Let me make it clear - I don't think that small town midwest is or will be the target of middle eastern suicide bombers. But we have been the target of various attacks - ALF stuff and that kid from Wisconsin trying to draw a smiley face with pipe bombs.

We have a couple more pressing problems in the midwest that made this class good.

- The first is meth - and the associated labs and booby traps that go with it. Many of the devices that the fire marshal showed were pulled from meth labs.

- A second is the ready access to the components of fertilizer bombs (nasty) - any nutjob could get their hands on enough explosives to cause serious damage (see oklahoma city).

- A third (almost uniquely rural) issue is that there is still old explosives laying around in various outbuildings. They're not everywhere, but it is good to have an idea about what you're looking at if you come across them.

Say what you will about the whole Homeland Security thing, but this class I went to last night was well worthwhile.

This is important to those of us who work in IT in banks. The guidance will be used by your IT examiners to grade you on how you are mitigating the "risks" as shown in the guidance. Where these examiners aren't IT professionals (they're more like auditors with no IT experience), they go by the book on looking at your infrastructure.

As guidances go, this one isn't too bad - issues (whether you agree with them or not) are clearly laid out and terms are explained in words that the examiners can understand.

The guidance breaks down the risks into strategic (compatibility, forking, maturity, and TCO), operational (code integrity, documentation, contigency planning, and external support), and legal (SCO - enough said).

The legal section of the guidance is right on - there are legal issues that are still being hashed out - see SCO vs. IBM.

The strategic risks aren't too badly written. They're basically saying to use the right tool for the job. Hopefully the examiners will read it that way.

The operational risks are way off. They talk about a lack of support and documentation for open source projects - which is bullhockey for the ones that I've used. They also spoke of contingency planning - and thought it would be difficult to replace your software in the event that you needed to - also not entirely true. The operational risks section looked like it was written from a press release by Microsoft.

Meaning: It is indeed right that one should, from time to time, reboot his IT hardware for it cures all manners of ills. Furthermore, if one is experiencing problems with the device, one should reboot the hardware and see if the problem continues before calling technical support.

This doesn't just apply to computers. I was called in to look at a fancy speaker phone that wasn't working properly. After looking over the connections, and everything looking right, I pulled the power plug from the wall and plugged it back in. Behold! It worked!

Yesterday, when trying to load a freaking page correctly, I tried something different. Normally, I'd either been refreshing the page or going back and re-clicking the link.

Yesterday, I hit the "page back" button followed by the "page forward" button and everything loaded correctly. It's worked 100% since then.

Don't know if anyone will read this or care, but it works for me.