I have a firstname.lastname address of gmail, and I've made friends with a pile of the other folks on gmail. Our absolute favorites are the emails and fanpics bound for this fine gentleman: https://www.facebook.com/RepoMattBurch

From: BEn xxx
Date: Tue, Dec 9, 2008 at 2:56 PM
Subject: hey meat head
To: @gmail.com

  Hey I am a repo man myself as well as a bounty Hunter among other things.On your show last night you said(It's not like a bounty Hunter being a repo man you never know what you are getting in to)We fell on the floor laughing at your complete ignorance being broad casted on national television.I understand you can bench press 9000 pounds but that is only good for a dumbass like yourself to get yourself out of a jam when you open your uneducated mouth.You kill more flys with honey and you are a complete embarrassment to the industry with your short fuse temper.O yeah it was great seeing you lead away with those cute silver bracelets on your wrist.

Indeed. Truly my heart bleeds for Mr Hayden.

I run a managed services department (so essentially I'm an IT director), and I think it's probably one of the most high stress positions that I've ever held. I'm on call 24x7, there is always money on the line, and it's a highly competitive industry.

It was summer, and it started as just a weird burning/itching feeling along my right armpit, and I initially thought that I had gotten some poison oak/ivy/whatever on myself. I rubbed some calomine on it, and called it a day. Fast forward three days, and I had a incredibly painful rash that ran in a band from the center of my chest, under my armpit, and around the back of my shoulder. And holy shit did it hurt. Now I'm only in my early 30's, and for someone my age, Shingles really only has one source - stress. That particular week I had 26 customer facing engagements, and had worked 70+ for over a month.

It was definitely a clarifying moment for me, and was directly responsible for my current attitude where we overstaff our department a little bit to keep the workload manageable, and I keep an eye on peoples timecards, and start hassling them about flextime when they go over 50 hours. The extra work hours just aren't worth the risk of someone having a health meltdown of some sort.

-matt

This stuff makes me feel crappy to write, but I actually went and looked at the CDC numbers:

All data comes from the 2010 CDC data and the 2010 US Census.

There were a total of 31,632 Firearms related deaths in the US in 2010

Unintentional 606 0.2/100k
Suicide 19,392 6.3/100k
Homicide 11,078 3.6/100k
Undetermined 252 0.1/100k
Legal intervention/war 344 0.1/100k

Intentional self-harm (suicide) by discharge of firearms (Total 19,392)
White (Including Hispanics) 17,909
Black 1,079

Assault (homicide) by discharge of firearms (11,078)
White (Including Hispanics) 4,647
Black 6,151

Firearm Homicides per 100,000
White (Including Hispanic) 2.9
Non-Hispanic Whites 1.9
Black 14.6 (Black males are 27.6?!)
Asian 1.0

The overall US Suicide rate is 12.0/100k, which is less than France, and about the same as the nordic nations and the UK, which all have pretty stringent firearms laws. This makes me think that firearms just happen to be the method of choice in the US, but that these were people that were probably going to kill themselves anyway (Japan, which has *extremely* stringent gun laws has a suicide rate of 21/100k). Interestingly enough though, I heard a story on NPR yesterday that said that people are 85% successful at suicide with guns, but only 2% with other methods, so I might be wrong.

On the other hand, in 2010 Blacks only made up 12.6% of the population, but accounted for 55.5% of all the firearms related homicides. What the hell?! When you've got 1/8th (really 1/16th because it's almost all men) of your population accounting for over half of your gun related homicides, you don't have a gun problem, you have a social problem. I'm not saying blacks are more likely to murder people with guns, I am saying that unfortunately there is a culture in the black community that glamorizes gun violence. It's not necessarily a wealth thing, because you don't see it among poor asians or hispanics.

I guess what's most frustrating about all this is that Microsoft is capable of solid engineering. While Windows 8 devolves and is an intensely frustrating to use debacle, Server 2012 is actually a pretty nice product with some cool features in it (block level deduplication, easier clustering, and the site to site VPN over SSL (DirectConnect) for example).

It feels like the server team largely listens to their users and generally improves their product, while the consumer teams just releases these absolute dogs every few years. I suspect the reason why is that the server team has credible competition in the form of Linux, VMware, and others, the desktop and office teams really don't have a lot of competition in the corporate desktop/productivity market.

-matt

You're a jerk, Zuckerberg. A complete kneebiter.

-matt

Went in with the wife around 10am - took us probably 5 minutes to get our ballots. We use paper ballots, and all the machines were up and working. A pretty painless experience all around.

Diablo 2 is probably a bad example, because of all things, Blizzard has a pretty enlightened view on the Diablo 2 license keys if you have registered it.

I bought my copy of Diablo probably 10 years ago, and registered it to my battle.net account, and I long since lost my CD's. Since then I have had the hankering to play it a few times, and instead of having to pirate it, and wonder if I'm downloading the root kit of the week, I just go to my battle.net account and re-download the installer.

-matt

You are absolutely right - also, there is typically less bloatware installed by the manufacturer that you need to fight through for the system to be usable.

My advice to my non-technical friends and family is "Don't buy a PC without a Touchpoint"

-matt

VTP is a wonderful easy to use method of propagating vlans, and pruning them from trunks, but it has some serious security moments:

As an example, lets say you have a switch that is connected to your network, and you detach it to do some QA/Testing on it, create and delete a bunch of VLANs (which increments the revision number), and then put it on a shelf and forget about it.

A year later you need a switch, and connect it into the network - provided that the revision number on your test switch is still higher, that VLAN information will propagate out and overwrite the rest of your VLAN database.

Cisco VTP best practices: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/switches/ps700/products_white_paper09186a00801b49a4.shtml#cg1c

-matt

They changed that last fall - all the A series stuff comes with routing, and much of it comes with MPLS, BGP, etc.

On the E series gear (the old Procurve line) most of the routing switches now come with OSPF, VRRP, better QoS. Next code release will also include MPLS and BGP.

-matt

HP networking expert here:
Hey look! HP routers from SMB through carrier class: http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/products/routers/index.aspx
Wow, firewalls and IPS too: http://h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/products/network-security/index.aspx?tab=3

They acquired a lot of neat stuff from 3com a year ago, and at this point probably have almost as wide a portfolio of networking gear as Cisco.

-matt

I live in Weare, and this is certainly not how I wanted to see my town end up on the front page of Slashdot.

The Town Selectmen are having an Q&A session tomorrow, and I'll be attending to ask questions. I do have to say that this surprises me; Weare is a particularly independent town in NH, which is a particularly Libertarian leaning state to begin with. I've met the police chief on a number of occasions, and he's always struck me as community minded, and relatively benign.

-matt

And of course, Mr President. After all, what a faux pas it would be to call President Obama "Mr President" here in the US.

Oh wait..