Working from home...

Today I am working from home because I have 3 guys here repairing the tile that another company really screwed up.

So anyway, these 3 guys are out in the kitchen and about every 5-10 minutes they come into my office asking about me something (what I don't know), I have a hard time understanding what they are saying.

I must say that working from home is not all it is cracked up to be. Yesterday I went to the Cub's game and saw them get beat in the 12th inning, it was not pretty -- they really should have won that game! I am not sure how many people do it every day, working from home that is. The reasons I say this is that many of the things that I need to get my job done are sitting on my desk at work and there is no way to get them here without going into the office. Now if you don't have an office or you ONLY work from home, this is a different story, I get that.

Anyway, gotta run to my office now, more to come later.

GMAIL Invites to give away

If anyone reading my blog has not yet gotten an invite to gmail, please contact me at (randyw (at) gmail (dot) com) and I will get you one (I have lots to give out). What? You don't know what gmail is? Here is their website.
Gmail is a Google (you know, the search engine people) webmail product. Here is what they have to say about it:
A Google approach to email.
Gmail is an experiment in a new kind of webmail, built on the idea that you should never have to delete mail and you should always be able to find the message you want. The key features are:

Search, don't sort.
Use Google search to find the exact message you want, no matter when it was sent or received.
Don't throw anything away.
1000 megabytes of free storage so you'll never need to delete another message.
Keep it all in context.
Each message is grouped with all its replies and displayed as a conversation.
No pop-up ads. No untargeted banners.
You see only relevant text ads and links to related web pages of interest.

Ok, gotta run now, I am supposed to be studying for an exam in 10 minutes. BTW, went to the Cub's game today against the Reds and guess what, they lost in the 12th inning, damn it... now I am half drunk and gotta take a test AND they lost the game!!

Cubs rout the Reds

The Cubbies routed the Reds tonight 12-5 and went up in the wild card race by 1 game. This is making it even better for my game on Wednesday. I am so excited, I am going with my father-in-law, his brother and my brother-in-law. It will be a nice "boys nite out" except it will be during the day and I have an exam that night at school.

That's right, I have an exam the night of the game I am going to but I cannot miss it, this could be the night the Cubbie's clinch their wild-card birth. If anyone would like to help me out with this, please let me know. Oh, and I mean YOU will take the test, I will go to the game!!

Anyway, I have been working tons and spent the weekend driving over 1,000 miles to be capped off by a political fundraiser on Sunday night. I am posting pictures right now to my site for my basement which is almost completed in the drywall phase. As I promised, here are my images from the framing phase of the basement.

Till next time, good night and sleep tight.

Work this week

This week work has been very challenging. During the week, in addition to my regular stuff that I do, I had 3 different employees with issues with their home computers. I know what you are thinking, "you work on employee's home computers?". The short answer is yes, but we expect those employees to do work from home at times. So if their home computers are not working, they cannot work... see?

Now it is Friday and Leslie and I are getting ready to head to Kansas City, MO for the next couple of days for her grandfather's memorial service. I know this is going to be very hard for her especially since she was so close to her grandparents and this will be the first time she has been to this place and it is where her grandmother was placed at rest. Don't have time to go into lots of details but that will be our weekend coming up.

On another note, we passed our framing and electrical inspection (not the plumbing though -- the idiot showed up on Thursday instead of Wednesday). The inspector had nothing but good things to say about the way everything looked and how secure items were. Drywall will be going up this weekend so there will be plenty of changes... Still no pictures though, I will go take them before we leave for Kansas City.

Till next time, drive safe and arrive home alive... Later!

Man oh man, 5 blogs in one day

This has got to be a personal best for me, five blogs in one day!!! Anyway, I am done working on the basement for the night, just spent about an hour and a half cleaning up with the shop vac and putting things away since I have an inspection on Wednesday afternoon (2:00 PM -- note to self).

I have no pictures to show yet, I am getting there, I promise!! But in the mean time you can see the image of me cleaning the basement (although you can barely see me).

Hopefully by this weekend (assuming we pass the inspection on Wednesday) I will be ready to post some pre-drywall pictures. Don't worry though, as always my loyal blogger following will be the first to know!!

Till next time, have a good night and may God bless your bed, your home and your Country.

Enabling email -- SenderID

Just reading up today and thought I would post some of this stuff together so I have be able to reference it at a later date when I am ready to investigate it. It all started with an Executive Email from Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer (no I am not special, it is a mailing list that they probably have never even seen).

Basically the part I am interested in is Enabling Proof of Identity and Purpose which you can get more info at http://www.microsoft.com/senderid/. Read about it there and see the picture below which will show in a 50 cent overview how it works:

I really need to compare Microsoft's text and version to the rest of the world's version. More on SPF is discussed here. Using their wizard here is my information to add to DNS to make SPF work for my organization (again, in a 50 cent overview).

Gotta run now, going the the Chicago White Sox game tonight, they will be getting their butt's kicked by the Minnesota Twins who I think will clinch their division when they win.

Microsoft taking on Piracy again (part 2)

Well, as I posted in my earlier blog (from today), Microsoft has changed the rules about getting downloads if you are a user of their Windows XP operating system. Sadly, as of right now, they seem to think all of the computer pirates are using the English version of Windows or at least they are only looking at pages written in English.

As you can see from clicking on these two links, one of them has a link to validate your Windows (English) and the other has a link to download the file that you want(German and Spanish).
English
German
Spanish
I would have checked the other languages but you get the idea with just these three. This has me asking the obvious question, why only English?? I really don't know why Microsoft has decided to single out those of us who use the English version of WindowsXP, but let's all ask Bill Gates why it is so...

Another nice t001 to use

Found another nice little tool to use for auditing passwords of my users and my systems. This package is called John the Ripper Password Cracker.

This appears to be a bit of a competitor of @stake's LC5 (cough*cough* SELLOUTS *cough*cough) which they don't even call L0phtCrack any longer. Of course John the Ripper is free and LC5 costs anywhere between $650 and $7,495 (for the site version, buy it here if you don't believe me) and just think, they used to sell their $650 version for $15!!

Ok, gotta run for now, bye all!!

Looks like Microsoft is taking on piracy one more time

Well, I am guessing that Microsoft has finally figured out that their feeble attempt to stop piracy of their Windows platform has failed -- yet again. It seems now that they are trying to get people (who are looking to download files from them) to "Validate" their copy of Windows.

Here is the page that I came across this latest attempt to dig their billion dollar knife even deeper in the hearts of those of us who pay for our software. Check this out. Now I don't fault them for trying to make sure that their software is legally obtained, I am all for them getting paid for their intellectual property and the like. I am against however, them selling something on the store shelves and when the customer reads and accepts the EULA (End User License Agreement), it says nothing about being forced to register with Microsoft nor having to tell them your 25-character product key (and if you don't think they are going to track your IP number along with that, you are an idiot!!). In addition, now they are saying

Validation is a short process that enables you to verify that your copy of Windows is genuine. If you request a download of genuine Microsoft software from the Microsoft Download Center, you will be prompted to complete the validation process. You may choose not to validate your software and still obtain your requested download. However, validating now will enable faster access to the Download Center in the future when validation may be required. Following the validation process, you'll be taken back to the initial download details page to obtain your requested download.

Now as I said before, I am not against Microsoft getting paid for the product they develop. However, when I went through the activation process on my machine following putting it together and buying my copy of XP Professional for $200, they stated that this is a "one time activation" and now they are changing the rules by which we are supposed to play the game. They are doing this because they realized that the crackers have outsmarted them (by the way, Microsoft will never win this battle because Microsoft comes out with a product and their methods are static, these crackers then have years to defeat the software protection).

Till next time, I will try to keep my name out of the paper if nothing else, at least the Police records.

Some music info for you

I just started using Apple iTunes for my iPod manager. One of the features that I like about it (of course it is by Apple as is the iPod, so they have a slight unfair advantage in these areas) is the Top 25 Played. This is a dynamically updated list of my top 25 played songs, both from inside of iTunes as well as through my iPod using the latest firmware that is available.

Not that I think anyone would care, but I am going to post my updated top 25 list on my website (every so often) - I may from time to time as I get tired of a song reset the play count in iTunes so songs may come and go, but here is the link to the file. I wonder if I should put a counter on this page to see if anyone even goes here, what do you think? Leave me a comment.

Till next time keep on rockin' --- Are You Down with the Sickness ?

After a couple days off from blogging

I have not posted for the last couple of days since my Internet connection is mostly off at my house. Remodelling the basement forces us to have my server, switch and cable modem (and it's desk) away from the wall and therefore unplugged. It has been kinda nice though, now my electric meter does not look like a deli slicer spinning out of control.

As of tonight, we have the basement all framed and low voltage wiring has been run. This weekend we are going to start running the conduit for electrical runs as well as do the copper roughing for the plumbing.

Sorry that you really cannot see much but that big ass ladder is in the way and I don't feel like moving it. Till next time, Sitting Bull say, "keep your ear to the ground and you will hear the buffalo charging, don't forget to get up in time to get out of the way though."

Finishing my basement

Well making some good headway on finishing my basement! I will post some pictures probably on Tuesday (nothing will change between now and the weekend - only working weekends on it). But the whole thing is framed out and now it is just a matter of getting electrical and plumbing rough in place. Today we also picked out the bathroom plumbing fixtures, we went with all Kohler for quality sake, not to mention we want the toilet to flush right as opposed to some of the cheap things we have upstairs (thanks Faganel).

On the Kohler stuff, we ended up going with all items from the Memoirs Suite of products.

Ok, short blog tonight since I have to start class tomorrow and really need to catch up on my beauty sleep. So I will leave you with the following... Check out my dog's webcam and you will not see my dogs, yet you will see the progress of my basement (which is currently in the framing stages).

Firefox Extensions (part 2) I have installed

This is a follow-up from my Part 1 post from a few days ago. This list is in addition to that list so I am only listing the extensions installed on my laptop in addition to my home desktop which was the topic of Part 1.

Extensions

* denotes an absolute must have!!

Super DragAndGo - Drag a word or a phrase and throw it anywhere on your webpage (content area) to search it through whatever search engine installed/selected in your search bar. If "find in this page" is selected, it uses the default google search engine.

URL2NewTab - Allows you clicking home button to load home page in a new tab in backgound/foreground configurable. It allows you load URL/keyword/default search typed in location bar in a new tab without pressing Alt key, in background/foreground configurable.

All-in-One Gestures - This controls soooo many extras with mouse and keystrokes I cannot even begin to start to do this software justice.

I still have a part 3 for my desktop at the office. Hope to get that done early next week.

Till then, thanks for reading and good night!

It has been 3 years now...

Well ladies and gentlemen, it has been 3 long years since the horrific events of 9.11.2001 and we seem no closer to knowing whether Osama is alive or dead than we were 2 months after the incident.

The world debates whether or not Saddam, who was unfriendly to Islamic fundamentalists, had any connection to al-Qaida other than payoffs some Middle East nations gave the terrorist not to cause trouble within their country's borders.

Pakistan remains a center of fundamentalist extremism, which no doubt pleases al-Qaida. Except that Pakistan is under pressure to cooperate with United States, and has done so more frequently than it ever bothered to do before the 9-11 attacks. That could not have been in bin Laden's and al-Qaida's plan.

Of course then there is the rest of al-Qaida trying to introduce some scare focused around the September 11th date and while we are an arrogant nation, we are 'still' smart enough to know that they would not try something on the same date... They would not be sucessful in achiving the type of terror that the dirty bastards seek. Of course that will not stop them from trying to raise a little fear in the hearts and minds of Americans.

Miami Herald

Osama bin Laden's top deputy appeared in a new videotape broadcast on an Arab television network on Thursday, taunting the United States for becoming mired in unsuccessful campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan while vowing that al Qaeda would attack the United States again.

The timing of the tape seemed intentionally to come just two days before the third anniversary of the attacks of Sept. 11. It is the latest in a long series of audio or videotapes issued by the Qaeda leadership, but unlike some others did not include an appearance by bin Laden.

President Bush, please let's put the IRAQ war behind us and move on with our full forces to find Osama bin Laden and his army of terrorist cowards. I am one of your supporters and a life long Marine, this is not a bash, it is just time!

Till next time, God bless you all and God bless America!!

Holy shit MON... hold onto your dreadlocks

Powerful Hurricane Ivan roared into Jamaica with huge waves, drenching rains and deadly winds on Friday and sporadic shooting erupted in the near-deserted streets of the capital as looters went on the prowl.

Large trees and poles crashed down in Kingston, some hitting houses. Ravines running through the city quickly overflowed and flooded streets.

There have already been 27 people killed by Hurricane Ivan before it even hit Jamaica and there are 2.7 million people in Jamaica without a lot of good places to go to get away from the hurricane. This storm is about to cross the dreaded boundry into Category 5 territory for the 2nd time since the storm formed.

Ladies and Gentlemen of Jamaica (epsecially those that we have met personally), you are in our thoughts and prayers!!

Firefox Extensions I have installed (part 1)

You know, I really like the new-er-ish browser called Firefox. However, one of the things that I really don't like is that there is no way to carry over your extensions, themes and the like from one computer to another.

Take someone like me... I use no less than 5 computers through the course of a day (and that does not count servers or other users computers) and trying to keep organized which extentions and themes I have installed in Firefox can be a real bummer. For that reason, I am putting together this blog/tip sheet -- it is for my own purpose but I have been using firefox for quite a while so you can use my suggestions as a good basis for putting together your own Firefox client.

Extensions

* denotes an absolute must have!!

* Single Window - A simple extension that allows Mozilla to fully utilize the built-in tabbed browsing behavior, compatible with Mozilla, Netscape, and Firefox.

* Web Developer - The Web Developer extension for Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools.

* Googlebar - The Googlebar project was initially created to address the widespread desire in the Mozilla community for the Google toolbar to support Netscape 7/Mozilla, since many users of Mozilla enjoy having all of Google's specialty searches in one convenient location. In the past, the Google toolbar was only available for IE on windows.

* Gmail Notifier - Allows checking for new Gmail messages directly from the browser's UI. A status bar item will show once installed, and a toolbar item can be added by customizing the toolbar. -- Very cool program but I gotta say, "Support is offered at $500 a second" seems a little steep if you ask me :)

FlashGot - FlashGot is a free Mozilla/Firefox extension, meant to exploit the popular FlashGet and Net Transport download managers.

* Adblock - Adblock is a content filtering plug-in for the Mozilla and Firebird browsers. It is both more robust and more precise than the built-in image blocker. Adblock allows the user to specify filters, which remove unwanted content based on the source-address. If this sounds complicated, don't worry: it's not.

* FireSomething - Modifies the product name in the browser titlebar, Help menu, and About dialog titlebar. Generates random names using multiple name lists. Allows you to have a new name generated for each browser window, or use the same name for all windows.

* BBCode - Adds a context menu for easy access to BBCODE/XHTML/HTML formatting in Forums

McSearchPreview - An extension for Firefox which enhances Google (all international flavors, too), MSN Search, Yahoo Search, A9 and AllTheWeb by adding previews (thumbnail) and Amazon product images as well as "Open in New Window" and "Site Info" links to the search results.

CuteMenus - CuteMenus is an extension for Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Suite. It will add icons to the most menu-items in your popups and menus.

Bandwidth Tester - Tells you the bandwidth of your current internet connection. It is very useful if you have a laptop and use it in different areas and networks frequently.

Open Download - Allows you to open ANY file (executables, etc.) from the internet into the default program assigned by your operating system, without needing to save it first.

Autofill - When I switched from Internet Explorer to Mozilla Firefox the one thing I missed was the Google Autofill function in the IE Google Toolbar. None of the existing form related extensions did quite what I wanted so I decided to write my own. After a lot of coercion I convinced my colleague and friend, Jesper Kristensen, to write it with me. Our extension is a semi-faithful recreation of Google's IE Autofill function in Mozilla Firefox.

* IEView - As much as I dislike it, some things just don't load correctly in Firefox (like Microsoft Outlook Web Access), this program works great in those rare instances.

There are others that are installed on my work machine and laptop, but that was the real (original) purpose of this post, to be able to get all of the extensions together. Till next time, enjoy this list and I will post part 2 later!

President Bush - OBGYN does what?

Well over the Labor Day weekend, President Bush managed to get caught on film making one of the goofier comments he has ever made. You can read the whole story here at Reuters AlertNet or you can just get the jist of what he said.

But then he added, "We've got an issue in America. Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many OB-GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country."

Now normally, I would not believe everything I read in the liberal press, but tonight on the Jay Leno show, he actually showed the video clip of him saying exactly that.

Well, I am going to look for this episode of the Tonight Show so that I can cut the clip and post it here, but if I don't, you can certainly find out more on the issue by searching Google News for the topic.

Took me a while but I found them and cut them up a little, you can view the Windows Media file below or view the Real Media file here (both are at 200K, so be patient with a dial-up connection).

Click picture for Windows Media Player

If you need Real Player, here

Gotta go for now, I start the Autumn quarter at DePaul tomorrow, need good night's sleep!!

Mark Minasi's newsletter tries to tackle SP2

Mark Minasi's latest newsletter has just been released and in the September newsletter, he attempts to tackle some of the things yet to be publicly discussed on the Internet.

I am looking forward to seeing him at Windows Connections in Orlando (assuming the hotel is still there after the last few weeks of hurricanes in Florida.

Going to bed now, nite-nite.

Dogs should be in the clear

Our vet tells us there is nothing to worry about with the ProHeart6 injection even though Riley has been itching quite a bit lately. The vet actually said there have been lots of dogs coming in to the clinic this week to get checked out for excessive itching. They said even if he is having an allergic reaction to the ProHeart6 and we bring him in, all they can do for him is treat the symptoms that he is experiencing.

Just talking to them made us feel better because all the things we were doing were the best things we could -- giving him itch stop, grinding his nails down so when he does itch it is with a softer surface (we thought part of the problem might be that he is scratching which is irritating his skin, so he is scratching more, which is irritating more, etc).

Well we are going to the Kane County Flea Market on Sunday and then clearing out our basement Monday so we can start finishing this weekend.

Till next time, keep your hands clean and you won't get your privates dirty.

ProHeart6 recalled -- unfortunately one week to late

Last Thursday we took our dogs to the vets, today the FDA recalled the medicine we gave our dogs to prevent heartworm. As of right now we are not sure if our puppy (Riley) is having a reaction to the medicine or not. He has been itching feverishly for the last week and this has never happened to him before.

Some of the following are links to the websites and results of the ProHeart problems including the FDA recall:

FDA Recall Order
Local Chicago CBS2 News story
Local Chicago ABC7 News Story (the one that brought our attention to the story)
Warning page for all dog owners
Danny's Death - The Golden Retriever
A Concerned Vet speaks out

WBOA Website

WBOA Parked Page is the new homepage for the Western Basketball Official's Association (WBOA). This is the group of basketball officials that I belong to. As of right now, it is simply a parked page and nothing more. I guess all I can hope for is that somehow it meets the

deadline of getting it live by the middle/end of September.

I think they are hoping to have all of the members contact information as well as the membership & board information and the information covered at prior & upcoming meetings. All I can say is good luck, Terry. I really hope it works out for you cause if it does not, people will expect me to take over and I start school in less than a week which does not allow ANY room for error.

Going to bed now, I am tired. G'nite.

Very funny picture

I was just surfing the web and came across this very funny picture of a windows Blue Screen Of Death (BSOD) at a Subway station (somewhere). I decided to capture it because these things seem to disappear after a short amount of time. So, here you go, the second picture is one of my all time favorites from our friends at Microsoft.

!!Go Bill Go!!

Going home, got dog school tonight without the dogs. Tonight is beginner's graduation!!

Updating EPO & VirusScan

Well today I have the glorious task of updating our ePolicy Orchestrator (EPO) to version 3.5 and updating VirusScan to version 8.0i. I worked on this last night until about 8:00 PM when I decided to go home but today it must get done. The good news is that I can always put up a picture of my boys on their webcam next to me just to make sure everything is going ok at home.

This is not usually that big of a task, but with version 8.0i, McAfee integrated their firewall product with their virus scan product and there are some issues with working with the firewall and trying to use other Management tools such as Remote Desktop, Diskeeper (remotely), etc.

Oh well, 12:30 and my boys are sleeping like babies, now, have you check in on them live in a while? No, well the first picture is right now, the second picture is of them live!!

Sleeping Like Babies

What are they doing NOW!

Seriously, gotta run now, stomach just started growling... Till next time, secure your damn machines so it is not so much a pain for me to secure all of mine!!