Work Journal For Week of February 14, 2000
Last Update: Wednesday, February 23, 2000 08:25 PM
Mon / Tue / Wed / Thu / Fri / Sat / Sun
I had another job interview today. I don't expect to hear back from them though. I asked about mobility within the company and their answer was that mobility would likely come within the same department and not vertically into other departments. In a subtle way I expressed that this was not the way I wish to develop my career.
***
An Irishman walks into a bar in Dublin, orders three pints of Guinness and sits in the back of the room, drinking a sip out of each one in turn. When he finishes them, he comes back to the bar and orders three more.
The bartender approaches and tells him, "You know, a pint goes flat after I draw it; it would taste better if you bought one at a time."
The Irishman replies, "Well, you see, I have two brothers. One is in America, the other in Australia, and I'm here in Dublin. When we all left home, we promised that we'd drink this way to remember the days when we drank together. So I drinks one for each o' me brothers and one for me self."
The bartender admits that this is a nice custom, and leaves it there.
The Irishman becomes a regular in the bar, and always drinks the same way: He orders three pints and drinks them in turn. One day, he comes in and orders two pints. All the other regulars take notice and fall silent. When he comes back to the bar for the second round, the bartender says, "I don't want to intrude on your grief, but I wanted to offer my condolences on your great loss."
The Irishman looks quite puzzled for a moment, then a light dawns in his eye and he laughs.
"Oh, no, everybody's just fine," He explains, "It's just that me wife had us join that Baptist Church and I had to quit drinking. 'Hasn't affected me brothers a bit though."
Mon / Tue / Wed / Thu / Fri / Sat / Sun
Haven't made much time for working on the computer tonight. What little time I made, I used trying to get ZoneAlarm to play nice on my main PC. I had no problems on the weekend but now it appears that ZoneAlarm is blocking access to my Novell server, thus I cannot log onto it.
If I turn off ZoneAlarm I can logon to my server, then if I start ZoneAlarm again while logged on, ZoneAlarm immediately blocks the IP address for the server.
I know from the scans I did of my PC via www.grc.com that my PC is fairly secure. I mostly want to run ZoneAlarm so I can tell if anyone is scanning my PC via the Internet. I'll have to go through the information at www.zonelabs.com to see if I may have missed where it says that it will not work on a multi homed PC ( multiple network cards ), which is what I am using.
FrontPage will not upload my update as it does not like something in my IP stack. Could it be that ZoneAlarm changes some files related to the IP stack. I will have to investigate. For now I will have to use FTP to post this update.
Mon / Tue / Wed / Thu / Fri / Sat / Sun
ZoneAlarm is now my friend and not my enemy. I can logon to my network without ZoneAlarm giving me any grief. It turns out that I had the wrong adapter subnet selected. I figured this out by doing a few minutes reading on the help file. Now to see if I can get FrontPage to publish while ZoneAlarm is enabled.
Zonealarm said it was going to block FrontPage but I was able to publish despite this. Time to try it one more time to see what happens.
No problems publishing from FrontPage the second time. So it appears that I now have ZoneAlarm configured so that I can do everything I want without any interference from the firewall.
Last night while fiddling with ZoneAlarm I also made some profile changes in ZenWorks for my user ID. I wish I had been paying more attention to what I did as when I logged on tonight my user profile copied up to the user directory on the server. I will have to play with my test IDs later and figure out what I did. Now I must go shovel snow and make supper.
***
If you are looking for a web site to get computer security news and tips take a look at securityfocus.com. You can search for security problems by vendor and product, check out vendor services, and download free tools.
If you are interested in how spammers make those strange looking URLs, you can learn all about it here. Much of the information you more knowledgeable types may already know, but you may never have pulled all the stuff you know together to make the connection with how to make cryptic URLs.
Your office may never have to by another Postal Code book again. Canada Post has put a Postal Code search and lots of other information on the web @. They even have ways for you to pay bills via the net through arrangement with some banks and utilities.
Tip: When working on your computers or other equipment around the house or garage are you always in need of a place to put screws, bolts, and other small items. Well grab an old egg cart on leave it open on the work bench. You can put all your small hardware items in the carton it so it does not get lost.
Mon / Tue / Wed / Thu / Fri / Sat / Sun
The following fell into my inbox at work:
Rules to live by...
A GOOD SPLASH OF REALITY!
Here's some food for thought from Bill Gates' Book (which was supported by a RAND Study). For high school and college graduates, here is a list of 11 things they did not learn in school. In his book, Bill Gates talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a full generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.
RULE 1
Life is not fair; get used to it.
RULE 2
The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
RULE 3
You will NOT make 40 thousand dollars a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice president with a car phone, until you earn both.
RULE 4
If you think your teacher is tough, wait until you get a boss. He/She
doesn't have tenure.
RULE 5
Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a
different word for burger flipping; they called it opportunity.
RULE 6
If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your
mistakes, learn from them.
RULE 7
Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you are. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parents' generation, try "delousing" the closet in your own room.
RULE 8
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not. In some schools they have abolished failing grades; they'll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
RULE 9
Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you find yourself. Do that on your own time.
RULE 10
Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave
the coffee shop and go to jobs.
RULE 11.
Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
***
From time to time a few of the other Daynoters have mentioned how they felt that the web space they have created is not entirely their own as their readers have helped to shape it as well. I can't say I feel like that by I still try not to offend anyone as I know some of my readers personally, and one of them also happens to be my mother. I have on a few occasions used this space to rant about something that bothered me for one reason or another. I like ranting here as the process of thinking about the topic and writing it out, I find to be quite healthy. What I don't like is that there have been a few times when I have had a good topic that I can't rant about here as I know it will offend one or more of my readers. I am lucky though to have a good friend who I can rant at via email to get these things off my chest. Thanks my friend and you know who you are.
Mon / Tue / Wed / Thu / Fri / Sat / Sun
I still have more material to cover on Netware 5 before I am ready to write my exam. To further my studying I downloaded a practice exam from Certify.com. I have used their exams for preparing for Novell exams before with good success. Later in the weekend I will register the practice exam which will make all the questions available to me. At the moment without registration, only and handful of questions can be seen.
All the Novell security stuff I have found to date is Linux based so I need to get my Linux project on the go again. For a change of pace I am downloading CorelLinux tonight. Corel warns that due to high demand that connections maybe slow. I am either very lucky or there is no demand, as I am getting a 90KB/Sec connection with Corel's FTP server which is very respectable.
The school where the children of my friends out in the country go is in need of a new computer or two. The old Mac they have is not cutting the mustard any more. I tracked down a foundation that collects computers and other supplies for schools and distributes it. The problems is that the rural school district these kids go to is not in the foundations mandate. I considered just buying an old PC and donating it myself, then I figured that I have good contacts with one company in town and that I should try and exploit them. I worked for Agrium a little over a year ago and they donate all their old PCs to the foundation I mentioned above. So I called and mentioned how the school I represent is not in the foundations mandate and asked if I could get a PC for them the next time they do upgrades. I am now on the list to get a couple of Pentium PCs next time Agrium is upgrading PCs.
Mon / Tue / Wed / Thu / Fri / Sat / Sun
Seasonal weather has returned, so I headed out for a bicycle ride this afternoon. Seems that the good weather also makes for good conditions for cleaning stables. Trucks carrying old straw and manure were leaving little presents on the road while on the way to spread their cargo on a field. This meant I had to weave my way through the manure on the shoulder of the road.
Mon / Tue / Wed / Thu / Fri / Sat / Sun
The day is evaporating quickly. I slept in a bit then proceeded to watch the Daytona 500, which ate up a number of hours. It's mid afternoon and I am only now getting at start at my chores. The temperature is nice but it is very windy so I am debating on whether a bike ride is a good idea or not. The wind chill factor is high, and fighting the wind on the open road is not fun when your freezing.
Copyright © 1999, 2000 John Doucette. All Rights Reserved