The name and the grade are the same!

I passed my A+, It was a certification that I didn't really need, work wasn't asking for it, I don't think it's ever closed any doors for me. A couple of months ago I got my NSC Defensive Driving Cert but otherwise I haven't added to my resume much in a while.

CompTIA will change their certification policy from lifetime to renewable every three years starting in 2011 so it made sense to get certified before that happened.

I've been studying intermittently since the spring but seriously since Thanksgiving. I had an A+

For Dummies book which was really thick, used a confusing font and was the wrong choice for me as it was written for a dummy, or someone starting from scratch with no experience. I have experience and don't want to be patronized with little jokes. I should have gotten a more advanced book.

The most advantageous resource was a Pearson practice exam. Despite its flaws pictured here, several of the questions were word for word with the actual exam and it was a great resource.

Jessie quizzed me on port numbers, 802.11x standards and the laser printing process and I crushed the exam.

GAFYD pau

Big changes for GAFYD accounts, they're moving to be more like regular Google accounts. Bazuzi.com.com was eligible for the early adopter program and we enlisted. Most of the services I mentioned last time are available now.

Tonight I finally finished sorting all my mail, ~2,500 emails are labeled and archived. I transfered my Voice number (804.3Bazuzi) and my Youtube channel now corresponds. I'm still waiting for Buzz and a few other minor services but for the most part everything is working.

Now to amplify the Bazuzi.com offerings to the family. I'm debating a wiki for recipes, a page for my wedding and a few of the family interviews. Anyone else done something like this?

NDCHGaRC

I don't want to offend anyone, I still want to celebrate a holiday. I've never organized a Secret Santa before, this is what I created and sent out to play Russian Roulette with my good standing at work.

We would like to invite you to participate in a non denominational clandestine holiday gifting and receiving ceremony modeled after a Secret Santa event.

If you would like to participate, please let me know by Friday, November 19th. Friday afternoon we will place the names of everyone who is participating into a fancy hat and each person will select the name of the person who they will buy for.

Please keep all gifts under $10. Gifts can be chosen with the theme of Technology in mind.

By the sword we seek peace

1. The first time they took some quarters and two granola bars and I didn't get angry because they were clearly hungry and didn't break anything.
2. The second time they set the alarm off and I was a little annoyed to have to wake up in the middle of the night.
3. This is the third time someone has broken into the car. Sunday morning brought this little gem and Springfield's ugly war boot crushed our Hawaiian petal.

They took my car's manual, a hair brush and a neck tie, then dumped them 50' away under a street lamp. You can see the rock in the first picture, it took down my rear-view mirror and the windshield-wiper lever. The wipers are now stuck on high.

The cops didn't even get out of their car when filing the report and were more interested in talking to me about Hawai'i than the incident. I had been giving New England the benefit of the doubt. No more.

Now you get nothing.

Neck Ties.

On one extreme they're useless, on the other they try and murder me.

Don't try and bend over to look at something because it'll be there blocking your view saying NO WAY, ME FIRST.

Need to lean forward to pull in your chair to eat? GUESS WHAT, I'M IN YOUR PIZZA

Want to protect IP at work and shred some paper? WATCH OUT, BRO, IMMA MERC YOU.

Massholes

Walking Honey Bear for the last time before bed tonight, we were waiting at the intersection.  There's a No Turn On Red sign and a lit pedestrian walk sign when it's our turn to cross. Both of these were ignored as a lady in an SUV almost ran us over. Fine, I was expecting it and wasn't surprised as I kept HB out of danger.

What I did not expect was what the young man waiting on the other side of the intersection yelled from his window while waiting at the red light:

"Your dog sucks cock!"

I don't even... What? Immediately I went on defense and I got angry and frustrated and wanted to sling up a middle finger or yell a retort, but what would I say, I was too confused. We completed the final block home trying to figure it out.

Entering the house I gave HB a little biscuit and called Wife. She gave me HB's perspective:

oh boy! Some guys yelled from a car. I peed.
I got a treat!

Super interesting

I was in this lady's office working on her computer, she had a metal water bottle that was painted with some pretty flowers.  I complemented her on it.
She said "omg thanks! I drink like a whole one a day!"
In my head I thought "I drank four of those already and it's just about 11am"
Then she went on to tell me how great it is to drink so much water.

The other day I was talking with my coworkers, we were comparing the strangest food we've ever eaten
Him: Squid
Her: Octopus
Other him: Squid
Me: Fermented whale blubber

I won that round.

Making the Amish look like Menonites.

Once a year the Baskin farm shears their alpacas. They invite everyone they know to shear all 15 in one day. They hire out a professional shearer; a soft spoken man named Vic who has worked with them from the beginning. He was thorough, knowledgeable, tolerant of mistakes and quick with encouragement when we got it right and a joke to relieve the tension when we didn't.

The rest of us filled out the crew holding legs, the head, administering shots and weighing them in before and after their haircuts.


I spent the day prior helping clean the space and prep. Day-of about 20 people showed up and saw the whole thing through. To complete the event, I drank a bear with every break and a snus in the afternoon and after the job was done.

Aside from Vic we all went unpaid; a real community coming together and a genuine slice of culture and o'hana.  I got to see my good friend, his wife and their son. I drank their beer, ate their food and took their poison ivy.

This is what I think about in my spare time.

I installed WSUS on my WHS. It was the most useful service to run myself. I couldn't find a reason to run DHCP, DNS (for fuxing with wife's internet experience?) and I only run MSE which can't be centrally managed.

Maybe this summer I can get my hands on a Dell Pro x64 installer and bring my HTPC up to speed. After that one plan is to upgrade the WHS to Vail and run a Domain Controller in a VM, join my 3 client machines and then be able to manage them a little bit better.

I think the storage of the My Docs and Desktop will be moved to the server into the user dir and accssed through a mapped drive. This will centralize storage for everyone on my network without having to worry about it.

I'm just a prisoner, in the same prison as you

After 4 months of looking I finally found work, successfully navigating two interviews and quickly falling into the routine of a new job. It's a private all girls school and they love their tech. Digital smart boards, thin clients this summer, a wonderfully disorganized server room with about 10 x  PowerEdge 1950.

It's nice to have a paycheck again.  I have awesome Accidental Death and Dismemberment insurance, you better believe if I lose an arm and a leg I'll get an arm and leg.

Archer, I barely know her

What stands for your culture? Today after an almost two year dry spell we went arching.  A charming indoor range about forty five minutes' drive.  They put a new nock on my string using the right equipment, fixed an arrow tip and sold me a finger guard. We shot for about thirty minutes until our arms got tired and fingers started to become raw.

We patronized a local small business, I connected with the kid behind the counter and pursued a hobby.

Chameleon

Wife has a Largan Chameleon digital camera from about 8 or 9 years ago.  Most of the indicator words next to buttons have worn off. It has a female USB A port, meaning it needs a male to male USB A cable. With no zoom or any manual settings of any kind it takes the most unusual photos. It was a gift from Wife's grandfather and I'm pretty sure it came free when he bought a machine for work. It went everywhere because of its size, but also because it had no monetary value, here you can see it braving the rain in Saint Kitts.

This camera is famous for being difficult to install with hard to find drivers.  There are no Win 7 drivers. It barely detects when plugged in to the computer.  Thanks to XP mode in Win 7 Ultimate I was able to fire up an XP machine and install the camera and grab what's left of the 51 pictures!  Unfortunately they're in pretty rough shape and they're all in variations of this masterpiece.

Cheers for XP mode at least.

Diabolical sound coming through your speaker.

It's an almost daily occurrence.  I'm sitting at a red light aiming to go straight, the light turns green and the driver on the other side of the intersection turning left jets out, ignoring right-of-way, in front of me like it's cool.  This annoys me when I'm by myself because I really like my car. When Wife is in the car it makes me furious, they're now putting my family at risk. What are my options? Usually just a long sounding of the horn.

I am impotent.

Motivation

There are lots things to help procrastinate, computer gaming, Internet, welfare, wealthy parents, low standards, solitude. It's often difficult to find motivation to get better, to budget your time and take everything in moderation.  Solid parenting & family, strong culture and a strong dream can help give you a handle on how to work for greater longterm gain instead of a smaller immediate gratification payoff but there are lots of things fighting against that.

School is becoming more and more a daycare holding pattern than a place for learning. College is works sheets, not fostering innovation.

For many Fight Club was a big inspiration. If it takes a meme to motivate you, that's fine too. Sometimes having a clear picture of what you want for your future. Maybe a partner can be your muse.

We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret

I think what really matters is that you find something that motivates you. I don't really care if it's a book, movie, money, boys & girls or meme.  As long as it gets you to do something it's worthwhile.

One person's trash is another person's garbage

The last few months have seen us pretty poor money wise while I look for work.  However we live adjacent to an apartment building which is the last in a line of four apartment buildings. So many people live in such a small parcel of land, it's awesome. People here like to throw away things that are perfectly good. They don't have a use for them so they place it neatly in the dumpster, problem solved! Right?

This much population density and this attitude toward stuff means free stuff for me:

• 1 x coffee table holding my server, printer and misc
• 2 x trash cans, one in use, one in basement
• 1 x deck chair on the... porch
• 1 x silverware organizer
• 2 x small stands / foot stool. used to elevate our LCDs
• 5 x milk crates doing everything a milk crate does best
• 1 x foot locker with children's toys. Locker is in excellent condition too. Most of the toys were passed to my aunt who works with kids with disabilities. 
• 1 x metal bowl, probably a base for a Xmas tree, now holding a plant

It's pretty awesome. Some stuff I put on Freecycle but because we can't afford stuff for ourselves right now I end up using most of what I find. Either way, it stays out of the dump and sometimes it finds an awesome home.

Today I found a hibachi grill, a tiny little guy sitting on the top in th dumpster.  It was a little dirty but that's it.  I spent the afternoon cleaning it and am now looking forward to grilling food this summer.

Hell

Right here in front of me and in my kitchen.
I reached for a lid, but couldn't find one. Turns out, that was the time to sort through this mess, right as dinner was ready to serve.  I pruned about 1/3 from the pile. I had containers with no lids, lids with no containers. Ridiculous.

I'm all for reusing containers but when I buy the yogurt on sale it means I get different brands and different brands think it's awesome to have differently shaped containers.

In other hell news, an apartment dweller on the right parked in front of the renters on the left. When they left this morning they knocked over a trash can into the drive way and didn't stop to pick it up. GG Mass.

Finally

I made lebne for the first time this week!

1. Heat milk until you can keep your finger in it for 10 seconds. 
2. Add it to bowl with starter. 
3. Cover. 
4. Leave over night. 
5. Strain. 
6. Isolate a small portion as next starter.
7. Nom

The land of hate and honey

I moved to MA a little over a month ago and have serious culture shock.  The neighbors above us are passive aggressive not making any effort to introduce themselves and in fact making an effort to avoid any interaction.  One of them ran to his car when he saw me pull in and pulled away quickly before I got out of my car.  None of them take out the trash, the only responsibility that we might share. After taking the trash out Thursday night for Friday pickup we left to Richmond for the weekend, on Monday we returned to find all the containers still sitting on the curb: 4 days later. They make no effort.

Tonight the person driving behind me honked because they felt I wasn't turning soon enough, despite the slushy rain and snow and the consistent traffic. They didn't have their lights on and I was the one not holding up my end of the social contract.

They're nice in person. When they get in their cars they turn in to monsters

The good parts:

• I'm living near my aunt. A relationship who's time for a close proximity has come.
• The price of cheese is zero (on a long enough scale)
• The Italian food is outstanding.  I never thought spaghetti could be outstanding
• My cat
• people say 'wicked'

Migrating from Gmail to GAFYD

I started moved from using Gmail to Google Apps For Your Domain. Here are a few resources if you decided to make the move yourself.

Migrating mail:

https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=21288

You lose labels if you do it through the web. If you use Outlook it should be flawless, but you need Education(must be a school) or Premiere edition ($50/user/year)

I'm sorting through my thousands of emails relabeling everythign now, using the keyboard shortcuts for the first time and it makes pretty quick work of it.

An excellent resource for migrating from Gmail to Google Apps by someone who's done it. The background is a poor choice and hurts my eyes. http://base6.com/2009/06/15/migrating-from-gmail-to-google-apps/

Contacts, you can export them and import them easily; keeping groups as well.

Calendars can be also exported and imported.

Here is the show stopper for me: the missing features. Last night I was looking for some missing features and came across a thread in Google's Help forum about Buzz in GApps:

Beyond Buzz and Voice, the list is long: Reader, YouTube linking, Google Profiles, Analytics, Latitude, Wave, iGoogle even Google Groups into which you and I are posting right now... these are all services that only work with a Google Account, and don't work (or are mostly broken) with Google Apps accounts.

The poster talks about how Gmail is a free service and gets all the new features and integration and paying Premier members of GApps have to fight for them. This is ultimately what swayed me. As far as I can tell the only advantage for me was signing in and seeing Bazuzi instead of Google in the top left, which, with the new Bazuzi logo from Jan, is pretty cool. I'd then have to wait for all the other features to trickle in. Migrating all those things, and getting friends and family to start following me at a different address along with competing with my gmail address for unique addresses and accounts(already claimed my Google Profile with Gmail) was going to be frustrating and fragment my audience.


I'm sad I won't be using the family domain to log in, but that's it. I still give out my email address as MyFirstName@MyLastName.com and that's pretty cool.

Gmail as default email client

I'm using W7. This will probably work on Vista as well. Thanks to Kevin for helping me figure this out using Buzz (which turns out to be a little more productive than Wave (which I thought Wave was designed for)). Buzz allows many of our friends to read our conversation but I thought others might want to see it also.


My netbook already launched GMail when I click on mailto links but my desktop did not.Somewhere along the line I'd set the netbook to do this, but I couldn't figure out how.

Google suggests using Notifier but if you're using Chrome perhaps you're already using an extension for that. Notifier isn't a resource hog, but I don't need over redundancy.

This MS Help site: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Change-the-default-e-mail-program
Tells you to go here:
Control Panel\Programs\Default Programs\Set Default Programs
To designate default actions for programs and file types.
There you can set Google Apps defaults, including MAILTO links on the web. You still need Google Apps installed, but that gives offline email which is something I want and already use.  
While you're at is, why not install Google Pack (which includes GApps) and let it handle package management for you? You can ignore the Spyware Dr w/ AV and install Security Essentials which is free and runs on XP and above Windows clients. 

These doggies are big

We took HB to a farm last week. He's been making do with fairly short walks around the neighborhood; competing for space with cars, houses and other doggies. We have an awesome friend who's family farm is close by and she let us come up for the afternoon.
HB was a little nervous at first having never seen horses before.

He quickly made friends and after introductions they all got along famously. 

He had so much fun exploring and running around that he didn't want to leave. He ran for 3 or 4 hours, playing in the snow, playing with their dog; Bodi; and exploring the fields. I'm really glad we got a chance for him to run. He doesn't enjoy computers like I do, so actually doing something was pretty great.

Doggiesaur

Now that I'm on the mainland I get the pleasure of living with our animals again. I walk HoneyBear 3 or 4 times a day and he sits at my feet under the desk all day watching me fill out applications.

We left him with his nana this weekend where he gets spoiled in all different ways. He was a rescue and had a horrible life before we found him. We're all pretty lucky.

Here you can see him suffering

My long lost cat, Merlot. I've had her since Xmas 1999. So she just turned 10! She loves to torture HB and then cry about how little food she gets. She is incredibly loving now that HB is gone.

A Nation of Readers

That's how my dad once described the British. They read everyday: a book, a newspaper.

My parents were both heavy readers (one of them British!), my brother was too(also British). My grandmother, who's native tongue is Arabic and learned French in school and who didn't learn English until she moved to the US as adult still reads a Danielle Steele book everyday.

I am not a strong reader.

Over the holidays I saw that most of my adult family are everyday readers, some read more than they watch TV!

My wife loves reading, she reads for fun; fiction & non-fiction and is grumpy when she can't. This past summer I got excited over World War Z and read it as fast as I could, it took me 4 days. My wife had never seen me that excited over a book. Kevin finished it in a night.

How did I become such an undedicated reader? It looks like I have always been surrounded by them, encouraged, shown that it was cool, etc.

I just finished reading His Dark Materials. It's a trilogy, they made a movie of The Golden Compass. It's like 900 pages and it took me 6 months to read. That's two months per book, about four times longer than most people. I'm trying very hard to become a strong reader, it's a habit I want my children to have and they're more likely to learn pick it up if they see me doing it.

I try to be my best.

Closed

4 weeks removed from the islands. It was warm, it was beautiful and natural. My friends that I miss dearly. I ate food that made sense and came from the backyard. I leave behind slow Internet, expensive food and a wonderful job.

I took away a great deal more than I left. I never knew life could be so great.

Much mahalos.