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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
procurve is a good place to start. if they didn't make you license features like L3 or routing protocols like OSPF or had actual QoS it would be much better. Good luck if you need to run anything better than best effort DSCP 0. Another option, buy refurb Cisco Hardware.
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.
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.
Quick Reply to this: A BGP AS has an intial cost of $500 (http://www.arin.net/billing/fee_schedule.html#asn) with a maintenance fee of $100/year, and here is the ultra complex configuration that you'll need to do:
Yeah, here where I live in Southern NH, an acre of perc tested buildable land will probably run you $50,000 plus without any problems at all. If you get it in a desirable location, you can expect $125,000 as a starting point.
Quick followup question to this - the Greenday song "Wake me up when September Ends". Am I the only one who wondered if they were referencing usenet? =)
When I left my full time job to start my own company, I had initially resigned myself to paying the $1200/month for COBRA (I have family coverage) but I decided to look for quotes on a group policy so that I could provide health insurance to any possible employees.
The coverage I ended up getting was from Harvard Pilgrim of New England. The coverage itself is *excellent* $10 copay, $50 emergency, no coinsurance, and only $680/mo for family coverage which includes maternity. Single coverage is $240/mo. I'm told that group policies have some additional benefits over individual coverage, such as not being legally allowed to drop you for health problems, and not being allowed to raise the rates exorbidantly. Rates went up approximately 8-10% at my 2 year renewal this fall.
I used the same insurance agent to arrange all my business insurance, and did not negotiate directly with the health insurance company.
My business is based out of New Hampshire, which may have specific laws that protect small businesses. The Agent that I used was a company called Kahlan Insurance based out of Concord, NH.
Quick question related to this, as I'm a big user of VMWare, but don't have access to Vista at the moment. The vmware tools, in particular the network drivers and video accelerators are both unsigned. Does this mean that it's not possible to install the vmware tools on a Vista virtual machine?
Yep, you're talking about VMWare ESX and their VMotion product.
It is helluva cool - requires shared attached storage to work, but you can do a lot of neat things with it.
Slashdot Mirror
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
procurve is a good place to start. if they didn't make you license features like L3 or routing protocols like OSPF or had actual QoS it would be much better. Good luck if you need to run anything better than best effort DSCP 0. Another option, buy refurb Cisco Hardware.
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..
Quick Reply to this: A BGP AS has an intial cost of $500 (http://www.arin.net/billing/fee_schedule.html#asn) with a maintenance fee of $100/year, and here is the ultra complex configuration that you'll need to do:
router bgp YourAS
no synchronization
bgp log-neighbor-changes
network YourNetwork mask 255.255.255.0
neighbor ISPRouter remote-as ISPAS
neighbor ISPRouter ebgp-multihop 255
Probably more expensive is that fact that you'll need a C class subnet from your ISP in order to get the AS from ARIN.
-matt
Yeah, here where I live in Southern NH, an acre of perc tested buildable land will probably run you $50,000 plus without any problems at all. If you get it in a desirable location, you can expect $125,000 as a starting point.
Quick followup question to this - the Greenday song "Wake me up when September Ends". Am I the only one who wondered if they were referencing usenet? =)
-matt
When I left my full time job to start my own company, I had initially resigned myself to paying the $1200/month for COBRA (I have family coverage) but I decided to look for quotes on a group policy so that I could provide health insurance to any possible employees.
The coverage I ended up getting was from Harvard Pilgrim of New England. The coverage itself is *excellent* $10 copay, $50 emergency, no coinsurance, and only $680/mo for family coverage which includes maternity. Single coverage is $240/mo. I'm told that group policies have some additional benefits over individual coverage, such as not being legally allowed to drop you for health problems, and not being allowed to raise the rates exorbidantly. Rates went up approximately 8-10% at my 2 year renewal this fall.
I used the same insurance agent to arrange all my business insurance, and did not negotiate directly with the health insurance company.
My business is based out of New Hampshire, which may have specific laws that protect small businesses. The Agent that I used was a company called Kahlan Insurance based out of Concord, NH.
-matt
Quick question related to this, as I'm a big user of VMWare, but don't have access to Vista at the moment. The vmware tools, in particular the network drivers and video accelerators are both unsigned. Does this mean that it's not possible to install the vmware tools on a Vista virtual machine?
This brings to mind one of my favorite quotes:
"A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you're talking about real money"
-Senator Everett Dirksen
Blech, Sprint kills me - I was at the San Jose Hilton, and I had to sit outside on the balcony just to get enough signal to call the wife.
I mean, c'mon, I can hit one of the largest tech centers in the US with a rock from there, you'd think that there would be cellphone service.
In contrast, I was there last week with a Verizon phone, and after doing *228, I picked up consistent 5 bar coverage.
Actually, I just checked. The classic skin is still present in WMP 10 - just pick it right out of skin chooser.
Many moons ago, when I spent far too much time MUDing, I found myself dreaming in text:
I would dream consistently for hours in scrolling colored text, in the general correct colors and shapes of chatting, MOB killing, PKilling, etc.
What was odd however, is that I couldn't read any of the wording (which I'm told is very standard for dreams), but I knew what each line meant
Did anyone else share this odd experience?
-matt
It is helluva cool - requires shared attached storage to work, but you can do a lot of neat things with it.
More information is available here:s .html#vmotion
http://www.vmware.com/products/vmanage/vc_feature
Disclaimer, I work for a company that sells (amongst other products) VMWare, and I do VMWare installs/consolidations.
Damn you UID 69688 - he always beats me to the proper spelling:
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