I want to kill someone. Really I do. I’m so damn sick of paranoid IT people, it’s really starting to make me want to just go live in a grass hut somewhere. Let me give some background.

I’m, as most/all of you know, a computer tech. I support computers for a living. Macs, Wintels, Linux, Unix, whatever. I don’t want to be a tech for the rest of my life, but as time goes on it looks more and more likely. Fine I say, I can handle that. So last summer, I took a systems administration class from the guy who maintains the main servers here at the university. It was a great class… learned a lot, but really, it didn’t change my opinion about security much. Watch your ass, and it won’t get bitten. Well, I guess I was in the minority or something… enter two paranoid sobs.

First off, a friend and I have been war-driving the past couple days. Wardriving is the act of getting a laptop, a GPS receiver, and a wireless card, going around, and finding people’s wireless access points and seeing if they’re wide open. It’s a geek thing. Mainly we’re just doing it out of curiosity for how many waps (wireless access points) there are out there, and how many are actually secured somehow. Well, one afternoon the friend went by the local hospital, and found out that they were sending patient data over wireless, not encrypted whatsoever. So, we contacted the IT guy there, and at first it seemed like was more interested in prosecuting the friend of mine rather than fixing the problem. Today I talked to him again, and he had calmed down a lot, and really now just wants to fix the issue. Good… atleast some people can learn.

Person number 2. I work with him. He’s taking the class I did last summer. The person that used to be in my shoes was an uber paranoid freak. It rubbed off on this person. Now I’m in proximity of him constantly and his paranoid tendancies are getting on my nerves. Security Security Security. “Unplug that box from the network, it hasn’t been locked down”. “What is there to lock down? Nothing is running on it”. “Policy, just unplug it”. WTF. There is no policy. The box is a brandnew xserve with all the updates applied. It’s no more vulnerable than the other ones we have, and more than likely, it’s less vulnerable than most the machines in the building. It’s such f*cking BS. He even wants to put in a firewall for the jschool and restrict the flow of traffic to and from the outside world. GAH! This is a friggin’ university. Don’t try to do the job that someone else on campus provides. It just creates more work and plausable deniability on their part. AAAARRRRGGGG. Must not kill.

I know I’m only a student… I know I’m just low on the totem pole… but since I’m going to have to deal with this shit and support it, I think it should be included in a little more of the policy making meetings. Furthermore, I’m sorry, if we implement a firewall for the jschool, I’m quitting. Out of protest I am going to quit. I so detest the idea of a paranoid limiting scheme that it would completely undermine my morals if I continued to work in a place that did that… especially at a university… a publicly owned and operated entity. I am paying taxes and working for this school… I think I should have certain rights. Sure, I don’t think I should be able to undermine other people’s rights by hacking a machine, or sucking up more bandwidth than I need (i.e. no major servers or anything). But I don’t think I should be blocked from running something like Napster and downloading music just because someone takes a security class and gets this nazi-esk ideal that everyone should be watched. Go work for Aschroft…

Rant Rant… I’m sorry… just seems like that’s really what I want to do right now because I have no other way to let it out. I want to be in the loop… and all I’m getting is this left over bone and grissle that someone tosses me after they’ve nawed on it for a while. I can guess what it used to be, but I can’t be sure. At the very least, this isn’t fostering very good interoffice relationship skills. Question is now, do I show this to my boss and see what he says. *sighs*

Well, that’s all for today kids… maybe I’ll post again later tonight or tomorrow with something a little more readable.

So here I am, one of the first things I’m doing on my new 12″ powerbook is typing my blog post. The main thing I’m wondering is how on earth I’m going to make this keyboard dvorak. I keep trying to type in dvorak that it’s pissing me off. I’m beyond the qwetry phase now… and while I seem to know well, I’m still not typing back at my normal qwerty speed. I mainly am going for bilingual since I’m always going to have to support some computer that is using qwerty. grrr… damn inefficient keyboard layouts.

iPod rocks, got myself a new basestation too to replace the one I’m selling. Not sure about the printer yet, but I have so far set myself back 2400 after rebates. 2300 if you count the money I’ll get for my old basestation.

Getting the money was interesting. So I sold some stock, the check took 3 days to come, then I got the my bank, and they say “we have to put a hold on this since you don’t have matching funds, it’ll be 5 days”. F*ck that. So I go to work for a few hours (since damn banks don’t open until 10). Go down to BofA, and they cash the check for me. So here I am with $3100 on me, walking down the street. I make it 2 blocks to my bank, and cash the money asap. I then walk a few more blocks to the bookstore, and start my spending spree. Oh it was fun. I want this and this and this and this. 10 minutes later, the powerbook shows from the warehouse, and I’m out the door with 2 armfulls of stuff, hiking back to the closest building I can stash the stuff in… my old work. I stash everything except the ipod and the powerbook. the printer is there, as are the boxes for everything.

I can’t wait to get home to start installing software on this thing and sorting through my piles of mp3 cd’s looking for the music I want to put on my ipod.

Good to be back though… if only I could stop wanting to hit e hoping it’s a .

Damn qwerty… I hope you rot in hell you inefficient piece of shit layout. die die die.

welcome to the wonderful world of dvorak… be prepared for the slowest typing since grade school.

Won’t be posting in my blog much until my speed increases.

thanks for your patience. talk to me vocally if you need anything.