Category Archives: Rants

Whether they be regarding Immigration services, or the suggestion that apples aren’t juicy enough anymore, if it’s a rant, it’ll be in here.

Targets

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I’ve been evaluating some of the material objects I have recently along with how and how much I use them, and one of the things I’d like to use more is my BB gun. Gifted to me for Christmas 2008 and barely used since, I’ve been thinking I could ‘recycle’ some of the soda cans that will ultimately be recycled anyway and create a small target range against one of the brick walls of the house or another similar location whereby I can safely pull the trigger without bodily nor property harm, and also get some more regular use out of it.

Other targets I have in mind right now are more personal-goal oriented. I need to find a job or some source of reliable income, and I also have a couple of website ideas to document and build. If anyone in the area has Flash experience and has a serious interest in collaborating on a fun project then hit me up.

It Has Been a While!

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Wow, I keep realizing how long it has been since I wrote an entry here. Most things remain the same. I still don’t have a full time job, although I interviewed with a county school system earlier this week and also applied to a year-round resort, both IT positions. I also have another 3 jobs to apply for this afternoon (hopefully) that are also IT and not terribly far away.

I’ve done some work on my monitoring systems for my servers. Over the last few months I’ve developed several methods for providing close to real-time outage-notifications and misc. monitoring for the three servers I administrate. The system I currently have primarily does two things: Service unavailable notifications via Twitter, Email and Txt message (via email), and corresponding “It’s available again” messages, and system monitoring using an Eggdrop IRC bot for each server with basic commands.

I’d like to expand this system at some point in the future, by migrating the system monitoring system from Eggdrop to a Perl bot. This would allow it to be more portable, and hopefully have a smaller footprint on the server it runs on. It would be nice to have IRC-based announcements for server-up/server-down as well as more minor alerts, like high CPU usage, high RAM usage, high hard disk partition usage, etc. We’ll see how that goes at some point in the future.

In more interesting news, I believe we have pretty much finished our Christmas shopping. All of our box to New Zealand items have been bought, and we are waiting for 3 of them to ship or arrive by mail. All but one (I believe) of the remaining items have been wrapped, and they’re all sitting in a corner of our room waiting for everything else to be ready to go. We’re just waiting for 2 items to arrive (apparently they were mailed recently), and another to be mailed. I checked yesterday and it was still pending.

I recently provided a redesign for a fan-site, I’ll try and post screenshots later. I’m also working on upgrading/updating the Infinitley-aLive website, and moving away from WordPress. I’m undecided yet as to whether I’ll use SilverStripe (as on http://chris.i-al.net/) or if I’ll build my own fully customized CMS for it. Having been looking at CodeIgniter, it may be a fun first-project for a CodeIgniter site.

Lastly, if you find yourself in need of some web-design or web-programming, or a shell account for almost anything, or just basic webhosting, leave me a comment or something. I am happy to work with your budget so long as it fits mine, I’m happy to work for the testimonial and for a reference for my resume if I feel a need to use it, and you’re happy to provide the details I need. I accept paypal, and cash or check if you wish to meet locally. Also, if I can’t do something I’ll let you know quickly, and if I can I’ll point in the direction of people who are able to fulfill your requirements.

Be Careful With Mechanical Devices

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ATC DeviceThis is an ATC, or an Air Traffic Controller. It is a belay device, used to add large amounts of friction to a rope when working on high-ropes courses. A couple of months ago I was working on such a high-ropes course (I won’t name it, nor will I name the individuals involved). We were working with a middle-school group, and operating a team-belay system. In this system, there are anywhere from 4-5 people working on belaying another person who is taking on the element we are focusing on. The way team belay works is that the first person in the line is the anchor. Their responsibility involves wearing a harness to which a carabiner attaches with the rope and the ATC. Their job is to pull down on the rope coming to them, to make a tight connection between them and the person participating in the element. That is all they do, if the person falls, or it is time for them to come down, they should let go and stand firm. The next 2-3 people stand in a line beside the anchor, and their job is to pull the rope through the ATC so that there is no slack between the ATC and the participant. The last person in the line is responsible for coiling the rope, so that it is not left on the ground to be trampled on should the belay line need to move (IE, following the participant along an element such as a catwalk or mohawk-walk). Depending on the situation, and generally a good idea anyway, an additional person will hold the back of the anchor’s harness so that in the event the participant outweighs them, they aren’t lifted off the ground at any point.

Anyway, this is relevant because I was working a high element using team belay, and the anchor was a young girl with long hair. It got caught in the ATC when the participant was coming down from the element. Some quick thinking and movement from the team of facilitators meant that safety was never a risk for the participant, and after about 10 very intense minutes, we were able to free the hair and lower the participant to the ground.

I was wearing my harness, unusual in the circumstances, as I was facilitating and not participating in any of the technical work beyond instructing the young people on what they needed to do. I was also the one who anchored the anchor, as it were. She was a small girl, and the participant larger than she, so I put my hand in her harness to hold her down. As I was doing so, she tipped her head and said “it’s caught, my hair is caught” – in my stupor I checked I wasn’t pulling it with my hand slipping behind her harness, and removed it again. But still, she had her head to the side. It was at this moment I looked at what was happening and realized Bad Things(tm) were going on. I called over the other two facilitators on the ground (a third was up a tree, working on fixing an earlier problem whereby he had lost the pull-rope through a pulley for an element). They pulled down on the rope to relieve tension from the ATC, but it wasn’t enough, the hair had got itself well and truly stuck. I ran for the equipment shed, and about 30 seconds later was attaching a new ATC to the rope just up from where the stuck one was, before attaching to my harness (God works in mysterious ways!).

This allowed us to work freely on the problem ATC device. As I said, it took about 5-6 minutes from this point (from point of realization to getting the new ATC in place was about 2-3 minutes) to get the hair removed. Someone had the genius idea to pull half the rope through, and that then it may be removable with an extra 1/2″ of space to work with in the hole. Unfortunately, this end of the rope was the one with tape around it marking what it’s purpose was, and wouldn’t pull through. And so, off to the kitchen one of the facilitators went, intending to take the vehicle they’d brought. He returned a few seconds later with a pair of scissors, and we cut off about 3 inches of the rope end. It was a matter of seconds at this point before the rope was removed, the hair untangled. It has since been reinforced that all hair must be tied back and away from all places where such things may happen to entangle and trap individuals.

Chromium

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I did some reading up on Google’s Chromium, or ChromeOS over the weekend, and I have to admit I am intrigued. There are a number of things I’d like to see before I actually used it, and I have my suspicions that it may be the beginning of other things while still being “the one that didn’t make it,” but still, I’m interested in where this will go.

I’d like to use something like ChromeOS (though not necessarily ChromeOS) to run an internet cafe, for example. It could be ideal in the right corporate environment as a compromise between thin clients and fat clients, using web-apps either in-house or remote services such as Google Docs or Microsoft’s equivalent. If this were the case it would need to be able to authenticate using LDAP/Active Directory or other authentication protocols.

Also, the right users would have no problem using a basic PC using only Chrome (or something like it) to access web-applications if it were well-configured and well-presented. A flamer on Youtube suggested it wouldn’t last long if Apple produced iPhone OS-based tablets, and I wouldn’t be surprised if an upcoming Microsoft release followed a similar idea. And as is almost usual, it wouldn’t surprise me if a Linux OS or two use this as an opportunity to do similar things.

Anyway, for those who haven’t caught up with ChromeOS, or Chromium as it is now called, here are some links and videos, thanks to Google.

ChromeOS Concept:

ChromeOS Demo:

Forgotten

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A few times I’ve thought of things to write about and either not been at a computer or doing something else, and when it comes to actually writing said ideas out in this little window thing, I’ve completely forgotten what I was going to write about.

It wouldn’t even bother me if it only happened occasionally, but it’s been happening a lot recently, not just with blogging either. It’ll be when I get in the car and either forget where I was going or what song I was going to listen to, it’ll be when I get to the store and I forget what I was going to buy, it’ll be when I sit down at a computer or open a new tab on my browser and I forget what I was going to do, which website I was going to visit, what email I was going to send, etc.

It’s frustrating, it’s aggravating, I wish it didn’t happen. But alas, it does. Maybe I need a PDA (IE, a notepad) so I can write stuff down and look at it later. Maybe some more interesting posts will happen this week (if I don’t forget what I’m writing about..).

Would Someone Hire Me Already?

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I’m really not liking living here. It sounds wrong, it mostly is, I love this area and the people that I’m close to, but I hate a series of specific circumstances. I can’t seem to get a job I want to (or can) have long term. Harrisonburg is fairly void of IT opportunities. That is, all the IT jobs are taken, and there didn’t seem to be all that many to begin with. No-one is expanding, so the chances of any opening any time soon are fairly flat. In DC there are hundreds of openings, but of the 10% that I might be qualified for, almost all of them require either a security clearance, a US Citizenship, or both. I have neither.

I’m keeping an open mind about it, so far I’m finding on average 1 job a day to apply for somewhere, and while I’m yet to be contacted by any possible employers, I’m continuing to look – mostly because I can’t stay working part time forever.

I have a small list of places I regularly check (usually every day, or every other day), starting locally and working my way out.

  • Eastern Mennonite Univerity
  • James Madison University
  • Rockingham Memorial Hospital
  • Rockingham County Public Schools
  • Harrisonburg City Schools
  • Rackspace (Locations in Blacksburg and in NoVa)
  • Craigslist (Harrisonburg, Charlottesville, Winchester, DC, Roanoke, Lynchburg, Blacksburg)
  • University of Virginia
  • Virginia Tech

I also check several school districts around the area every week or so, checking county and city school systems around as far as Charlottesville, Roanoke, Winchester/DC, etc, and I just added Carillion, the hospital in Roanoke to my list of places to regularly check (thanks Lauren).

If you’re a hiring manager, I can send a resume as required, but I have two years professional IT experience between basic and advanced experience working with PC’s, Servers, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Mac OS X, Windows Server 2000 and 2003, Linux as a desktop and server, web technologies and networking, computer hardware, Active Directory, Novell Netware, have worked on a service desk, and can usually learn things quickly. I also have around 10 years experience in a non-professional environment just playing with stuff and learning things at home or while working on friends/family computers. I’d like to study, but I need to get my family to a point where we are self-sufficient with enough spare cash-flow to fund such an educational venture.

I Want…

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…to change the image of cheap internet hosting. I can’t see it happening. What I would love to do would be to run a small business supplying cheap webhosting for websites and IRC and Shoutcast and Teamspeak and VPSs and Dedicated servers and so on and so forth, meanwhile providing quality 24 hour phone and email support for a low monthly fee. I’d like to do that. I think that is what the internet would like. But it isn’t going to happen any time soon. Why? Because I don’t have the upfront money to pay for the first server, which itself would probably only be able to supply websites for example. And even if I did, I would probably not be able to afford long-term payments if only one or two people bought accounts – not much motivation to have people calling me at 3 in the morning because their website is running slow.

The sad truth is that small internet businesses are not very profitable. In order to make any money, you need a minimum amount of resources and get a large number of customers using them in order to pay for a) the resources being used already, and b) more resources.

I was crunching numbers a few months ago with the prospect of starting a VPS company, but in order to get going, I was needing around $240 a month for the server just to get it up and running, and then I needed 24 people paying $10 a month before it would break even. With that kind of package, I’d only have another 6 packages available on that server before I’d need a second one, and then I’m back to finding $180 a month until that one reaches a break-even point. Once I had 6 servers running, there would be enough profit from 6 full servers to fund a 7th without anything coming out of my own pocket, by which point I would be serving around 180 customers. The seventh server is what would be the turning point in the business. And somewhere in all of this I’d need to have found 180 people that want VPSs with the crappy support that I’d be able to provide on my own, meaning I’d probably need to pay for advertising of some description, and possibly provide some web-designing services of some kind. Keeping in mind also, that none of those numbers were taking taxes or any other mandatory expenses into consideration, so it would probably be the 8th server that was making money. Around the 10th server (Read: 300 customers) I’d be able to afford to visit a mobile communications store and lease unto myself a cell phone and a wireless data-card to provide support anywhere. I’d also be able to lease a VoIP account for the business and accept incoming phone calls for support. I would have undoubtedly branched out by this point, and be providing other services using similar hardware such as website hosting, but hosting more people per-server at a lower cost per-customer. I’d be reselling dedicated servers, probably looking at the viability of buying my own hardware and co-locating it.

And that is where it gets depressing. Maybe I need to just do it? Maybe I need to save the money and put a real plan together, put the time into it and make it work. Maybe I need to find a business partner who I can trust. Maybe I need to give it up already. I know I need to study the business side of it to find out how much that would cost before going further with the viability of the pure technical numbers. I know I need to study further, and make decisions regarding placing multiple service types on the same servers, such as ShoutCast hosting alongside TeamSpeak hosting – probably not a good plan. The same idea applies to mixing VPS plans on the same hardware, as it isn’t entirely fair to cram whatever will fit on a server on whatever is available at the time, at the same time I can’t afford to run 3 servers with 3 plans until they’re paying for themselves.

So I shall return to my silent pondering of greatness that will likely not come. I will continue to come up with ideas that may never see fruition. And I will proceed to consider possibilities to make money as well as a name for myself in the internet community.

How People Find Me

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I’m intrigued, when I look at my statistics, as to how people come to my blog, what they see, etc.

There are 3 groups. Naturally there is a miscellaneous group, they tend to just fall in here either by the next-blog function in the wordpress toolbar, or by an automated link being clicked. There are my friends on facebook and twitter who click my links, and I also get a small amount of traffic from a few friends blogs.

But the biggest group, and this actually surprises me, is the group searching for information on USCIS Form I-797C, Notice of Action. In fact, on a test-search for “i 797c notice of action” my post about receiving it is on the first page (about #6). I intended to write a summary of when things happened, and how my immigration to the United States worked out in reality, but obviously that hasn’t happened yet. Maybe next week.. (though I doubt it!)

Current Balance: $1,041.77

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Money isn’t really my friend. I have a bad habit of getting money and immediately spending money. I guess it’s a reflex left over from the idea of “Well, there’s money, let’s spend it before someone else does, or we find something else that it has to go towards.”

In fact, that $1000 isn’t hanging around very long anyway, there are a couple of credit card bills to be paid, and we’re going shopping tonight, so who knows how much we’ll have in the morning. But we’ve also filled up both vehicles with gas, and set aside our outgoing payments, we just need to keep doing what we’re doing and our standing balance should slowly rise!

I’m still looking for a job, so if anyone in Virginia (or DC) is looking for a Level 1 Helpdesk Analyst or DC Ops Tech (will work any shift if required), hit me up and I’ll send a resume. I don’t mind driving to work, I was quite happy to drive 2 hours each way to Rackspace, and I’ll be happy to do the same for you.

Angus Burger

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So the other day I was in need of dinner, and nothing at home seemed appealing. I had to decide between stopping at KFC to try the grilled chicken, or McDonald’s to try the new Angus Burgers. By the title of the post, you can probably guess that I went to McD’s.

So, simple review. Of the three burgers on offer, the bacon one is the only one that I stood any chance of liking at all. In the bacon one were a pile of red onions, which I got Kelly to take out, and she ate them (I was driving at the time). It’s bigger around than most McDonald’s burgers, it may stack up size-wise with the Big Mac (given that the Big Mac is stacked). In short, the Bacon and Beef Angus Burger at McDonald’s is awesome. I can hardly wait to try another one. Although it will probably be after I try the grilled chicken at KFC 😉