May this year be filled with better times than last.

And if any of you all happen to visit Cow Country California, PLEASE let me know. I'd love to play host (schedules permitting). We do happen to have a national park which is invariably the sixth or seventh item on people's Things To See In California list - so they never see it. ;-)

Yay!

Looks like I will be a Systems & Procedures Analyst II

Yay!

:-)

Although I got an email from a client yesterday that said "You have always been so helpful. Thank you so very much - you will be missed."

I'm hoping she doesn't know something I need to know. ;-)

Chicken!

As mentioned previously, my employer's contract was not renewed. My last day of employment in the job I've held for a while (since 1994) would definitely be December 31, if nothing else happens.

Thankfully, today was my interview with the County IT Director for my job. With any luck, I'll become a County IT employee before December 31st.

Once thing that sucks is that the company I work for is big into processing Electronic Benefits Transfer cards for various government programs. So my final 'paycheck' will be in the form of a EBT card with fees attached when funds are withdrawn. Supposedly there is one method to get the money without a processing fee: hand back the card that was just issued, and get that converted into a paper check. The company will allow one (and only one) transaction gratis. So the finance person that converts the EBT card to a hand-written paper check needs to get the data entry into the web page right on the first try. Impressive. Not.

I think I did OK in the job interview. I've known the IT Director for a while, and she knows that I'm honest and have integrity. She also (just) learned that way back when, I went to night school to learn bookkeeping - because I wanted to understand the finance department's language. Also, when she asked if I had ERP experience, I knew what she was talking about, because I actually did write a whole manufacturing information system in RPG II back in the mid-eighties. Heh. And that I know Visio inside and out. Heh heh. The things you learn in an interview. ;-)

The whole thing has people stressed out. Some people are hearing from Human Resources that they don't qualify for their own job. Other people are being told that they need to apply to become desktop techs - because desktop techs do everything and by that virtue are the most skilled of all the positions.

And the pay grade for desktop techs is so much lower, why?

So feelings are hurt, and managers are having to deal with flare-ups of anger. It took the County way too long to get to the interviewing point - technically, they gave us notice that this was the plan in 2004. Then they were given the job classification paperwork nine months ago*. Interviews only just opened up last week, for a 50 person department that should be online January 1st (ten business days).

I'm doing my best to keep my head down, and focus on rowing the boat to shore.

*So says the guy who started the process, but won't get the director's job. Too much drama.

I can't imagine that I had anything to do with it; but, the timing is coincidental. As mentioned here, Citibank had been sending out incredibly stupid emails, just begging to be spoofed.

Now their emails do not include a link. They (intelligently) tell the customer to visit the Citibank web site - which the user already has in their bookmarks.

Thank goodness. Whomever at Citibank got a clue: I salute you.

I don't know if the conversion is 100% complete, but so far all the messages I've seen have the improved format.

Now it is Washington Mutual's turn to pull their heads out of their butts. ;-)

So for the first time ever, I purchased something from Woot.

Sandisk 1GB Media Player with FM Tuner and Voice Recorder = $16 (refurbished). It will make a nice small gift for the oldest step-son. I don't own anything like it, nor does my wife - so this was an inexpensive way to get a portable mp3 player. Two years ago, I terribly needed a portable voice recorder. Finally, I'll get one.

And now, I should be able to vote on icblf's shirt designs. ;-)

So I'm implementing a new anti-virus / anti-spam solution, and it works differently from what we had before. It compares every incoming message against it's 'corpus', and either passes the message through; or, it puts it in quarantine. On a set schedule, every person with items in quarantine get emailed the list of the newly quarantined. This digest message lets people release the items they do want from quarantine.

So far, so good.

As people release messages from quarantine, a copy is sent to a 'feeder' mailbox. In a perfect world, everything that shows up there could be used to update the corpus / train the anti-spam engine. In the real world, I have users that release the Viagra / Cialis ads. They release the Storm worm messages. They release Nigerian 419 scam messages.

Gad.

So now I have to read their freaking email to see if it is real, or spam. If it is real, I drag the message to the HAM folder. If it is spam, I drag it to the SPAM folder. In either case, the system gets trained to distinguish ham from spam. But this aspect of it is a manual intervention process.

For the record, when the person gets moved to the new anti-virus / anti-spam system, they are pointed to a FAQ that warns them that the released email is reviewed by actual human beings.

Still, I don't like reading people's email.

First off, it's a waste of my time. It's also annoying, because we have a clear policy that work email is supposed to be used for work, ONLY. And instead, I see stuff that is super non-work related. Some people have idiot friends that send them photos with pornographic content. With friends like that, who needs enemies? (Unless the recipient is trying to get fired.)

Now, regarding Citibank.

Lets see how their competitor, Wells Fargo, does it:

"Thank you for sending your service request to Wells Fargo Online Customer Service. Your questions and concerns are our top priority. We do not consider regular email, which is not encrypted, to be a secure way to send confidential information, so we will send our response to your secure Messages & Alerts inbox at wellsfargo.com. We will notify you at this email address when our reply is ready for you to view."

Let's see how Citibank does it:

"Please click here to access a bogus site that will steal your account ID and password."

Well, their email might as well say that. And because I have to freaking read the stupid email, I can tell how many real Citibank please-click-here-to-visit-our-website messages come through compared against how many (not) Citibank please-click-here-to-visit-our-malwebsite messages come through.

These messages work, because HTML can be crafted to take a URL of http://web.da-us.citibank.com.ssl898.pk/citifi/scripts/login2/index.html and make the URL appear to be http://web.da-us.citibank.com/index.html

Forth what it is worth, Sallie Mae and Washington Mutual also send out clickable emails. But this is such a bad idea, it boggles my mind. Why would you want to train your banking customers to assume that clicking on links is safe? Amazon, eBay, Multiply - it's not such a big deal. But banks?

Citibank: please get a clue. That goes for you too, WaMu.

Is anyone else watching The Big Bang Theory? My wife and I both like it. The casting is good - each actor makes their part fit really well. The writing has been pretty good. In some ways, it's a revamp of The Odd Couple, except that they've brought a cute babe into the mix, and, instead of divorced men, the guys are 'dating newbies'.

Mostly it's good because the actors that play Leonard and Sheldon have a terrific grasp of who their characters should be.

I bought a Brother MFC-5840 a while ago. Great features. Low price. One year warranty. Lasted 1.5 years.

>:-(

So I want to replace it with something with a network port that supports CUPS. It probably should print in color, although that's not a deal breaker.

The box it will be replacing does fax, scanning, copying, and printing. Well, no printing any more....

What are your favorites, and why?

Thanks!

So I got an email from Senator Boxer:

Here is my reply:

A friend mentioned that his friends were interested in a game, World In Conflict by Massive Entertainment. Apparently there is a difference between Real Time Tactical and Real Time Strategy - and WiC is a RTT, not a RTS. But the reviews have been favorable, so I bought myself a copy.

Star Wars: Empire at War is also an RTT. I wasn't that impressed with SW: EaW.

But I like WiC better. Maybe a year and a half is what it took.

It could be because there are more unit types. The fact that it has an online multiplayer component is very nice - someday I'll actually play against real people. The single player campaign had interesting voice scripting, which I didn't expect - so it did seem like there was a story being told. At some point, SW: EaW became inane; WiC never did. If anything, the campaign/story in WiC was a little short. I think first impressions also factor in - the initial unit maximums in SW: EaW were discouraging; WiC didn't make that mistake.

I still haven't been as excited by a game as much as I was by Command and Conquer. I saw hints of that in WiC though.

Hmmmm... I bought a joystick to play Darkstar One - and I see that I haven't made a journal entry for that.

Well, I found a good use for the joystick - I remapped the joystick hat to w, a, s, d - awesome! I'm very right-handed, and was having trouble, having to think about the left hand keyboard control. But with the joystick hat doing the camera movement, it's effortless.

I really like the graphics in the game. That's all very well done. I also like the extra strikes I can call in - there is a large variety, and I like the countdown timer that let's me know when it will happen. I also really like that the game is well balanced - mostly I would win, but not always.

The only thing I don't like is that my mortar trucks tend to travel to the enemy instead of raining mortars on the enemy from far away. Close up, they make great targets. Command and Conquer lets you build airports, and then fly jets out of them. WiC only has jets for auxiliary strikes.

Which brings me back to the RTS versus RTT game play. At their core, RTS' are about money . I like fending off the enemy until I can build an overwhelming force and then wade in with a ridiculous number of units. It's exhilarating when I have to defend myself against a monster army run by my step-son who knows his goal is to destroy my source of wealth. But with RTT's all that is toned down. It's not about building, it's about using wisely. Kind of like chess. Well, real-time chess, with replaceable pieces. And explosions and stuff.

Anyway, I really like WiC. I'm certain I'll buy the next game Massive comes out with too.

For the record, I bought the collector's edition, which purports to have a chunk of the actual Berlin Wall in it. It cracks my friend up, that one of Nikita Khrushchev's decisions would end up as a bauble in a videogame. Such is the reward for politicians with ambition.

This "chunk of wall"? It isn't even large enough for a decent bricking.

The game is loads of fun though.

;-)

A friend of mine sent this link to me; it is hosted by Reason magazine (which is really conservative). Their blog links to a video news segment by Channel 42, KEYE, CBS from Austin, Texas.

Texas lawmakers have stopped even trying to pretend they have integrity.

[edit 2007-10-02] I also found the transcript of the video.

Well, it's been a month since my last JE, so maybe I should write a few things down.

Still no news on the contract. The County hasn't signed an interim contract either, so we are working without one, and have been, since July 1. I suppose that shows good faith on the part of ACS, that even though we've been told the contract is over, ACS is still paying for bodies to run the place.

We've lost seven people in the last seven weeks, although one of those was a retirement.

There is still a chance that Board and the CAO could decide to renew a contract with us. They just hired a new CAO; he worked for the County before, as the finance guy in the CAO's office, but left. He has a reputation of having high ethics, which is great in my book. Being a finance guy, if he looks at the plan that was presented to the Board, he might ditch the whole idea of insourcing.

Things have definitely slowed down. As private sector employees, when your job is on the line and the customer says "jump", you start jumping and ask "how high?" on the way up. Now that the job is over with (unless things change), people aren't asking us to jump. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to start a six month project when your contractor only has four months left.... Previously, we would pay for stuff for the County, and then submit the bills for reimbursement. Now that there is no contract, that is over. The County is going to have to print their own purchase orders - and due to the legislature taking their time, that ain't happening now. Probably in a month or two... but why would departments be allowed to spend money on their own personal IT projects before the County-wide IT department is formed? I'm going to take a cluebat to any of you who answer "synergy". ;-)

Anyway, work is slow, and there isn't as much pressure to perform. What are they going to do? Fire us?

;-)

If people are a little quicker to laugh nowadays, it's a nervous laugh instead of a joyful laugh. But we have plenty of time to work on those little side projects we've always wanted, but didn't have time for.

:-)

So I have four ReplayTV units here at home, all cabled into one switch (mostly). For a year or so, I had another PC in the one of the spare bedrooms; setting it up, I bought a little switch to expand the network there. Then the oldest son moved back in, and loaded that PC up with spyware and malware and porn. Out goes the PC (if he wants porn, he can get himself an apartment and pay for his own internet connection).

Since the only network device in his room was the Replay, I pulled the little switch out as well, and cabled that Replay directly into the same switch as the rest. See the top of the diagram of the network.

Except his Replay fell off the network.

Hunting it down, it was a DHCP problem, kind of.

BTW, I learned that the Linux equivalent of TeraTerm Pro is minicom. It was silly how difficult it was to find out what program to use to access the first com: port on my PC (which is cabled directly into the Cisco router). There are a thousand pages telling you how to access the Linux console via a serial port connection, but hardly any that tell you how to access the console port of some other device from Linux. But I digress.

The nice thing about being cabled directly into the router is that I could turn on the debug messages for the DHCP server and do DHCP release and renews and watch the messages scroll by.

Next test: reboot the errant ReplayTV.

The DHCP server would continuously get DHCP discover packets, and hand back DHCP inform packets, but the Replay never took Yes for an answer.

Sometimes, the DHCP server even managed to send back unicast packets (which is what it would do for the properly working devices). Still, no go. The Replay would not take an IP address. Even if I configured it manually, it complained it couldn't talk to the default gateway.

Eventually, I carry the Replay into the computer room, and hook it directly to the switch, bypassing the in-wall wiring. No joy. A thought struck me: how about bypassing the big switch (the D-Link), and plugging directly into the Cisco?

It works!

Put it back on the D-Link. Despair.

Well... it worked for a year, when there was the little Netgear between it and the D-Link....

It works. (See the bottom of the diagram).

I don't get it. Three out of four Replays are happy with the D-Link. This one - picky picky picky.

So there you have it: the debugging process to get a wonky net appliance back on the network. The Replays run VxWorks which keeps me, a mere mortal, from being able to tell what is going on inside the device.

I can kind of see the appeal of something like MythTV. If only the ReplayTV people would sell their guide service to MythTV users....

On the other hand, the devices Just Work (err...), and have for years. My wife thought I was the world's most intelligent husband the week after I brought the first box home. And then, when I brought the second box home and they auto-networked and streamed video between them.... :-)

Heh. I really like my Replays.

Even if I do have to play network tech every couple of years.

Store's solar conversion close to being finished

As always with the Times-Delta, eventually the article and photo will go offline. I was amused to find yesterday an article on byte.com that has stuck around for more than ten years....

But anyway, Kohl's department stores will buy power from SunEdison at a fixed rate over 20 years. 2,100+ solar panels on that roof.