Everybody Staze...

Well, wednesday night, thursday morning. Got back to eugene yesterday night and since then have had both a headache and just been really tired the whole time. Gods, I think it’s something in this damn town. I miss visiting with my friends while I was there. Got to see a friend I hadn’t seen in a long time, glad to see that she was doing well, however single she may be.

The apple classes weren’t bad, the first one was on netbooting, and the second one was supposed to be on ldap and directory access, but the lab didn’t work, so the money was refunded and the class cancelled. but we got some good information during that time.

other than that, I need to finish up my website so it’s the same and that the main www.staze.org doesn’t just bring up “test”.

Damn I’m tired… I think I’m going to go home now… I’m over at LIX with friends, and it seems that there really isn’t that much going on. I’m on my laptop, Kat is sitting next to me rating her music. Someone is over mudding, a few people are making a puzzel, gah. nerd party.

I’m stopping now. Night everyone… my head feels like it’s going to explode.

That’s what val said when she finally got the new css tweaked to work with my site. I really like it… I hope you do too. I must say she did an excellent job… easily makes up for her being very mean while playing Mario Party and losing to Eric and I. When she ended up winning in the end, she acts like nothing ever happened. Women, I tell ya. 😉

Onery!

On other fronts, I love my 12″, it’s wonderful. The ipod is awesome too. I’m kinda bored here in Portland, but it isn’t soo bad. I hope to get together with a friend of mine I haven’t seen in ages, as well as go to the microbrew fest tomorrow with some people from Eugene. I hope. That aside, I probably should go see my grandparents tomorrow.

Monday and Tuesday are Apple System Administration Training Seminars, which should be interesting. My boss is paying $300 for the 2 days I’m going, as well as paying me while I’m there. While this seems logical, it’s not something normally done for student workers at the university I think. I am very appreciative. Have I told everyone how much I love my boss? He’s the man… I like having cool bosses.

Tara in in Vancouver BC at the moment. Selling Art. Sounds like she did well. Her pictures sold for a total of $300 CAN, and after the rather large 10% taken by Anime Expo, she’ll end up with $163US… which makes her about $37 in the hole for the whole trip. While it isn’t as much as she would have liked, she was the only artist there to sell all of her work, and from the sounds of it, only about 5 other pieces sold. Once again, she steals the show. I hope she gains a little more self confidence from this… she is always so paranoid about whether her stuff will sell well… which seemed logical considering she’s only sold at one convention since she has been doing this. Now with 2 under her belt, I think the primary concern, rather than will it sell, is do the people at the convention have any money. 😉 Good job Tara…

Well, that all aside, I must go now, Val and Eric I think are getting bored with me typing away in my blog. I really just thought I’d post something since it’s been so long, and since I wanted to show off the new colors.

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.