I had pretty much beat a major caffeine habit after surgery a couple years ago, and then blew it this summer on a contract assignment. I've always said, "never trust a company that gives you free coffee." This place has two free machines, one a Nescafe machine, much like a soda machine, and a Flavia flavored coffee machine. The Flavia machine was right outside my office.
I'd grab a cup at the hotel with breakfast, and make another one for the drive to the office. Then, grab a Flavia upon arrival (around 9am). One or two more before lunch. Hit a diner around 1 or 2, have an omelette and bacon with a couple cups of joe, grab another Flavia around 3, perhaps another between 4 and 5. Have dinner around 7:30-8:00, and have some chocolate ice cream and a cup of coffee for dessert. So lets see.. about 10 cups a day. It got to a point where I would drink a cup for every 90 mins that I needed to stay awake. Ready to go to bed? Just don't drink any coffee. Within 5-20 mins: "Sleep, the sweet sister of death. Take me, for I have missed you." (that's my "good night speech")
I was finally able to start working at home in November -- no more travel, no more hotels(!!), and back to a caffeine-free environment (thank God). I didn't realize just how bad it got with all the regular coffee. I've been having trouble organizing my mind for about a month, and I'm finally starting to get cleared up. It was so bad, I was starting to think I went schizophrenic or something. It was like that adult ADD tv commercial, comparing it to your mind changing channels every second or two. Imagine living like that for a month! No thanks..
Now I just have to work on the 4 sugars per cup of coffee:(
Right on. I constantly have to ask white-haired people in meetings to stop referring to me as "the WinTel guy" simply because I often represent the Intel server space. So they try to appease me by referring to me as "the Lintel guy". That sounds even worse.
Here is a great little utility which makes building new kernels easy. It automates the process of downloading and applying patches, and can be easily configured to build a new kernel reusing your previous kernel config selections. Makes the download/patch/recompile process about as seamless as it gets, especially if you have a static kernel config.
Now, now, don't take one person's comments and generalize them as applying to ALL stateside carriers. The Nextel downloadable rings and wallpapers don't expire. Now, I was bitten because I changed out my phone before I backed up my custom rings and wallpaper and couldn't redownload (bastards!). Now I know.
I had them for over a year before I damaged my phone beyond repair.
but cell phone pricing is NOT an example of flat-rate pricing -- unless there is a carrier I'm not aware of who provides unlimited service for one price
You know, I was about to reply with "don't they ALL do it?" and I decided to check. I was wrong. Nextel does "unlimited everything" (24x7 cellular and nationwide 2-way radio) for $200/mo. There are 43,200 minutes in a 30-day month. Take out free Sat & Sun, and 7am-7pm Mon-Fri (4*12 hours, really), that leaves 28,800 "anytime minutes" per month.
AT&T caps out at 6,300 mins/month. Verizon, 5,500. Cingular, 3,000. TMobile has a nice plan with 5,000 anytime minutes but with a three day weekend for just $129/mo. Looks like Nextel is the only carrier I could find stateside that offers truly unlimited usage plans.
Thanks for making me look it up, that was interesting!
on a lame box connected to the internet but not on your internal network
perhaps not even connected to the Internet. I occasionally have to work in midtown Manhattan, which is wireless heaven. I do occasionally have to configure stuff by hand, such as guessing the default gateway and using known external DNS servers, but given enough time, I can pretty reliably get service from my office or hotel room.
One particularly annoying connection gave me a 192.168.1 address and let me ping 192.168.1.1 but do absolutely nothing else. I ran nmap and nessus against the ip and absolutely nothing came back. It was freakiest thing I've ever seen. Its like someone bought a Linksys and powered it up without attaching it to anything else on the internal or external side. I guess it would be a good way to p2p with some friends if your apartments or offices are all within reach of the AP, but otherwise, it was a strange finding.
I agree with the other replier to tell him gently, but I would do it in a backhanded way. Make sure you're surfing the web or checking your email when he walks in. Be sure to say something like, "wow, I am *so* glad you guys put this wireless in for us, it *such* a timesaver while I'm waiting to see you! THANK YOU so much." And if you're brave.. "and thanks for keeping it easy to get on the network. So many places have all these convoluted security settings. If you're just letting your patients check their email, then there's no sense in encrypting anything or keeping outsiders off your network." There's a great value in the skill that lets you tell decisionmakers what to do and make them think they came up with it all along.
I don't have a PDA with 802.11 so I haven't checked my hometown doctor's WLAN. I guess I could pringles-can it from the parking lot. My orthopaedic surgeon is at a major university and they run fiber to every desktop, and even replaced an xray review station with about a 25" wall-mounted flat screen.. just beautiful.
You get spyware everywhere unless you only surf on slashdot.org...
My updated Spybot S&D blocks the "Avenue A, Inc" spyware from Slashdot about every third or so page view. So even our blessed Slashdot is far from innocent. It helps if you configure S&D to pop-up an indicator each time spyware is blocked.. then you can see which sites are trying to pass the *real* bad stuff onto you.
You have another replier with a good point. I get a bunch of free inbound text messages but don't pay for 2-way messaging. I pay $5 for unlimited AIM. Plus, as the other replier said, she's always at home and would to run downstairs and fish through her purse to find her cellphone.
This way, I don't have to teach her how to read and reply to SMS messages, too:) It took long enough to get her to skillfully use Gaim. In fact, we're in the midst of another "she lost her cellphone somewhere in the house" incident, so SMS would *really* be out of the question!
Sometimes my wife will use her PC while we're in my office, and when she wants to know where to find some stuff on the net, i'll usually just IM her a Google hit page..
Also, I spent the summer working at a contract a couple hours away from home, and would frequently use AIM on my cellphone while at dinner to let her know that I was still at dinner and would be calling a little late that night. My little contribution to be one less person yelling into their cellphone in restaurants.
Not flaming here, but you may be comparing apples to oranges. You are complaining that/. reports every active Microsoft worm while it is out there, actively infecting multiple computers, but does not report every vulnerability affecting Linux machines. Slashdot doesn't tend to report new vulnerabilities affecting Windows, unless it comes as something spectacular, such as 6 high risk holes announced at once.
If you're reading security sites, then you're "doing it right", and that's what you need to focus on. You. I run Jay's IPTables Firewall. I occasionally check LinuxSecurity, but instead I usually visit their Packetstorm mirror and try out some of the latest exploits against my various machines just to see if I'm vulnerable. I also check CERT weekly, NIPC's Cybernotes biweekly, D-Shield and Incidents.org biweekly, and update Nessus and check my firewall biweekly. I don't have any open ports, so I rarely check for updated Snort rules. I do check my MRTG reports about once a day to see if an inordinately high amount of traffic is flowing through my firewall. There's so much that everyone should do all the time, that there's hardly enough time to complain about how much focus a web site places on reporting one OS'es actively exploited holes vs another OS'es potential vulnerabilities. In the time to read this, you could have been reviewing the Top 75 security tools and seeing where they fit in your environment, even if your environment is your house.
I wonder if that came from Spanish slang. After 7 years of learning Spanish in the classroom, I once used "donde esta Cecilia?" to ask one of my sisters where the other one was, and the sister I asked (who lived in Oklahoma) corrected me with, "its adonde, not donde." I was like, "that's funny, none of my teachers, professors, or books have said that.. ever." She was like, "well, that's how native Spanish speakers speak.
So, there you go.. its not, "where is she?" Instead, its "where's she at?" (technically, "at where is she?") according to Spanish slang.
I use lol with my sister, but the key is to institute a delay.. and I often send it as
l o effin' l
LOL actually doesn't sound AOL to me, and if you have a sibling you chat with, "haha" sounds too sarcastic and would start fights:) OTOH, I'm *still* sick and tired of the FIDO wannabes dragging ROTFLMAO over to our IP-based world. You should have left it with the QWK packets you last sent from your Mom's basement 20 years ago. I remember when AOL was plugged into the 'net, and even moreso, I remember when FIDO gateways started gatewaying forums to usenet. Ugh. Its like seeing UUCP configuration details in sendmail.cf.
You may have been kidding, but I don't think the way to reduce traffic on the net is to increase spam fiftyfold. I just moved off a Linksys back to a Linux-based firewall for added functionality and found a continuous load of 3kbps on the wire 24x7. And that's with ports 25, 80, and 135 blocked. I can't imagine what an idle, unblocked line looks like.
My family had a nearly-pure Amazon Christmas this year. I'm outside Trenton, NJ, and my sister flew in from L.A. while my mom came up from Orlando. For the last couple of weeks, my wife and I have been receiving 1-3 Amazon boxes every other day. We all wrapped the night of the 24th and had a GREAT TIME today.
We (the kids) had some bigger gifts shipped directly to Mom's in Florida and just put pictures of those big items in with her cards.
And yes, I did get the binary clock from ThinkGeek.
Re:Screw weird, this is the *COOL* present thread!
on
Weird Presents Anyone?
·
· Score: 1
I definitely vote for my mother-in-law as the best one out there this year.. I've been talking about getting my private pilot's license this coming spring, and my in-laws gave me Flight Simulator 2004 AND a 1 hour discovery flight AND a half hour of ground school from a nearby flight school..
now THAT is cool!
So yeah, I got an xbox with the GTA doublepack (thanks, honey!) and FltSim 2004.. I see my anti-Microsoft campaign is making excellent progress with the family!
If SCO wins, I suspect IBM will settle by buying the company. SCO's market value is half our annual revenues, and Linux is at the heart of our key play.
Seriously, how willing would a company be to deploy an environment that automatically builds and deploys new servers to handle increasing workloads if each new virtual server costs thousands of dollars in licensing fees for the OS alone? Granted, when IBM transaction processing software is deployed its not cheap either, but you can cut the cost of the server in half using Websphere on Linux, or cut it entirely using a free servlet engine running under Linux.
I recently had breakfast with the IBM'er who literally owns IBM's public image, and we had a very interesting discussion about this.
My mom's true letter quality came in the form of a brother printer with some kind of spinwheel. I too had an Epson MX80 with my Commodore 128, and in NLQ mode, it would write each letter like 3 or 4 times, just SOAKING the ink into the page.
Funny that you choose that exact quote, as that's exactly why my mother-in-law swears I bought the nav option with voice prompting in my Murano earlier this year. Guess there's no cure for geekiness.
FINALLY, someone with old-timer computer memories and a **UID** to back it up! I love reading about all these cherished memories about TRS-80's with 770k+ uids. I mean, really, what happened to the 20 years of geekiness between those "days of yesteryear" and last week when you found the geekiest site on the net??!?!
I started out by staying late after school almost every day just to write in BASIC on a Commodore PET.. in 6th grade in 1981! Then at home, I bought through the Commodore line with a VIC-20, a couple of 64's, and a 128. Bought my first Intel, an IBM PS/1 386, from Sears in '92.
Proud "geek." t-shirt owner, with a penguin mobile hanging from the ceiling fan, and a warm tux blanket covering the bed. Oh, and my wife wrapped my xmas presents in penguin-covered paper. Merry Christmas, all.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the part that pisses me off the most.. typical govt pork..
I had pretty much beat a major caffeine habit after surgery a couple years ago, and then blew it this summer on a contract assignment. I've always said, "never trust a company that gives you free coffee." This place has two free machines, one a Nescafe machine, much like a soda machine, and a Flavia flavored coffee machine. The Flavia machine was right outside my office.
:(
I'd grab a cup at the hotel with breakfast, and make another one for the drive to the office. Then, grab a Flavia upon arrival (around 9am). One or two more before lunch. Hit a diner around 1 or 2, have an omelette and bacon with a couple cups of joe, grab another Flavia around 3, perhaps another between 4 and 5. Have dinner around 7:30-8:00, and have some chocolate ice cream and a cup of coffee for dessert. So lets see.. about 10 cups a day. It got to a point where I would drink a cup for every 90 mins that I needed to stay awake. Ready to go to bed? Just don't drink any coffee. Within 5-20 mins: "Sleep, the sweet sister of death. Take me, for I have missed you." (that's my "good night speech")
I was finally able to start working at home in November -- no more travel, no more hotels(!!), and back to a caffeine-free environment (thank God). I didn't realize just how bad it got with all the regular coffee. I've been having trouble organizing my mind for about a month, and I'm finally starting to get cleared up. It was so bad, I was starting to think I went schizophrenic or something. It was like that adult ADD tv commercial, comparing it to your mind changing channels every second or two. Imagine living like that for a month! No thanks..
Now I just have to work on the 4 sugars per cup of coffee
Right on. I constantly have to ask white-haired people in meetings to stop referring to me as "the WinTel guy" simply because I often represent the Intel server space. So they try to appease me by referring to me as "the Lintel guy". That sounds even worse.
"Just, say 'Intel', please. Thank you."
Here is a great little utility which makes building new kernels easy. It automates the process of downloading and applying patches, and can be easily configured to build a new kernel reusing your previous kernel config selections. Makes the download/patch/recompile process about as seamless as it gets, especially if you have a static kernel config.
Now, now, don't take one person's comments and generalize them as applying to ALL stateside carriers. The Nextel downloadable rings and wallpapers don't expire. Now, I was bitten because I changed out my phone before I backed up my custom rings and wallpaper and couldn't redownload (bastards!). Now I know.
I had them for over a year before I damaged my phone beyond repair.
but cell phone pricing is NOT an example of flat-rate pricing -- unless there is a carrier I'm not aware of who provides unlimited service for one price
You know, I was about to reply with "don't they ALL do it?" and I decided to check. I was wrong. Nextel does "unlimited everything" (24x7 cellular and nationwide 2-way radio) for $200/mo. There are 43,200 minutes in a 30-day month. Take out free Sat & Sun, and 7am-7pm Mon-Fri (4*12 hours, really), that leaves 28,800 "anytime minutes" per month.
AT&T caps out at 6,300 mins/month. Verizon, 5,500. Cingular, 3,000. TMobile has a nice plan with 5,000 anytime minutes but with a three day weekend for just $129/mo. Looks like Nextel is the only carrier I could find stateside that offers truly unlimited usage plans.
Thanks for making me look it up, that was interesting!
on a lame box connected to the internet but not on your internal network
perhaps not even connected to the Internet. I occasionally have to work in midtown Manhattan, which is wireless heaven. I do occasionally have to configure stuff by hand, such as guessing the default gateway and using known external DNS servers, but given enough time, I can pretty reliably get service from my office or hotel room.
One particularly annoying connection gave me a 192.168.1 address and let me ping 192.168.1.1 but do absolutely nothing else. I ran nmap and nessus against the ip and absolutely nothing came back. It was freakiest thing I've ever seen. Its like someone bought a Linksys and powered it up without attaching it to anything else on the internal or external side. I guess it would be a good way to p2p with some friends if your apartments or offices are all within reach of the AP, but otherwise, it was a strange finding.
I agree with the other replier to tell him gently, but I would do it in a backhanded way. Make sure you're surfing the web or checking your email when he walks in. Be sure to say something like, "wow, I am *so* glad you guys put this wireless in for us, it *such* a timesaver while I'm waiting to see you! THANK YOU so much." And if you're brave.. "and thanks for keeping it easy to get on the network. So many places have all these convoluted security settings. If you're just letting your patients check their email, then there's no sense in encrypting anything or keeping outsiders off your network." There's a great value in the skill that lets you tell decisionmakers what to do and make them think they came up with it all along.
I don't have a PDA with 802.11 so I haven't checked my hometown doctor's WLAN. I guess I could pringles-can it from the parking lot. My orthopaedic surgeon is at a major university and they run fiber to every desktop, and even replaced an xray review station with about a 25" wall-mounted flat screen.. just beautiful.
You get spyware everywhere unless you only surf on slashdot.org...
My updated Spybot S&D blocks the "Avenue A, Inc" spyware from Slashdot about every third or so page view. So even our blessed Slashdot is far from innocent. It helps if you configure S&D to pop-up an indicator each time spyware is blocked.. then you can see which sites are trying to pass the *real* bad stuff onto you.
Steve
You have another replier with a good point. I get a bunch of free inbound text messages but don't pay for 2-way messaging. I pay $5 for unlimited AIM. Plus, as the other replier said, she's always at home and would to run downstairs and fish through her purse to find her cellphone.
:) It took long enough to get her to skillfully use Gaim. In fact, we're in the midst of another "she lost her cellphone somewhere in the house" incident, so SMS would *really* be out of the question!
This way, I don't have to teach her how to read and reply to SMS messages, too
Sometimes my wife will use her PC while we're in my office, and when she wants to know where to find some stuff on the net, i'll usually just IM her a Google hit page..
Also, I spent the summer working at a contract a couple hours away from home, and would frequently use AIM on my cellphone while at dinner to let her know that I was still at dinner and would be calling a little late that night. My little contribution to be one less person yelling into their cellphone in restaurants.
Not flaming here, but you may be comparing apples to oranges. You are complaining that /. reports every active Microsoft worm while it is out there, actively infecting multiple computers, but does not report every vulnerability affecting Linux machines. Slashdot doesn't tend to report new vulnerabilities affecting Windows, unless it comes as something spectacular, such as 6 high risk holes announced at once.
If you're reading security sites, then you're "doing it right", and that's what you need to focus on. You. I run Jay's IPTables Firewall. I occasionally check LinuxSecurity, but instead I usually visit their Packetstorm mirror and try out some of the latest exploits against my various machines just to see if I'm vulnerable. I also check CERT weekly, NIPC's Cybernotes biweekly, D-Shield and Incidents.org biweekly, and update Nessus and check my firewall biweekly. I don't have any open ports, so I rarely check for updated Snort rules. I do check my MRTG reports about once a day to see if an inordinately high amount of traffic is flowing through my firewall. There's so much that everyone should do all the time, that there's hardly enough time to complain about how much focus a web site places on reporting one OS'es actively exploited holes vs another OS'es potential vulnerabilities. In the time to read this, you could have been reviewing the Top 75 security tools and seeing where they fit in your environment, even if your environment is your house.
I wonder if that came from Spanish slang. After 7 years of learning Spanish in the classroom, I once used "donde esta Cecilia?" to ask one of my sisters where the other one was, and the sister I asked (who lived in Oklahoma) corrected me with, "its adonde, not donde." I was like, "that's funny, none of my teachers, professors, or books have said that.. ever." She was like, "well, that's how native Spanish speakers speak.
So, there you go.. its not, "where is she?" Instead, its "where's she at?" (technically, "at where is she?") according to Spanish slang.
I use lol with my sister, but the key is to institute a delay.. and I often send it as
:) OTOH, I'm *still* sick and tired of the FIDO wannabes dragging ROTFLMAO over to our IP-based world. You should have left it with the QWK packets you last sent from your Mom's basement 20 years ago. I remember when AOL was plugged into the 'net, and even moreso, I remember when FIDO gateways started gatewaying forums to usenet. Ugh. Its like seeing UUCP configuration details in sendmail.cf.
l
o
effin'
l
LOL actually doesn't sound AOL to me, and if you have a sibling you chat with, "haha" sounds too sarcastic and would start fights
Happy New Year from FN20og.
You may have been kidding, but I don't think the way to reduce traffic on the net is to increase spam fiftyfold. I just moved off a Linksys back to a Linux-based firewall for added functionality and found a continuous load of 3kbps on the wire 24x7. And that's with ports 25, 80, and 135 blocked. I can't imagine what an idle, unblocked line looks like.
They forgot an important one..
102. Prevent broadband providers from prohibiting Cable/DSL routers in end users' homes. They do far more good than harm.
(Yeah, more debt there but what can one do about that?)
Yeah, but that's smart debt. Smart debt good. Dumb debt bad. Lesson over.
My family had a nearly-pure Amazon Christmas this year. I'm outside Trenton, NJ, and my sister flew in from L.A. while my mom came up from Orlando. For the last couple of weeks, my wife and I have been receiving 1-3 Amazon boxes every other day. We all wrapped the night of the 24th and had a GREAT TIME today.
We (the kids) had some bigger gifts shipped directly to Mom's in Florida and just put pictures of those big items in with her cards.
And yes, I did get the binary clock from ThinkGeek.
I definitely vote for my mother-in-law as the best one out there this year.. I've been talking about getting my private pilot's license this coming spring, and my in-laws gave me Flight Simulator 2004 AND a 1 hour discovery flight AND a half hour of ground school from a nearby flight school..
now THAT is cool!
So yeah, I got an xbox with the GTA doublepack (thanks, honey!) and FltSim 2004.. I see my anti-Microsoft campaign is making excellent progress with the family!
If SCO wins, I suspect IBM will settle by buying the company. SCO's market value is half our annual revenues, and Linux is at the heart of our key play.
Seriously, how willing would a company be to deploy an environment that automatically builds and deploys new servers to handle increasing workloads if each new virtual server costs thousands of dollars in licensing fees for the OS alone? Granted, when IBM transaction processing software is deployed its not cheap either, but you can cut the cost of the server in half using Websphere on Linux, or cut it entirely using a free servlet engine running under Linux.
I recently had breakfast with the IBM'er who literally owns IBM's public image, and we had a very interesting discussion about this.
I was wondering WTF myself.. so I googled for it.. this hit is pretty descriptive.
:)
I learned a new word today!!
My mom's true letter quality came in the form of a brother printer with some kind of spinwheel. I too had an Epson MX80 with my Commodore 128, and in NLQ mode, it would write each letter like 3 or 4 times, just SOAKING the ink into the page.
Funny that you choose that exact quote, as that's exactly why my mother-in-law swears I bought the nav option with voice prompting in my Murano earlier this year. Guess there's no cure for geekiness.
FINALLY, someone with old-timer computer memories and a **UID** to back it up! I love reading about all these cherished memories about TRS-80's with 770k+ uids. I mean, really, what happened to the 20 years of geekiness between those "days of yesteryear" and last week when you found the geekiest site on the net??!?!
I started out by staying late after school almost every day just to write in BASIC on a Commodore PET.. in 6th grade in 1981! Then at home, I bought through the Commodore line with a VIC-20, a couple of 64's, and a 128. Bought my first Intel, an IBM PS/1 386, from Sears in '92.
Proud "geek." t-shirt owner, with a penguin mobile hanging from the ceiling fan, and a warm tux blanket covering the bed. Oh, and my wife wrapped my xmas presents in penguin-covered paper. Merry Christmas, all.
Continuing for another replier, z/OS is a 64-bit OS with a 31-bit emulation mode.