Another experiment with XP - SP2

Well, I have been testing SP2 for about 3 weeks and I have not found anything in my orginzation that will break or explode (trust me, that doesn't mean my users can't or won't break it, it just means it shouldn't).

In everything that I have read from Windows IT Pro to O'Reilly Network articles to simply reading newsgroups, it seems like Microsoft really knocked out most of the bugs during their very extensive beta and release candidate stages. The firewall still seems to be the one VERY BIG problem with everything, it really is much better than the first version (pre-SP2) but there is a lot of room to grow.

Currently I am working on ways to shut the firewall off when inside the network but for those users with laptops, turning it on when they are outside the office. I know there are two profiles for this but I want to shut it off if it is in the domain realm.

Of course depending on what you read and who you believe, it may be that this service pack will end the world as we know it (in some ways that would not be so bad -- Mr. Spammer).

Well back to work, I will report more later...

An answer to my previous blog...

Well about 5:00 AM this morning, I found out the answer to one of my questions from last night's blog.

I am too tired to type, been drinking Absolut Citron and Red-Bull since 3:00 PM don't know if I am wide awake or drunk...

When it hit 5:00 AM, I figured out that I was wide awake and drunk but I could not fall asleep. I ended up watching some show on MSNBC and then the Olympics on NBC for a bit before I just decided I needed to cut my losses and turn off the TV and make myself go to sleep. My damn alarm went off at 9:00 AM!!!

In all seriousness, Leslie and I did have a really good time when our neighbors across the street (Mike and Carrie) came over with their kids and we drank together and just talked for a while. Mike is the one that, with the help of his brother, is going to finish our basement and their kids are so cute and very nice also for a 4 and 2 year old.

Alright since I just got back from buying new escape windows for our basement, I guess I need to put them into the basement and then hopefully we will go shopping looking for some bedroom and media room furniture for our basement.

Till next time, don't mix depressants (alcohol specifically) with stimulants (Red Bull specifically), it really can make you a wide awake drunk and while there are many things worse, it really sucks!

The neighborhood block party

We had our annual block party today and it was a complete bust!! First of all it is August and the temperature was about 60 degrees and then to make matters worse, it started raining!! After everyone stood under a couple of tents for about an hour, people started leaving in droves (us included). So we came back to our house and invited some neighbors across the street over for a drink.

They just left and their kids were starting to get pretty tired. I am really glad they did come over since they had never seen our house and they are seriously some of the nicest people I have ever met.

Alright, that is all for tonight. I am too tired to type, been drinking Absolut Citron and Red-Bull since 3:00 PM don't know if I am wide awake or drunk...

One thing I like about Chicago

Like all other major metropolitan areas, Chicago has its segment of unemployable, homeless, beggers and others that much of society has turned its back on. One of the things that Chicago has different is that we don't try to bullshit the tourist, they tell it like it is. Here is a perfect example...

Hey gotta run, our doggies have a VIP event tonight at one of their 2 favorite stores in the world, Wet Nose in Geneva -- this is the one where they get their special food from. Of course their other favorite place is also in Geneva and it is Jessie and Chopper's Barkery. Till next time, keep your nose out of the brown stuff -- I don't care if it is your boss' brown stuff!

Blogging just to blog

You know sometimes I feel like I am blogging just to blog. I mean seriously, is anyone reading this stuff anyway? I don't really know, since opening my comments up to the public, I have had like 2 comments (other than myself).

Anyway, enough with the pity party. Tonight I installed my new mouse and it is very awesome. I have always been big fan of the Microsoft mice (as opposed to the many other brands or generic out there) and I have tried everything along the spectrum. From the basic wheel mouse (they don't make ones without the wheel any longer) to the regular optical wheel mouse all the way up to the wireless optical explorer (I got 2 of the leather ones) but I have not tried the Bluetooth for the same reason that I do not like the wireless ones -- they seem to skip and secondly, I spend to much time doing things in places that do not handle wireless/Bluetooth very well at all. Some of these places are DOS mode, bios, non-Windows OS, etc. When you can't use your mouse because it is wireless the OS or underlying OS cannot handle it, you must resort to something else.

So anyway, the new one that I got was the next generation Intellimouse Explorer which I found on the Internet for like $21 each at one place, everyone else was like $40+... So I bought 6. This mouse is replacing my (former generation) Intellimouse Explorer and even though I just hooked it up, I really like the tilt wheel feature and the precision is so much more clear than previous versions.

Well going to bed, I had dog school tonight and I am pretty tired -- both dogs are also pretty tired, as you can see right here:

Casey

Riley

Ok, gotta run, time for bed... Nite, nite! Till next time, keep your eye on the prize and your hands outta your pants.

FlashGet - The Best Download Software

FlashGet - The Best Download software

Came across this great new download manager that is FREE and works well with Mozilla and Firefox. There does seem to be one BIG complaint that I have, it installs Cydoor which we all know from the KaZaa days as one very nasty piece of spyware. However, it does not seem to complain too much if you run SpyBot after installing it and clean the Cydoor mess up for you.

If you are using either Mozilla or Firefox, you should get the extension called FlashGot. The developers page can be seen here. Ok now I really gotta run, later!

Still working on Expo tiling

I have been working on getting some tile replaced/repaired in our kitchen for almost a year now! We had someone come out to our home and take pictures for the Expo Design Center to replace some of the tiles that have fallen off the wall and others that the grout is so 'thin' that you can almost see the wall between the tiles.

Well after 9 1/2 months of Expo changing tile people, ordering then losing our tiles, managers hired & fired, we are back working with Steve (our very first expediter) and when I talked to him the first time, his response was "You mean this isn't done yet". That was yesterday and our tiles had just come in on Sunday, today he called me to tell me the installer should be contacting me today or tomorrow.

Needless to say, Steve was a little embarrassed that everything was not done yet since this was the last job he worked on before he changed from tile to carpet, but since he is the only one who has gotten anything done for me, I am not complaining about him in the least. Oh well, gotta run... I always seem to do these things at the end of the day -- oh well!

Working on new PCArmory.com website

I have been working away for the last couple of days on my brother-in-law's new business website. The website will use NUKE-PHP (which we all know I am still fairly new at. If you want a sneak peek, go to PC Armory.com. Last night I was up until 2:45 AM working on the site and getting the email stuff ready to go for them today. And now here it is 4:00 PM and they have not even called me (probably because they have not checked the current email all day).

Gotta run, going to get my building permit for my basement today. Talk soon!

My own little XP SP2 problems

Today I decided it was time to upgrade to Windows XP Service Pack 2 and started the process earlier today and while it was going on my dogs (Casey & Riley) were playing a little tug-o-war with one of their toys. Riley pulled it away from Casey and it hit the power button on my UPS and my computer shut down... right in the middle of the SP2 installation. I thought to myself, "this cannot be that big of a deal, they had to anticipate laptops losing power during install". Well I was wrong!

I will be spending the rest of the night tonight as well as most of tomorrow rebuilding this system! Wish me luck.

My new website -- PC Armory.com

I have started to setup my brother-in-law's new website, PC Armory.com is the name but the site is not set up yet and the DNS will take a few days to get around the world.

Anyway, soon it will be available and you can see what guns he has for sale. That's right it is a gun dealer website, I know, I know, does the world really need another gun dealer? Apperently so, and hey as long as it pays the bills and he does not do anything that will hurt anyone, I can live with it. Gotta run for now, will drop back in later.

Another day... and nothing but clean-up accomplished

Today our CEO walked around the building and about had a cow at how messed up and cluttered the office was. So she basically told the office manager, "get it fixed". Of course, the first one she went to was me!!

I took it upon myself to start junking things and now I have tons of things stashed away and my area is no doubt the most "vacant" in the office.

Sorry, after the fact I realized I should have taken some before and after photo's, but alas I did not.

In my haste to get rid of everything, I did find an electronics recylcing place that is like 3.3 miles from my house called United Recycling. I will be taking lots of electronics there tommorrow!!

Gotta run, doggie school tonight. Till next time, keep your feet out of poo and no one will complain about the smell of your shoo.

Toolkit to Temporarily Block Delivery of Windows XP SP2

It appears Microsoft has released a fix for the upcoming, impending doom on Corporate America. There has been a lot of huff in the press lately about companies not ready for SP2 and how dare Microsoft put out a patch that will be released as an Automatic Update. To all of these companies I say the following, "If you are relying on Automatic Updates for your patch management strategy, take what you can get". I only say this because Microsoft has provided all kinds of free utilities that are available and you don't need to be an IP professional to use them or understand them. One such tool for small businesses would be SUS (Software Update Services) Server, along with some great peer-to-peer support sites like SUSServer.com. If you are adverse to using software by Microsoft to update Microsoft software (if that even makes sense), you can use Shavlik's HFNetChkPro which is free for like up to 50 users. If you are a large corporation, you should be using a patch management tool like Microsoft SMS, Shavlik's HFNetChkPro, St. Bernard's Update Expert and the list goes on and on... Of course there are some exceptions to this little rant of mine, if you have remote offices, field branches, etc it is understandable for those machines to use Automatic Updates.

That being said, if you truely are using Automatic Updates and you do not want to let SP2 install itself, go to this page and follow the instructions, get the file and get cracking cause you only have about a week before SP2 is released to the Automatic Updates stream for the home users to get taken over, er, I mean secured. Download details: Toolkit to Temporarily Block Delivery of Windows XP SP2 to a PC Through Automatic Updates and Windows

Thanks for sticking with me through my little bitch session! Till next time, keep your computer under lock and key and you won't have to worry about this stuff anyway!

Setting up another network

Tonight I have to set up another network for one of my co-workers (not the same one as a couple days ago) who just needs a firewall installed and computer reconfigured. I am looking forward to an easy task since the last several have not been so easy. After that comes a correction clinic for my obedience club and I am planning on running Casey through the Open ring for his first attempt -- I am not expecting much from him as he has never gone through it before.

By the way, last night I still did not get done with my father-in-law's wireless setup. He has a laptop that we got a wireless nic for, but it has IE 4.0 and the minimum spec is IE 5.5 to install the drivers for the card and I did not have a disk that would have a newer version of IE on it, so I am going back this weekend to finish the job when none of the kids are there.

I am outta here for now, leaving work a little early (for me) because my co-worker leaves at this time every day and I am following her to her house. Wish me luck tonight at doggie school!!

Nothing like a never-ending-project

Today I had a project that started at 1:00 with one of my co-workers' that we scheduled a half-hour to complete. We got a pretty good start on it and then BAMMM, we hit a wall and next thing you know, it was 5:00 and we are still working on it.

Now this co-worker is one of the nicest people you will ever meet and so I did not really mind that it took so much longer than I had anticipated, but you all know what I am talking about, you plan your day and then something comes along and throws a monkey wrench right in the middle of things!

I really gotta run now. I am going to my father-in-law's house to set up their wireless network and it is proving to be quite a task, I was already there last night for about 3 1/2 hours. Now I know what I am doing but they have floors and walls that are thicker (for soundproofing) and it is causing some issues with the computer furthest away from the access point. I got them all Linksys stuff, access point, firewall, network cards, wireless nic's and even a repeater today just in case.

This better work or I am going to be pissed. Gotta run, later!!

Neighborhood Pool Party

Today was the neighborhood pool party at our very good friend Paul & Noreen's house. It is one of the events that everyone in the neighborhood looks forward to for much of the summer. As usual, Leslie and I went and spent much of the day and most of the night there. The difference with this one is that when we left, I threw my wife over my shoulder and said, "Let's go, you're coming with me!"

It is always nice though because we get a chance to meet some new people in the neighborhood as well as seeing and talking to many of the people you just see when you are driving by with the quick wave and a smile.

Strange thing though about Paul & Noreen's party this year, we have our "official" block party in just 2 weeks to the day. Oh well, I guess I will just have to talk to different people at that party. Till next time, I have had too much to drink and need to take a nap before Sunday :)

Cubs blow another game

Well, we went to the game today and had great tickets. We were right behind the catcher straight out from the first base foul line. Anyway, Greg Maddux pitched a really good game and made it through 6 1/3 innnings, which is as much as he has made it through in any of his last 4 starts. He pitched well enough to get the victory... but then comes the relief squad, sucking as they have all season long.

Here is a quote from the game "How bad was the ninth inning? Reliever Glendon Rusch faced three batters and all three reached base and scored; (Kyle) Farnsworth faced four batters and all four reached base but only three scored, thanks to Jon Leicester's mopup." Can you believe that Kyle Farnsworth makes $1,400,000 and he can't get his head out of his butt this entire season!! By the way, his ERA for the last 7 days --- 27.00 !!!!!! How the hell do you still get to play on a professional team with those numbers!!!

Anyway, I just got home and I am tired, going to get some dinner and go to bed! By the way, today is Gary Jr.'s 21st birthday-- happy birthday man!!

Problems with Video Codec's

Well, today I really hit a wall. I was playing some video for a company sales presentation (tomorrow!!) and all of a sudden, videos would not play. I thought to myself, "Self, this is not a problem, you can just go to your Old trusty source Nimo's_Codec_Pack." Well as you can read on that site, there is no more Nimo's Codec Pack!!

So now I am forced to use one of the other Codec Packs out there, so I am giving a new one a try. The one that I chose to use is Codec Pack All in 1 which I am not so sure about. I normally would not post this blog until I had tested it and was somewhat pleased with it, but in this case, I don't know if it will lock up my computer or what so I am posting it right now. If you don't see a blog tomorrow, it locked it up and there will be a huge rant in here on Saturday.

Ok, gotta run now, must reboot now to take affect.

Saw Trailer And Movie Clips

So my friend (and neighbor) Dave calls me tonight and says "Dude, you have to do a Google search for this move, Saw Trailer and Movie Clips and see some of the clips, they are really f'ed up". So I am up for just about anything at this point in the evening so I hit it. There are about 6 clips on this site but they are really disturbing and I can only imagine the movie is really bad!!

Anyway, back to the real world. Tonight I watched The Amazing Race 5, Episode 6 in which the big brothers (Marshall & Lance) were eliminated due to the fact that the one brother's (Marshall) knee's hurt him so bad that they quit on the last event of this leg.

The brother's quit and thus now The Amazing Race has a quitter, just like Survivor (whose quitter, Osten Taylor will go down in infamy as the first quitter in reality TV history - and he got fully chastised by the host of the show).

Gotta run, heading out to run an errand, at almost 11:00 PM!!!

Windows XP - SP2 is out

Long live the Microsoft Gods, XP SP 2 is out!

With Windows XP Service Pack 1 coming out on September 9, 2002, the GODS of Microsoft managed to squeak in under the wire of a 2 year window for the 2nd Service Pack. Don't get me wrong, I would much rather see them treat every service pack as they have this one, with the extensive testing and such. However, when you look at what this service pack entails, you are talking about a monster 266 MB that is 278,927,592 bytes!!!

They did put together a very nice page for IT Professionals though which has a link to the full network install. I don't know what all the stuff on the page references yet but the biggest thing is definatly the firewall and workarounds to help allow an IT Pro work around the firewall. The best way to work around this firewall is to modify the %windir%\Inf\Netfw.inf file and deploy this file via Active Directory Group Policy. There is an entire guide on working on this .inf file in a managed environment. This guide will really save your behind if you are an IT Pro, otherwise you will be visiting every workstation to open ports on the firewall, then when the end user decides to restore the original configuration, you will be going back again!!

Got to go, restarting my PC... Later all!

Finally saw Spiderman 2

Well, finally today I saw Spiderman 2 and it really was not as good as the original. I guess I had not read anywhere that 2 was better than 1, but I just thought I would throw my 2 cents out there on which was better. Ok, one question, what was with the "crowd surfing Spiderman" on the train after he passed out?

Seriously now, if I were Spiderman I think I would have never stopped being Spidey but I would be all over MJ. Oh well, I guess you never know how the mind of a superhero is going to work.

Ok all joking aside, last night was my father-in-law's 55th birthday and we went over to his house and now we have plans to go to Six Flag Great America later this week with my sister-in-law (Jessica Stubbs) and her slightly younger brother (Tom Stubbs). Anyway, once we go to Great America, I will post some pictures so that everyone can see what fun it is at one of the greatest theme parks in the world.

Got to run for now, talk to you later...

Bailey's first birthday

Well today, I went to my niece's first birthday without my wife (she was very sick with whatever I had most of the week). I am so glad that I went because my Uncle Tom and Aunt Marty were there and I have not seen them in a couple of years. It was really nice to catch up with them and Leslie and I are going out to their place on September 11 to spend the weekend with them.

If you want to check out some pictures of Bailey's first birthday, go to my Gallery and click on "Bailey's 1st Birthday". There are some really good pictures of everyone, some really bad ones too, you be the judge!!

Well, I have a heck of a chore ahead of me tonight, I am reformatting my website for all PHP instead of HTML extensions. It is easy to change the filenames, what is not so easy is changing all the links once I change those names. I need to make a redirect page from every former .htm page and redirect it to the new .php page, which is really the same page.

Got to run for now, more info to come later, enjoy the weekend!

My office closes early and here I sit

Today it seemed as though my office closed early. Everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE, left early today and the place was a literal ghost town by 4:00. There were 4 people here (me included) at 4:15, down to 1 at 4:45 and here I sit. Actually right now, I am pondering whether I should do the things that I know have to get done or if I should just leave myself. What do you think? I am with you, just leave.

Ok, I am going to leave right now, I just have to print off some stuff for my next quarter at DePaul for a second class that I am going to take... crazy, I know! Well the teacher who is teaching this quarter was the same one I had in my class before last (Spring 2004). It was Dr. Danny and he was a fun teacher and made class interesting instead of just lecturing all the time.

Till next time, I am outta here. Have a good weekend and stay safe!!

Gearing up for ECHO

Tomorrow starts the big show for ECHO, who is the manufacturer of items such as chain saws, small powered lawn & garden tools, etc. I am running the IT for their show in Illinois this year along with Greg Bizarro who is doing their A/V stuff for them.

As for my part, I put together a I-Form computer that is extremely stipped down on the extra OS stuff and has Windows 2000 and Office 2000, and that is pretty much it. I stripped out all of the extra stuff that Windows installs and everything except for Word and PowerPoint for the computer. The will be amazed at how quick this little computer will go once they see it in action. Since they will be taking it with them tomorrow (dry run for show which is next Friday), I created an image so that I can restore the image to the exact condition it was in when I gave it to them. This way if they decide to install anything on the computer, I can blow it away and come back to my prestine image in about 20-25 minutes time (tops)!!

The pay for this gig is not great but I am more doing it to get started with Greg working on the side. I will make about $50 per hour for my time plus $200 for the computer and my time will total about 8-10 hours max. It will turn into a nice little sum of money though by the time we are all done.

Well gotta run, got obedience school with the boys tonight and I need to go get them some more raw food. Till next time, keep your eyes on the skys and your feet on the floor!

What a way to spend a sick day...

Today I felt so bad that I did not want to go into my office and get everyone else sick to I decided to take a sick day. About 10:15 AM I get a call from my CEO that her house was struck by lightning last night and a giant hole was in the middle of her sun room ceiling. Needless to say with a lightning strike of that magnitude, anything that was plugged into an electrical outlet is effectively 'toast'.

So anyway, she calls me this morning because her son's computer is acting up and he needs to send a file to his professor for his summer class. So I try to talk her through the installation of a CD burning software program (WHOOOAAAAA, that was a chore), then basically told her to connect it to our network, map a drive letter then send it from your computer. Done, only 45 minutes! Then the real fun starts, her son is going away to college in a couple of weeks and he has more spyware and adware than I have ever seen on a single computer. He had over 150 programs running in his TaskManager Processes. So I told her I would take care of it.

Now, I do in fact love doing this type of stuff so this is no big deal to me... but, that was 9 1/2 hours ago and I am now reinstalling the OS because there is just no way around all of this stuff, everything I have done from Spybot, SpywareBlaster, Ad-aware or any other of the tools that I tried have had any of the success, simply due to the large amount and the deepness of the spyware.

So now that I am reinstalling the OS, I am debating whether to lock the thing down since I know I will get the phone calls if the thing is not working right, what do you think? Naa, Kenny is a cool kid, I will just tell him what he did and what not to do again and everything should be cool.

Till next time, take your medicine idiot!!

Codegrrl.com PHP Scripts

A very cool site with some nice php programs, the one I particularly like is the PHPCalendar. Works with a MySQL backend. I will checking this one out tonight from home! --CODEGRRL.com-- is the site and there are a few scripts that look really nice. I get 5 free MySQL databases, so I might as well use them!!

Till next time, I am outta here, feeling sick and going home to go to bed (or at least lay on the sofa till my wife gets home)!

Another little cool program - Spam Abuse

As with many of you, I have had it up to here (I am pointing at my forehead) with spam and all these stupid home users with high speed connections (yes, some of you may be the ones that I am referring to) not protecting their machines. I have come across a nice little tool that will allow me to automatically send an email to their ISP and also to several spam databases at the same time.

The name of the program is called Abuse appropriately enough. You can get your own copy from SourceForge, the web host to the world of Open Source. The program actually needs a little setup (very little) but there is no add-in to your email program or anything else like that. The program can send emails to all the appropriate people for everything you put into one single folder (like Junk E-mail in Outlook 2003).

Ok, well back to work now, I gotta get some things done before I go to lunch. L8r

Very useful tool for evaluating open ports

I have come across this very useful tool for evaluating your open ports. An by default, Microsoft NT based systems (2000 & XP included) have tons of open ports. The tool is called DiamondCS OpenPorts and is available at their website.

The tool will spell out if you for example have open ports 80 (port 80 of course means that you have a web server running -- and you may not have known it) or 25 (port 25 is the SMTP mail port which means that your machine may very well be acting as an open relay for spammers to take advantage of).

I have been looking for a tool like this for a while. There are lots of tools out there that can test your ports over the Internet, but if you have a good firewall configuration, those tests will stop at the firewall and that does not take into account any possible "internal attacks". What I am really interested in is making sure the computer is secure (seriously, what happens if the computer is ever placed outside the firewall or is a laptop?).

Another very valuable (and free) tool is released by a company of former hackers turned legit (guess they needed jobs to pay the bills). The company name is Foundstone and their free tools are located under the Resources --> Free Tools section of their website. More specifically the program that scans open ports, allows you to close them, etc can be found here.

If you just have one machine at home with a Linksys Firewall/Router you could always go to Steve Gibson's GRC.com to test that machine or your home configuration. Just remember though, if you play with that tricky little "Advanced" tab and the DMZ or you have a laptop, your test from GRC.com needs to be rerun, because you no longer have the protection of your home firewall.

OK, gotta fly, this was supposed to be a quick note to myself about the OpenPorts software, not a tutorial on home firewalls. Till next time, keep your hands to yourself and you'll keep them out of the 'cuffs.

Go-Quiz.com Tests

Came across this thing on another persons blog, Go-Quiz.com Magical Name Acronym Generator. I thought it was pretty cool, although I don't necessarily agree with what it gave me for my name, but hey, oh well.

R	Revolutionary
A	Appealing
N	Naive
D	Dashing
Y	Young

Name / Username:

Just for the record, it does not handle numbers very well, that is why I had to use Randy, cause t001z does come out like Tempting -- 0 -- 0 -- 1 -- Zany. Oh well, till next time, keep your nose out of the boss' ass and you should be in good shape!

Mid America Taping and Reeling Firewall Upgrade

Today I am spending most of my day performing due diligence before doing an upgrade on the firewall of Mid America Taping and Reeling (This company is by far the best in the tape and reel industry, they have been doing surface mount, axial taping, radial taping, component packaging, smd taping and carrier tape longer and better than anyone out there).

Currently their firewall is a Cisco PIX 506E running on bin 5.x and we are upgrading to 6.3.4 which is the most recent version, we are also upgrading to the latest version of Cisco PDM which is 3.02. This should be a pretty routine upgrade but still anytime dealing with a customer's life line to email and the Internet, got to make sure we know what we are doing BEFORE going into the office to do the upgrade.

Barb and Ed met with me on Friday to go over the last of the particulars and make sure there will be zero down time or business interruption to which I gave my assurance of this. Work will begin and commence on Monday or Tuesday, whichever they give me the green light to come.