledge in the future as I set up and maintain more internal backbones.

Hello, one and all,

Our topic today consists of something that not many average, regular users think about. Backups. Consider the following scenario:

You are a photographer. You take hundreds of pictures at every event and keep a copy stored on an external harddrive. You have heard that it is better to store files on your external harddrive because your system drive is more likely to go out. One evening, you come home from an event and notice the power has been reset. No big deal. You'll just turn your computer back on and everything will be fine.

Once Windows comes up, you connect your camera and start the transfer wizard. What's this? Your computer doesn't see your external harddrive? It's turned on. And plugged into the computer. Changing USB ports doesn't help. It doesn't even feel like the external drive is even working. Your local 7 year old comes to take a look and says the drive is dead. All 8000 of your pictures are lost.

Now you ask yourself, "What could I have done in this situation?"

Enter Mozy Online Backup. Mozy has developed a nifty service where your files can be automagically encrypted and uploaded to secure servers in their environment. In the event of a harddrive failure (it will happen), you can recover all of your files fairly easily and quickly with just a click of the mouse. Amazing!

This is not to say that having an external drive is wrong. On the contrary, it is correct that a system drive will usually fail before an external drive. However, offsite backups are definitely what you need. What happens if you lose your house in a natural disaster? Your external harddrive is no good.

What continues to make Mozy a great solution is that backups are automatic. You schedule it to copy your files up when you're asleep, or at work, or away from your machine in general. It will run while you're gone and give you a nice little notification that it's finished when you return.

Next, their recovery options are remarkable.

First, you can log into your account on Mozy's site and pick and choose the files you would like to restore.

Second, they install a special "drive" on your machine that allows you to restore from.

Third, and this is huge if you have a complete system failure apocalypse badness of massive proportions, for only a $30 processing fee + $.50/GB, Mozy will create a DVD (or multiple DVDs) and send them to you via FedEx.

All-in-all, Mozy is remarkable. And their prices aren't bad either. Two options:

1) Mozy Home Free (Free?!? Free.) - Mozy offers everyone 2GB of free backup; however, I'm going to help you out. By clicking here, I can get you an extra quarter GB of space. To be fair, you'll be getting me an extra quarter GB as well, but I have found that 2.25 GB is a lot better than 2.

2) Mozy Home Unlimited - This plan allows you to backup as much as you want, as often as you want, for only $4.95/month. What an incredible deal!

I've been using Mozy Free for a while now, until I could get money, but now that the summer is here, I'm planning on purchasing the Mozy Home Unlimited very very soon and backing up my entire machine. I've got roughly 17GB of pictures that I'd really like to backup, and Mozy Home Unlimited will let me do that.

Today bothered me more than normal. Not the things in my personal life like work, but the current events that are shaping up into something massive. When I first started running through social networking to read the news, I would go through Digg or Reddit. The interesting thing about these two sites is that it contains probably the most uninformed conformist Americans. I say that because they'll focus on the bad and blame whomever someone tells them to blame.

I followed the progression through the '04 elections as people cried out foul play in the voting process. I watched as people claimed every event and action was a failure on our President's part. Were they right? Who knows? Probably not near the amount of failures they were giving him were truthful, but some may have struck.

As Bush's term ended, I began reading through many other sites as I got my news. Yahoo!'s AP aggregate and personal blogs that hit the homepage as well as Google's official blogs that leaked political bias into their postings. I got to see what the Internet community truly believed. I am a lurker, primarily, on a technology forum site and the few times I delved into Politics and News, I instantly regretted it. This was the informed community. They argued over events and politics I had no idea existed.

The campaign trail got me excited at times. It depressed me at times. I jumped on the bandwagon of my favorite candidate and watched as he dropped out. I saw the democratic nominees make claims of change and hoped that America wouldn't take the path that so many people expected them to take. As Obama made claims of change without examples, I just knew that no one would side with him. How could anyone choose a man who hasn't told you what he wants to do? Yet he was chosen and history was made.

In his first 100 days, I saw the Internet community confused. Obama isn't Bush, but he's continuing Bush's economic plan. But it's okay, because he's telling us it'll be okay. His charisma leads the nation down a path I'd rather not tread. The democrats push plans throughout the entire governmental process and succeed in owning huge banks and companies. The government's power grows rapidly with no signs of stopping.

Following Twitter, Reddit, personal blog postings concerning Miss California's seemingly innocent response to a loaded question. Because she didn't agree with the question-asker, she lost her shot at the title. The cyberworld exploded. People could not find common ground in this issue; this situation. Her statement wasn't offensive. But she's an idiot for believing this. Is that grounds for her not to win? She's an idiot, she deserves to be shot.

This is what I saw the day after the pageant.

Today, the Twitter-verse exploded in rage against prop 8. What is the government's role in marriage? Should they regulate who can and cannot get married? Following the #rejectprop8 hashtag, you can see what these Tweeters believe. It's crazy how much the world has seemingly changed over the past 5-10 years. Possibly for the worse.

I've said before that I feel better about getting my news from the Internet via social networking as well as news aggregates because I can get a more balanced view. That's not completely true. Many of the social networking sites I visit are heavily liberal-bias. I guess a better explanation would be that I'm getting my news from the same sources, but the opinions that come with them, as with the discussions that follow, are from honest people. They're not from "experts" or "analysts" from the big-name outlets. They're people that have dissected this information already and formulated deep thought (usually).

So why did I write all of this? Partly to work it out in my head. I've rewritten several sentences above as I further understand what I'm trying to say. That being said, most of this was still a stream of consciousness base. But all in all, I say all that to say this. Today, I worried for the future of our country more than normal. Today, I grew depressed as I read people's opinions regarding prop 8. Today, I tried to compare everything to my own beliefs and drew a blank. Today, I realized that I don't know fully what I stand for.

And that scares me.