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Halfway there…Posted In: Academic, Everyday life — July 4, 2006 @ 10:58 pm — PeterHalfway there… A couple of Thursdays ago, I turned in the final examination for another class at Regis in my pursuit of a Masters Degree. This class puts me at the halfway point of the degree program and on the cusp of earning a token graduate certificate in Information Assurance. Without trying to sound too cliché, it seems like it was just yesterday that I began looking for a graduate program that would see past my less than stellar undergraduate record and give me a chance to perform at a graduate level. Well, here I am, putting another “A” under my belt and taking a short break from class work to enjoy the rest of summer with my wonderful family.
The last class I completed, Securing & Protecting Systems Applications & Data, was pretty lousy and required an odd project assignment to construct a web-based information security assessment tool. Enrollment was very low for the course, so only one team was assembled to complete the project. The project grade reflected only 10% of the overall course grade, despite spending nearly all my time working on it. Either way, it was a fun project as I got reacquainted with many technologies I’ve not used in a while. I’m looking forward to a break from school. I’ll be taking 8 weeks off at the least, 16 weeks at the most. During that time I’ll likely spend a few hours here and there planning my practicum project and clearing it past my advisor and other faculty members that may be involved in oversight. Most importantly, I’ll have loads of free time to spend with Amelia and Stephanie. Amelia is at a very fun age right now and is quite active with her recently acquired crawling and standing skills. We’ll be taking a trip out east in September to Myrtle Beach and it will be a relief not to have to muck with course work while on vacation. So, I’m going to make an effort to update our website more often and resist temptation to hack with the code or take up another redesign effort. Instead, I’ll be focused on publishing more content! 
The home stretchPosted In: Academic, Everyday life — April 21, 2005 @ 9:16 am — PeterI have one more week left of MSCI 600 after tonight and cannot wait to be finished up. Not that I have disliked the class, I just need a break from school. The 8 week classes at Regis are quite intensive and you are forced to work aggressively throughout the entire term to complete all the required assignments. I still have to wrap up my final project, a 20-25 page report on the IT business alignment of the organization I work for. In addition, I have to put a presentation that summarizes my report. I’m looking forward to the presentation most. This class has lacked presentations from students and I look forward to seeing what my peers have to say. I’ll likely use OpenOffice Impress again to build my slides. I love its ability to export slides to an HTML-based slideshow… On Tuesday night, Stephanie and I went to Cherry Creek Mall to get me a replacement pair of glasses. Iris managed to get a hold of my glasses again and chewed the stems up a bit more. They are still wearable, but slightly uncomfortable… Turns out my vision benefits plan is not accepted at Lenscrafters. I didn’t check before going, I just assumed Lenscrafters accepted all vision programs. Instead of heading home afterwards, we went shopping at Foley’s. We stumbled upon this great looking Calivin Klien suit and I could not pass it up. I have been intending on getting a suit for years now and have been avoiding the actual purchase for quite a while. After trying it on and deciding it was the one, I went over to the tailor and had it marked for adjustments. I was surprise that the tailoring of the back and sleeves would only be an extra $20. So, I have a suit.. mission accomplished. Another great thing at Foley’s… not only were Dockers on sale, but they had them in size 34×31. I rant about this every time I shop for pants. I am somewhat short, but a 30 length is too short and 32 is too long. Rarely do I find 31 length. I’m wearing a pair of the pants today and I really really like them. I may have to go back over the weekend and get a few more colors because they are on sale for $25 a pair. Yesterday at work I helped seal up a Postfix configuration for our mail relay server project. Something that seemed lacking from the Postfix distro was simple mail queue management. Sometimes messages get stuck in the queue for various reasons and they may need to be requeued or removed. The included tools are not very convenient, so I combed the Internet for something else. I found pfqueue, a ncurses-based console tool for postfix queue management. It was 99% there with features, so I cracked open the code and added the last feature we needed. I created a diff patch and submitted it to the author and he replied saying my code would be included in the next release. Ah, the joy of open source software… I’ve been reading this blog alot lately. I don’t know why, but I’m more interested in blogs of people who are geographically close to me… I have found some great blogs on the blogroll and also realized that I have a long way to go in learning how to blog. The majority of my posts are journal like in nature and are hardly interesting to anyone that does not know me personally. Perhaps I’ll read one of the blogging 101 articles I found a few weeks ago…
Time fliesPosted In: Academic, Work life, Everyday life — March 25, 2005 @ 12:14 pm — PeterI can’t believe this week is already over. I was supposed to have a batch of software enhancements done by today, but it does not look like I will be finished. I spent quite a bit of time fighting with the Eclipse environment trying to get the Lomboz J2EE plugin to work. It kept giving me errors on my JSP tag library declarations at the top of a few pages. Nearly a day was spent backing through the last few stables release of Eclipse until I found a build that did not produce the errors. So, I’ll send the email out this afternoon asking for a few more days. The timeline I set for myself was a bit tight, I figured it would push me to work harder and get these tasks off my list. No hockey today since we got some snow last night. I won’t comment about it being the end of March and there being freaking snow on the ground! Nothing like the starting Spring with snow :/ Last week Stephanie and I finally committed to a new laptop. I have been stalking ads and reading reviews for several weeks. I came to the conclusion that we would not be able to find an absolutely perfect laptop for the money we were looking to spend. Overall, I think we came pretty close. We bought a Compaq Presario v2135us and we are quite happy with it so far. One of our requirements was an integrated SD memory card reader. We have various devices that use this type of media and would rather read data off the card directly, rather than use awkward proprietary software utilities to acquire data from each device. The card reader works great, however, it is not spring loaded. This is not a problem for people with nails that can grip the nub of the card that sticks out. That is about it. I love the computer otherwise. Some neat features it has are, a button to disable the touchpad, dedicated audio adjustment buttons, a great keyboard layout (the backslash key is in the right place!!!), and an overall rugged design. Funny that I decided to go with a Compaq. While I worked as a computer technician when I was 16, I hated Compaq computers. They were the most awkward machines to work on because they usually had a riser board that contained the CPU and memory. At the time, very few other computer manufacturers did this. They were also a pain in the ass to get upgrade components for. It seems they have come a long way since then. While laptops can hardly be compared to desktops with regards to using industry standard components, it is definitely easier to get upgrade components and stuff now a days. I’m contemplating reloading the operating system to remove all the crap they installed by default. I managed to remove most of it, but some of it remains, with no clear uninstallation option… Last night I had class and we spent a good amount of the session talking about the Sarbanes-Oxley act. The class is now down to four people, including myself. Since there are so few of us, the professor is considering consolidating one of the class session to give us a bit of a break. I’m not so into this class. I’ve been doing very well, scoring A’s on all my papers so far… I need to get started on the course project soon so I’m not torturing myself with an all nighter to try to finish it up. I’m setting a goal to at least get some ideas organized and setup an outline this weekend. I think I might take a walk around the building over my lunch. My legs are cramping and I need to stretch. I have alot to get done this afternoon and I probably should venture away from my desk for a bit. To help me concentrate, I brought a bunch of music with me today. The playlist is as follows… I’m not sure what inspired me to bring the Peter Murphy… We’ll see how I like it. Bebel Gilberto - Tanto Tempo
New Ride!Posted In: Academic, Work life, Everyday life — February 25, 2005 @ 10:51 pm — PeterWe have been somewhat shopping for a car for a while now and have spent a considerable amount of time perusing ads and searching Internet listings for used/new Honda Civics. We decided that the Honda Civic would make most sense for us since I have a long commute to work and we don’t have money to throw around on a finicky undependable car. I have spoken with many Civic owners and they have nothing but great things to say about the car. This past Tuesday on my lunch break, I browsed http://cars.com looking for deals on a used Civic. I came across the usually listings, 2003-2004 Civics with about 15-20k miles for 15-17k dollars. Then this one listing caught my eye… It was a “used” 2004 Civic EX with 2650 miles for 16.5k dollars. For a Civic EX, this price seemed to good to be true for a car with such low of miles. Turns out the car was being offered by a Credit Union auto buying service. I have heard about these businesses from coworkers and they said they got great deals and service through them. So I called the place up and arranged to see the car. That same night, I was closing on our home refinance. The closing wrapped up faster than I thought, so I picked up Stephanie afterwards and we went to see the car. Turns out the car was everything we were looking for and more. Power everything, moon roof, CD player… the works. So, we are the proud owners of our first new vehicle. I have driven it quite a bit over the past few days and I love it! Some pictures of it parked on our driveway are here. We took the car out for a cruise tonight and went to walk Shadow, Stephanie’s aunt’s dog. Her and her new husband are on their honeymoon in Cancun and we are looking after her dog. The original plan was to have Shadow stay with us, but we all agreed that was not the best idea. Stephanie’s aunt thought Shadow would feel abandoned and we thought it might be a bit overwhelming for our pets. I think going over there daily to walk and exercise Shadow will be sufficient. It is only for a week… This weekend marks the official end of a 1 year 4 month project I have been working on at work. We migrate the final batch of users from the remote hosting facility to our inhouse servers tonight. I’m going to get to sleep soon because I have to wake up and ~1am MST to import a bunch of data and then sleep again to make it to the office by ~6am. Overall, the project has been a success. Like most IT projects, there have been a few bumps along the way… While I am quite proud of how well things have gone, I recently found out that our largest volume credit union will be leaving the service. My first reaction was to assume they were not happy with the service since being migrated to our datacenter, however, management assured me that this is not the case. While the credit union has not given a specific reason for leaving our service, it is believed the move is political and does not reflect dissatisfaction with our service or most recent migration efforts. Still a huge bummer :/ The hockey game was fairly light today, only 4 people made it to the rink. I played very sloppy today, it seems less people to pass to makes for a more difficult game. I fumbled the puck quite a few times, but scored a few times too. The puck we were using was warn out and kept turning on its side and rolling. This caused many of our shots to lift off the ground and the puck was flying all over the place. One unlucky wrist shot managed to get high enough to catch me in the side of the head. Thankfully I was not facing the other way or it would have hit me right in the face! This game revealed two things, I need a helmet and a new puck… On top of all this, I have a huge assignment to get done for class. This Monday will be the final class for MSCC 610 and we have to submit a paper surveying technologies at the company we work at. A short 15 minute presentation on the paper is due also. I am about 1/3 of the way done and have most of the content locked away in my head still. I should have some downtime tomorrow while at work to spill some more out on paper. I envision the final paper being about 7 pages single-spaced. Amazing how fast these courses fly by. Unfortunately my next class is being held at the Interlocken campus which will add a 30 minute commute after being dismissed at 10pm. Hopefully this will be a rare occurrence of not having the class I need at the Lowell Campus. Stephanie made blueberry muffins! Time for a snack!
Movin’ along…Posted In: Academic, Work life — February 7, 2005 @ 11:21 pm — PeterToday I wrapped up a few lose ends at work and planed my week. I’ll be digging into JMeter to put together a performance test of a web banking system. I’ll need to configure a few remote drone testing nodes to help distribute the load. My week is rather crowded with meetings and such. I’ll be discussing some single sign on issues with the team and hopefully flesh out a disaster recovery document that has been on the back burner for a while. Tonight I had class and we were dismissed early. To my surprise, the article presentation was not due today, but I volunteered to give mine while the topic was fresh in my head. I think the presentation went very well. I spoke naturally and didn’t require notes. I figure not needing notes was a sign that I was comfortable speaking about the topic and showed I really understood the material. I learned alot from the assignment and my peers asked some good questions after I wrapped up. I tried to use the ToastTimer PocketPC program to time myself, but my device went into sleepmode and the clock stopped ticking. I’ll need to remember this for the final presentation so I can pace myself better. So, I’ve cleared up my academic todo list so I can concentrate on the final project. I started putting together some notes, but have yet to meet with management at work to get some answers to a few of the questions I can’t answer myself. The assignment is an IT inventory of our employer, documenting types of information systems, operating systems and security polices. Next Entries » |
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All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. --Noam Chomsky |
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