Streaming My Consciousness

Mark Wade at CA recently posted a neat article about what happens when you respond to a spam message. Check out some of Mark’s other posts as well. Lots of good stuff there for our users, but in a forum where your typical end-user is not likely to be found.

I will occasionally chase down phishing messages (and populate with bogus data) just to see how elaborate the phish is, so I can warn our users. There have been a few recently that have been particularly well crafted, and thus pose a higher threat, as the deception is far more effective.

Just a reminder for your users, unless your bank is run by a bunch of idiots, they won’t e-mail you out of the blue. If they do, it’s time to change banks.

Yesterday, for reasons unknown, our entire network dragged to a crawl around midday. Those reasons became quite clear this morning when word hit the blogosphere (here, here, and here, among others) that Microsoft had pulled another fast one on us network admins and rammed a patch down our throats, bypassing the normal WSUS approval process. Apparently, the Windows Installer update pushed out a few weeks ago makes this possible

The patch in question was a major version relese to Windows Desktop Search, which is categorized in WSUS as an “Update”. Our WSUS machine is configured to auto-approve critical patches, but not routine updates. Imagine my surprise when I find that it is already in the “approved” category and has installed itself on all of our machines. Between the time it synced and the time it pushed out to the machines, I hadn’t gone near the WSUS machine to approve it…

And Microsoft’s PR flacks are telling us that those of us who did get the patch had already approved it. Nice try, Microsoft. I and hundreds of other admins have a far different story to tell.

The least they could do is warn us this was coming, so that we could test it. Instead, we had 200 machines sitting there, reindexing themselves while people were trying to get things done.

I like WSUS, generally, it makes my job a lot easier when it comes to managing the patches that Microsoft constantly needs to issue – but it really ticks me off when they abuse the system for their own self-serving goals.

I’d be willing to bet a donut that this somehow breaks Google Desktop. Micrsoft has a long track record of dirty tricks when they feel squeezed by the competition… anyone remember Win32 v1.32? the patch from 1.31 did very little, except for one key thing… it completely broke OS/2 compatibility with 32-bit Windows applications. Any 32-bit app written with 1.32 or later was unable to function with the 1.31 libraries that you could install on OS/2.

Our receptionist at work and her hubby own a 1983 Beechcraft Bonanza (B36TC for you AvGeeks), and I asked her a while back if they’d mind taking Faith up for a ride sometime (this was around her birthday) and she said they should be able to do that at some point (although at the time the plane was undergoing its annual inspection). Yesterday, she pinged me and said that her hubby needed to go make a gas run down to K81 (Paola) from OJC. K81 is about 20nm from OJC, and is well worth the trip, as 100LL at K81 is about $1.25/gallon cheaper than it is at OJC. Big difference when you’re buying 80 gallons. Besides, there’s a great little BBQ joint in the terminal building at K81.

The flight was contingent on “Optimal VFR Conditions”, and today’s conditions were about as optimal as they get – crystal blue sky, mid 60s, and winds around 5 knots. The sort of day you’d want to play hooky so you can get up in the sky.

When I went to pick up the girls at school today, Faith was running around the room with her arms out, wanting to “take another fly around the room”… And I hadn’t ever told her (nor had her mother) that we were going flying. I think we’ve got a born aviator in the house.

We went out to OJC around 4:00 and waited for Dave and watched some planes come and go (bonus: there was another girl there who just turned 4, watching planes with her grandpa, and our girls made fast friends.)

We got up in the air, and Dave let me drive for a bit, which was fun. I’d almost forgotten what a thrill it is to ride shotgun, hadn’t done so in about 10 years, when I was on the company Cessna 414 for a previous employer. On the way back, he passed the controls back over to me and let me fly most of the way home (all of about 5 minutes, 20nm goes by fast at 160kts!). Sadly, Dave isn’t licensed as an instructor, so I wasn’t able to log the time

I really need to figure out how to pay for flight school. Paypal contributions happily accepted!

Looking east In flight, N819DK K81-OJC on approach to OJC RWY 36. The body of water is located just east of Quivira Rd between 191st and 199th streets.

I’ve been keeping an eye on our new wireless (SonicPoints!), and noticed something interesting… This 60-minute image was captured at 10:17. Can you guess what time people started coming into the sanctuary?

I’m guessing that it’s probably a combination of bluetooth from all the cell phones in the room along with different RF dispersion patterns because the room filled up with a lot of very wet objects (humans) which absorbs 2.4GHz quite readily.

Wow. What an experience that was. I want to make my own take on Clif’s commentary.

I’ve been at Resurrection for a hair shy of a year and a half (I started just after Easter 2006). Before, I was working for a company that installed voice and data cabling for all kinds of different IT departments. It was on one of our projects that I met Jason Wilson at Indian Creek Community Church, where I got to set up my temporary project office in his space at the church. The ICCC job was a nice relief from the usual work environment, since I got to get paid to do church work (there’s a whole saga that ended up happening with that job, but that’s another story for another time). What’s funny is that Jason and I had a number of conversations about a local roundtable gathering he had on a semi-regular basis for church geeks and geeks in the church (Little did I know what was going to transpire two years later…)

God works in strange and amusing ways, and about 6 months later, I found myself working with Clif and the gang getting my feet wet in IT again (and it was a relief to be doing geeky stuff). While I found that I was really good at data cabling, it was still little more than specialized construction work that was frequently hot, dirty, and underappreciated. By early 2006, I was looking to bail after 3 years on the job. I was burned out, my family was starting to wonder who I was after the long hours I was pulling, and it was taking its toll on me.

I’m currently studying Ortberg’s If you want to walk on water, you need to get out of the boat as part of our Tuesday morning Men’s Fellowship (added bonus: it’s down the hall from my office!) One of the first things we’re asked to look at is the boats in our lives that we need to step out of. While I was fed up with my current job, it was pretty much a sure thing. There was no shortage of work. And along comes this opportunity at Resurrection. More or less out of the blue, the result of some seemingly random and tenuous connections that I’d made. I needed to get out of my boat and start walking on the water. The money Resurrection was offering me was not really much more than I was making as a cable monkey, and we were already running pretty lean on the budget, since my wife was at home with a toddler and an infant. I felt God calling me to take that leap into the water and to trust him, that things would be OK. It was utterly terrifying. I told my wife that we could try it for a few months and if it didn’t work, it was time to look at other options.

Adam mentioned something in his brief Q&A talk that he called “discernment by nausea” which he said has served him very well over the years. When presented with two options, the one that makes you queasy and want to throw up is almost invariably the choice God wants you to make. It certainly was for Peter when Jesus called him out of the boat (and he was probably already contemplating syndicated reruns of dinner by that point). Making the leap to Resurrection was terrifying, and made both of us queasy. Every budget calculation we came up with was about 10% over what we had available. “We could make it if only we could skip the tithing! Doesn’t working for a church count instead?”. Spiritual warfare was afoot, and it was making me ill.

I got out of the boat. We continued to tithe what little income we had. And it worked out. My wife saw my work stress evaporate practically overnight. It’s taken me the last 18 months to get into a groove, when my track record usually finds me looking for the lifeboat so I can jump ship by now. That’s not to say that I didn’t contemplate it – early this year, our financial straits were still tight (although my wife had just gotten a part-time contract gig at Resurrection), and I was looking for options back in the for-profit world. I ended up with a hot lead at a large advertising and search company (starts with a G and ends with an oogle!), and they were interested enough to fly me down to Phoenix for a day of interviews (for a position in Denver, close to my wife’s family).

It was very good for my ego to have such a superstar seriously interested in hiring me. But as the time following the interview went on, I found myself on one hand excited about a potential offer in the works, but on the other, knowing that if I did get an offer, I was actually going to have to make the decision on whether or not to leave. And the more it went, the more I realized that I didn’t want to have to make that decision. At the time, we had a number of cool projects in the works and coming up, and I’d already told them that if an offer was forthcoming, I was going to need a fair bit of lead time to wrap things up before leaving (I haven’t told Clif about this until now because at the time, I didn’t want him to start panicking that he might lose his shiny new server/network admin in the middle of crunch time, and afterwards, it was moot anyway… Guess this just turned into Blogboard Confessional time!)

I spent a lot of time asking God to make the decision and His will for me blindingly clear, because I’m a geek and I Don’t Do Subtle. I needed God to use the clue-by-four on me. While working for “The Big G” would have been incredibly cool on many, many levels, I was tremendously relieved when they told me a few weeks later that they appreciated my time, but that it wasn’t going to be a good fit for their current needs (but to please apply again in the future, so the door wasn’t slammed shut on my nose!)

Looking back, it’s become quite clear that the process was God’s way of telling me “yes, you can hang with the superstars, but I’ve got a team of superstars right here that I need you working for.” The Round Table event that we just concluded drove that home even harder – we’ve got a great bunch of geeks right here in our own church IT community. Sure, we don’t have a semi full of cash like G does, but we do pretty well, and we’re doing it for the Kingdom (no, not yours, JP!) The benefits of working with you guys more than make up for the difference in pay. As long as my family is fed (they are), I’m happy as a clam, right here.

Wow, this ended up being way longer than I expected.

The whole wrangling with tithing that I went through reminds me of this video, which was shown at one of the pre-Institute workshops today (which reminds me of something Watson would have made for RezLife, but it actually comes from the folks at Central Christian Church in Las Vegas):