It's about that time.

I've been keeping myself quite busy over the past few weeks. I got most of my college school work done early so I could just ride out the rest of the semester until graduation. That's this Saturday. I can't really believe it's time for me to graduate already. It seems like this semester just started! This will be the second time that I march with my classmates at NMCC. My first degree was in Applied Sciences with a focus in Computer Electronics. This time, it's another Applied Sciences degree..with a major in Computer Information Services. Two Associate's degrees later and I'm still thinking about going to school for a Bachelors, maybe even a Masters but I think I'll take a break. Since I've been finished with my school work for a while, you are probably asking "well then Tim..why have you been so busy?!" Work has been keeping me pretty well entertained. There are about 12 different things that are teetering on the fence and I don't know which way they're going to go. One of those things being the MLTI expansion. I've also been doing a lot of planning around that. I will be very VERY disappointed if the legislature does something stupid, like voting it down. On top of that, we've been house hunting. Yes, that's right folks, I'm looking to buy a house. I went into the venture thinking it would be as easy as pie. How hard could it be to find a house you like, say "me likey" and then shell over the money. Well...it's hard. Hardest thing being that Alyssa and I have to agree and like the same house. Yes, Alyssa and I get along and love eachother and all that, but when it comes to some things, we don't agree. We found out that aspects of houses, we tend to disagree on.. a LOT. Then there's all the paper work, the endless showings, the realtors trying to get you to buy something you don't want...it goes on and on. Doesn't help that all of the houses in Aroostook County have huge inflated prices. I spoke to someone who paid 50k for their house and it was recently appraised at 117k. They have done NOTHING to improve it. If anything, the house is now in worse shape. Insanity. People are trying to sell their houses for almost double what their worth..and then they have a hard time understanding why their houses have been on the market for two years! Alyssa and I have settled on a couple places that we both like..and we're going to pursue those. Don't know what'll happen, we may end up staying where we are for another year. Who knows. In other news, we had a incident with skunks under our front porch which may have actually turned out to be some groundhogs that got sprayed. Stay happy and healthy folks, I'll let you know when we move!

It's been a while

I know I haven't blogged in a while but it's only because I've been keeping pretty busy. I will write an update soon..right now I'm dealing with finishing up stuff for school and the MLTI disaster at work. Also, trying to buy a house ...so...yeah..I'll catch you up later.
:)

Me - 2, the Board - 0. Can barely contain my excitement..

Yesterday was a long day. It began with speech class at 7:30 AM. Usually not a huge deal, but having just had a week off, I had become accustomed to sleeping in a little later than that. To make things worse, I had volunteered to be one of the first to present our "Demonstrative" speeches. I chose to demonstrate how to play guitar tabs. So yes, this means I have to basically put on a concert at 7:30 in the freaking morning. Not to brag but I'm a pretty decent public speaker, I've become acclimated to giving public presentations and speeches, it sort of comes with the job. Let me tell you right now, playing a guitar in front of a crowd of people...NOT the same thing. I think I'm a decent public speaker because I am always prepared to speak and I am confident in what I'm presenting. My guitar skills..not a source of confidence. I had a feeling I was going to have issues so I apologized ahead of time. Over all, I didn't do too poorly, even though I was nervous as hell. You know I'm nervous when I mess up 3-4 times in a song that I've played millions of times before without an issue. Everyone was still really impressed and I got a good round of applause, this made me feel a bit better. After class I got to go home and relax a bit. This gave me time to prepare. I had to present to school board at 7 PM regarding the laptop expansion. I received a call from the Superintendent and he basically told me that I needed to convince him once more that the expansion program was the best course of action for us. Of course, this time I have to convince the rest of the board with him. About an hour or so before I was set to present, I started feeling nauseous, by the time I was done, it had left. I've never had an upset stomach problem before this time..but a lot was riding on what I had to say. I went over every single detail of the program, I showed them facts, figures, benefits and drawbacks. The chair of the board asked Mr. Keenan(the superintendent) and the HS principal what their positions were. They were both in favor of the program. But there were a couple members of the board who wanted to go over the budget first. This is when I was dismissed. What a horrible torture. I came to work this morning, still not a word. Until 10 minutes ago. Our principal had spoken to the superintendent and the board voted in favor of the program! I almost did a happy dance right there and then. To have an entire school full of Macbooks..awweee..it's like a dream come true. Now, if the legislation would just leave it be...

(Image courtesy: http://www.cecscareers.com/)

Is it Monday already?

Monday already? Damn, where did the weekend go? Forget that...where did last WEEK go. Last week was my vacation from college and it doesn't even seem like it existed. Now, now it's Monday..which is followed by Tuesday. I'm not looking forward to Tuesday. I get to start Tuesday off by giving a demonstrative speech on how to play a guitar tab. Yes..riveting, I know..but you know what..it was much better than my orignal topic. Basic Java programming and how to write a rock, paper, scissors game using Netbeans. Yeah. Try demonstrating that to a bunch of Job Corps kids and keep it under 10 minutes. No..instead I figured I would demonstrate how to read a guitar tab..and then kick out some jams for a few minutes. Speaking of which, I need to borrow someone's acoustic guitar. I don't think the neighboring classes will appreciate my amp. That's a good hint to those wondering what I would like for my birthday. So, that takes care of Tuesday morning. Next up, the normal workday..which won't be starting until around noon. Why noon you ask? Well, because at 7 PM I get to be the honored guest speaker at our local school board meeting. Hooray! So, I'm all set on making multiple trips from PI to Easton..therefore I'm going to work late. The high school principal and I sat down with the superintendent a couple of weeks ago and thoroughly convinced him that going with the MLTI expansion was the best course of action for our school. But now..for some reason, I'm assuming it's because people whined and now the HS teachers are keeping their Macbooks, we have to go to this board meeting and not only convince him AGAIN..but also convince the board members. I don't have a fear of public speaking and I have presented to the school board before..but this is a HUGE decision..and I'm sure there will be more than one asinine, repetative questions..the answers to which will make no difference whatsoever because I have a feeling that all that is going to be looked at will be the dollars..not the value. Sad, but true. People don't value education as much as they do money...or so it seems. The benefits of this MLTI program far outweigh the costs. I was asked to do a quote on how much it would cost to replace our lab computers and continue on as we are now..I did as I was told. The costs of the 1 to 1 program aren't much higher..and we would be cutting the student's opportunities short by keeping the stationary, locked down, rarely monitored computer labs that we have now. It's depressing to think that we would sacrifice a once in a lifetime chance like this to save a few dollars..but it looks like that's how it's going to be. Oh, did I mention that this laptop program will cut my overhead by about 1/3 ..freeing me up to focus on things like integration instead of maintenence? I'm sure that won't factor in at all. Who knows though, maybe with all the money they save by opting out of the program..I can finally get some benefits.
In other news..Macheist has one day left. They've already hit the "mega-unlock" donation amount. There are no more locked apps, so it's $39 for all of them. On top of that, they've added a couple more applications to the package..one of them being Delicious Library 2. It's awesome, you should check it out.

(Image Courtesy: www.zdnet.com)

BUS 250 Down went the house of cards...

I really try to keep up with my blog and post on a daily basis but there are those days where you can't even fathom sitting down for 5 minutes. Friday was one of those days. It all started around 9 AM.
The night before I completed a cable pull in anticipation of our new network-able office photocopier. Before doing the cable pull I eyeballed how much cable I would need. Yes, eyeballed is a proper verb. I'll admit, it was a bit lazy, I should have measured, but I used to "eyeball" all the time when I worked for MFX Internet and I was always pretty close to the mark but when I was off, I was almost always OVER, which was no big deal since I could just chop off the extra and then terminate it. Well, this time I was short, by about four feet. The solution, a coupler and an extra few feet of cable. This means a trip to Staples.
Friday morning, I wait around for Staples to open up at 9 AM. For me, 9 AM is late..so I kind of just lounge around..eat an extra pop tart..you know..hang out.
9 AM I get to Staples, grab my coupler and my cable..head to the counter. I pull the school department's Staples credit card out of my wallet and hand it to the cashier. The proper protocol with this credit account requires the cashier to call in the order with a PO number. So, as I wait for her to complete this, I talk to the store manager. After a couple of minutes..she hands me the card back and tells me they wouldn't let the transaction go through. Uh..what? I've purchased hundreds of dollars of merchandise from that store with that very card..all I want now is $20 worth of stuff..and you're telling me no. Of course, the administrative secretary is on vacation..but I make the call anyway. As I look at my phone I notice I have a call from the school with a voice mail..and some email. The voice mail is my superintendent explaining some problems with his mail that he's having..to him his email is broken..to me...sounds like an network issue. I call him back and tell him I'll look at it when I get in. Next, I check my email...there's a message from the HS secretary telling me that the ES secretary can't log into the network. Now I start to worry. On the way to work I'm trying to think of what could be causing the entire ES to lose its network connection. I come into the building..hear another tale of how someone has no network access...and I head straight to the switch cabinet with my laptop.

Above is the photo I took of my switch cabinet a while back. It's a horrid mess and I've never really had the opportunity to clean it up. So, yes, I had to troubleshoot a network connection in THAT cat 5 spaghetti. Eventually I got annoyed...it was really hard track down the problem. Sometimes in life, especially if you're a technician..it's easier to just tear everything down..and rebuild it from scratch. This way you can test things as you go along and figure out where the problem is (at first I was suspecting a loopback issue somewhere on the network..or maybe a NIC that was chattering..something of that nature). So I broke it down. I took every cable out, made note of where everything was, took out all the switches and started from scratch. By the time I was done, the only thing left in that cabinet was the fiber transciever(where the connection comes from) and the UPS. I inserted a brand new 16 port switch to do my testing on and plugged in 3 computers that I could monitor the ping reports on. I plugged my macbook in and started watching the connection closely. After about 15 minutes I noticed that the connection started going wonky again..so one by one I started removing the computers I was monitoring. Eventually I was down to having only the cable from the transciever and my Mac plugged into the switch. I skipped the switch altogether and plugged the transciever directly into my Mac..and voila..doing the same thing. I move the CAT 5 cable to get it out of my way..whoops...look..the connection came back. Yep..bad cable. I replaced it and the connection was fine all weekend. I of course, had to rebuild my cabinet..but I didn't mind. It looks a lot better now. I will get a picture of it up soon. Isn't it amazing how something as simple as ethernet cable can completely ruin your day?

EDIT: Here is the after photo:

Bus 250 I can't believe people are still surprised...

So, as I mentioned earlier, I'm doing a little side project for a former teacher. His computer got hit by a pretty nasty root-kit and I told him that his only good option would be to reformat. Upon hearing that his wife asked what it would take to get them a new computer. They asked me if I would work up a quote and put a new one together for them. Sure, no problem. So I sat down at my computer, opened up all of my favorite purchasing sites and started perusing the goodies to see what I could come up with. Got some pretty decent deals. A "barebones" system with a quad core phenom processor, motherboard, 4 gb ram, case and power supply for $500. Add to that the 1 tb SATA drive that was $90 and some other odds and ends..it all totalled out to a pretty decent price, even with a 20 inch lcd monitor. I decided to have these shipped to my office instead of home because the teacher lives in Easton and I have more space to work in my office than I would in my house. Today, some of the items began to arrive. The principal first questioned why I was getting all of this stuff when my budget was frozen. I explained. Then she began questioning my prices. How was I getting things for so cheap!? People...stop thinking that retail prices are the end-all and be-all of what you're going to pay for a computer. More often than not you can get a better system, which is customized, for a lower cost than you could from HP or Dell. You just have to know where to look. Places like Newegg.com and TigerDirect.com or zipzoomfly.com and even amazon.com have excellent deals on different items everyday. You just have to look around. Start shopping online folks, it maximizes your choices and minimizes your spending.

(Image Courtesy : www.newegg.com)

BUS 250 "I haven't been slacking.."

I would like to start off by stating that I have not been slacking when it comes to writing my blog entries. I have been...preoccupied. Plus there has been a lack of material to write about due to this preoccupation. I have been working on many little projects here and there as things have seemed to calm down in the area of tech support at work. I have built a new image for the HS library iBooks and have almost finished reimaging those. I have taken up a job researching and building a new computer system for a former teacher. I have also been working with the leasing company to get some new copiers put into our buildings. Add that to my everyday work load, life, the universe and everything..and spare time just drifts away. Add to that the sickness that I have been fighting for the past 4 days and I think I have a valid excuse. So stop judging me!
Okay, now..down to business. Since I really have nothing super exciting going on at this moment in time, I guess I can talk about what's on the docket for the upcoming weeks and months. At some point this week I have to do a cable pull in the High school so we can network the new photocopier. I personally don't think it's necessary to network our photocopier and I can forsee many issues with this. BUT they're paying me $150 to do it, they seem pretty adament about getting it done and you know..I can always pull it off the network later on :)

I actually took a 2 hour break while typing this entry because of an super excellent discovery! Macheist is putting on a charity sale! Macheist 3 bundle is on sale now and for the next 13 days only. You can get the following applications for a mere $39! 25% of this goes to charity and it CAN go to a charity of your choosing!

iSale (Retail:$39.95) - Online auctioning doesn't have to be a chore, make it fun with iSale!

Picturesque (Retail:$34.95) - Stop opening clunky photo software just to touch up your pictures.

SousChef (Retail:$30.00) - Turn your Mac into an awesome kitchen companion.

World of Goo (Retail:$20.00)- One of the best games of 2008. Imaginative puzzle game.

Phoneview (Retail:$19.95)- Gives you more control over your iPhone and iPod touch.

LittleSnapper (Retail:$39.00) - an excellent screen and web-snap application for Mac OS X Leopard

Acorn (Retail:$49.95) - A photo editor built for the rest of us.

Kinemac (Retail:$299.00)- Real time, professional 3D animator.

WireTap Studio(Retail:$69.00) - Awesome audio recorder, editor, organizer.

BoinxTV (Retail:$199.00)- A TV studio..right on your Mac!

The Hit List (Retail:$69.95) - Simple to use yet powerful task manager for you and your life.

Expresso (Retail:$80.00)- Get your geek on with this complete set of developer tools for the mac.

(Total Retail Cost for all Apps : $950.75)

Plus if you are one of the first 25,000 buyers you get

Big Bang Board Games (Retail:$24.95) - Seven classic board games with a 3D twist.

So that's $975.70 worth of software for $39.00.

Why not go for it? Even if you aren't going to use the software anytime soon, you can find someone who will..and you can donate to a charity of your choice. You can't go wrong!

I've already purchased my bundle, the deal was just way too good to pass up.

Also, if you invite other people to participate, you get two other applications as well. Ill leave those as a surprise for you. BUT if you read this and decide to buy the apps..don't forget to tell them who told you about it!

I'm going to go play World of Goo now.

(Image Courtesy: www.culturefeast.com)

BUS 250 Poo on Ebay

So you all know that I purchased a Blackberry Storm not too long ago. You should know, I posted an entire blog about it! Anyway, upon buying my Blackberry I soon decided that it was pointless to continue to have my iPod touch as it would only be collecting dust. So, I decided to sell it on Ebay..regardless of every voice inside me(yes there are many) screaming not to..I did. I posted my iPod on Ebay at a starting price of $199.99. Which I thought was a decent price since I was selling a lot of accessories with it. About 5 hours before the end of the bidding (the item was listed for 5 days), someone had bid $450 on my auction. MOST people would be like "woohoo look at all my money!" but not me, I'm not that trusting. I did some research and found out that this bidder had been called out multiple times for scamming people..and on top of it all, they were from the UK which I WAS NOT shipping to. So I cancelled the bid and the item ended up not selling. Great..5 days wasted and not a damn thing sold. I WAS just going to sell it to someone I knew since I was aggravated at this point but Ebay sent me an email stating that they would let me relist my item at NO CHARGE. I figured..well..might as well, it's free. So this time I list it for 3 days with a starting bid of $174.99. The auction sold and it was to a person in America who had no negative feedback..nothing about scams anyway. Hurray! Then I get an email from this person telling me that in order for me to get my money, I have to ship the item first. Now...I know some people are gullible...but how many are THAT gullible? I told the person that nothing was being shipped until my money had cleared through Paypal. Since the buyer paid by "eCheck" it took 6 days for the money to clear. That brings us up to (5+3+6=) 11 days since my original posting of my iPod. By now the money has cleared through Paypal. I go into Paypal to see about transferring it to my checking account. Wait...what do I see here? I see my money's status as being "On Hold". What the hell does THAT mean? I read the details and apparently Paypal likes to hold the money of "risky" sellers until the item has been verified delivered or positive feedback is left on Ebay. So..that would bring me to 32 days...just to get my money out of my iPod and that is ONLY if everything goes smoothly. They gave some BS about releasing the funds earlier if the tracking number is put into their system, but from all the comments I read from other users, that rarely happened. By this point I was fed up and I refunded the customer's money and apologized for the inconvenience. I told them if they wanted to give me negative feedback that I didn't care, because I was probably never going to use the service again. On top of all of that garbage, I got an email today from Ebay that politely let me know that I owe them 10 dollars for listing fees on my sold item. I was furious. Paypal is a subsidiary of Ebay, did no one from Paypal alert Ebay that I refunded the buyer's money? No, you know what..forget that, YOU TOLD ME THE LISTING WOULD BE FREE YOU JERKOFFS!!@ I sent them a nice little message letting them know that I was very disappointed with them. Sure, Ebay is great when you are looking to buy something...there is plenty of buying protection in place. When it comes to being a seller though, those protections make it unbearable. I read a comment about one poor fellow who sold something quite large and had to pay out around $300 in shipping. After he shipped the item, Paypal STILL held onto his money and he was out that $300 dollars in the meantime. Even more unfortunate for him, he was hit by a hurricane and had no money to prepare with. Way to go Ebay. Buy and sell on Amazon..it's quicker..there are fewer hoops to jump through..and people seem to be more trustworthy.

(Image Courtesy : www.xomba.com)

BUS 250 Sync your watches..you're on Apple time now sucka!

Ran into an interesting little bug today. We have some G4 iBooks in a cart in our library for the high school students to sign out and use. Thanks to the MLTI "geniuses" who obviously had no clue what I was talking about when I said I needed the image for the HS MLTI I iBooks..I inadvertently put the HS Staff Macbook image on these iBooks. Well..the HS Macbook image is designed to run optimally on Intel Macbooks with 1 gig of ram and a nice speed processor. The OS was Leopard. In a hurry to finish, and without paying attention (mostly because I trusted that Apple gave me the right image) I reimaged all of those laptops and just tossed them in the cart only to find out later what was actually on them..and they ran...but they ran terribly. The poor kids didn't even want to use them and would rather use the computer lab machines. So, I made it my mission to rebuild an image from scratch for them. I finally finished my image which was built on an older version of Mac OS X Tiger. Which is what the iBooks were originally intended to run. Today, after imaging about 6 machines, I noticed that the time was off on them by about 4 hours. I thought this was strange because they were supposed sync with the Apple time server on the internet. After confirming that they did, in fact, sync with the net the obvious next place to look was in the time zone section. Here I found that the computer had managed to glitch out, set itself to GMT and it was stuck there with no other options. After a couple hours of tinkering I discovered that the time settings were stored in a file called localtime. I tried messing with it to get it to give my my time zone options back but it wouldn't work. Eventually, I just pulled an old switcheroo on it. Using terminal and a sudo command I renamed the file to localtime.old and forced the computer to create a new localtime file. Voila..all my options were back. I'm not really sure what caused the glitch..maybe it has something to do with some files from Leopard remaining on the machine during the cloning process? Shouldn't be the case..the disk is supposed to be wiped before it's cloned. I booted up the image I've been using to clone and the time is fine..so the glitch is occurring during the image process. I will have to look at it more tomorrow. In other news..Apple previewed it's 3.0 version of the iPhone OS today. No surprise that it comes with copy/paste functionality and the capability of tethering ..but the kicker was the bluetooth addition. That's right folks..this new OS version can magically turn on the bluetooth radio that has been lying dormant in your phones and iPods all this time. Isn't it awesome to pay for something and still be unable to use it ...at least until Apple says it's okay. It's like sticking a biscuit on a dogs nose and telling it to stay ..then when you snap your fingers ..the dog gobbles up whatever Apple has to say..because it's been waiting so long to get it. I'm just as guilty as the rest of you..but I'm starting to get annoyed by it.
Oh..and if you only have an iPod..be prepared to shell out an extra $10 for the new OS version.

BUS 250 Flashcards and Fisticuffs

The entire educational technology community was in an excited uproar today over the news that grades 7-12 will be getting new macbooks through the MLTI initiative this coming fall. I say will, it is completely optional and it looks as though the cost of the computers will be coming out of the school's EPS money..but in my opinion..and the opinion of many others, it will be worth it. Now it's my job to convince my administrators and the school board of my opinion. Should be fun. In other news, I sat in on another edtechtalk.com seedlings session today and they were interviewing Andrew Sutherland, the creator of quizlet.com. I had never heard of it until today but it is an excellent site. It allows you to not only create flashcards and quiz yourself with them, but it also saves them and makes them publicly searchable. I'm bringing quizlet to the staff tomorrow..we'll see where they go with it. It has been a long day and I can tell I'm getting sick, going to cut this one short. I'm out.
(Image Courtesy of www.computer-choppers.com)

BUS 250 The web boasts many great free applications, now it contains your OS too?

Today was a busy day, but as with any other day, I manage to get my twitter bits posted as I try to keep up with work and stuff people are posting. Just before I went to leave work I noticed that @mrichme posted a tweet about something called g.ho.st. He simply asked if anyone else used it and what they thought, mentioned that it was an online VM type thing. Free..online..those words always peak my interest so I had to check it out. You simply type g.ho.st in your browser(because now we're not required to put the http header in ...the web is smart enough to figure that part out) and away you go. You're taken to a nicely built landing page that tells you a bit about the application and shows you where to sign up. Away I went. The only little hiccup I came across was during the signup process..firefox's addblock pro addon doesn't like this application so I had to disable it. After the signup and signed in and was amazed by what I saw. There in my browser was a fully functional web based operating system. The GUI was very similar to what you'd see on any other OS which made it easy to navigate. From the start you get 5 gb of free online storage which is stored on Amazon's S3 storage network and backed up automatically..also you get 3 gb of email storage. To me..that equals 8 gb of sweet internet storage space. On top of that, for every person you invite..you get an extra gigabyte of storage space. So for all of you who read this..my username is tim.levesque. Go ahead and type that in when you set it up. The g.ho.st team put a lot of thought into making this function like a real OS. It has built in productivity apps, it has a last.fm radio player, games..mail client..basically anything you can think of. It even has its own built in browser. I know, a browser in a browser sounds kind of ..excessive, but when you think about it, it's really not. You use the browser in the online OS and store all of your bookmarks on it and guess what..yep..wherever you have internet access you can sign on to your g.ho.st OS and have access to everything..including those bookmarks. It's an awesome concept and I'm sure I'll find some great uses for it. If not anything else...it's another free 5 gigs of online storage right?
Remember
g.ho.st
my username is tim.levesque
Enjoy!
(Image Courtesy: g.ho.st)

BUS 250 Great..more work to do

Just finished watching the Maine State Governor's state of the State address. There were rumors flying around all day about different things that he may or may not talk about in his speech. One of the big rumors was the injection of MLTI laptops for grades 7-12 in Maine schools. Well, I'm pleased to say that the rumor was true and all HS students will be receiving Apple computers to call their very own. Now, on to the reality..how the HELL am I going to handle this by myself. As it is now I have a hard time getting the laptops that we have done, and now we're going to tack on another 90 or so. I'm not just talking about preparation, you know..like configuring the stock state image and getting it installed on every machine..but also all of the maintenance and care that has to be done year round. I'm planning to graduate from college this semester so that'll free up some time but man..there are a lot of other things that come into play here. My network is currently only a class C network..that means 254 clients. I'm running low on IP addresses as it is. This means I'm going to have to have my network upgraded..and anything with static IPs will have to be reconfigured. This includes servers..airports..wireless routers..routers..switches...ugh the list goes on and on. I usually like to be prompt and get things to the students right when they enter school..this year..they may not see anything until October. As excited as I am for the kids..and to have the technology..I'm not excited about the death sentence that the governor just laid down on me. urgh
(Image Courtesy: studywiz.mlti.org)

Her name is Helen A.S. Popkin and she calls us twitterers narcissistic?

Even if I DID have two middle names..or a middle name and two last names...or whatever it takes in order to warrant two initials between my first and last name..I wouldn't be narcissistic enough to include them in my periodicals..

So I was annoyed by the article this woman wrote..had to do a write up on it for a class, decided to put it on my blog..to share my anger with the world. Because..you know.. I love myself.


...........................................................................................................................................................................

In this article, MSNBC writer Helen A.S. Popkin decides to share with the world her dislike of the application Twitter. Now, I understand that everyone should be able to step up onto the soapbox and say their piece about whatever they like but, the least the naysayers can do before they start their denouncement of something, is to at least educate themselves of the pros and cons beforehand. What kind of a name is Helen A.S. Popkin anyway? That’s right Helen, I hate your name and I don’t care where you inherited it from! Anyway, dear Helen decides to go off on a tirade about her dislike for the web application Twitter, stating all her thick-witted reasons, letting us all know that she is in no way interested in anyone else’s lives and she goes on to inform us that Twitter is a huge waste of time. She calls Twitter a narcissist magnet and likens it to “texting while driving”. Well Helen, I liken you to that guy I met at Verizon Wireless today who didn’t comprehend why he couldn’t get his 4 free phones without signing up for a plan. Yeah, he didn’t have all the information necessary to make any kind of educated judgement and neither do you.

In case you haven’t noticed, I’m a huge fan of Twitter. This is not because I’m a narcissist, nor do I feel that texting while driving is a past-time that anyone should pursue. Twitter, like any other social medium on the internet, is only going to be as good as you make it. The greatest thing about Twitter is you only receive updates from people that you follow. That’s right Helen, all those narcissistic people that you are discussing, those would be the people YOU chose to follow. Twitter is so much more than a “drive by comment”.

I started using Twitter early on this year just to see what all the fuss was about. One day I was participating in a live podcast recording called “EdTechTalk” where technology directors throughout the state come together and talk about different issues and subjects, usually regarding technology, that people coming across in education today. Near the end of the show everyone started handing out their Twitter usernames to keep in touch with one another. I didn’t have one, so I made one really quickly and exchanged it with a few people. From there my followings/followers grew and soon enough I was connected with quite a few professionals in my field from all across the country who I could bat around ideas and problems with. Since then I’ve used Twitter as a tool. On more than one occasion someone has come across an excellent new piece of software or a useful new web app and shared it on Twitter for everyone to see. Things like Dropbox, Virtualbox, Windows 7 beta test downloads..and even an excellent seed program that Acer started up that allowed schools to try out their netbooks and new desktops. The best part about Twitter is it works on YOUR time. Unlike instant messaging, you don’t need to be present for the messages to come through. People blog throughout the day and then when you have time you can read what has been posted. It is also more convenient than email because you don’t need to address your blogs to everyone, the people who follow you will read them at their leisure. Twitter, and other applications like it, are excellent collaboration tools and should be taken more seriously. There are many excellent way to put the application to use, some of which I’m sure haven’t even been thought of yet.

So, in conclusion, to say that Twitter is “juvenile” or that it is simply a place for people to feed their narcissistic needs is just uncultivated ignorance. Just because the writer of the article has yet to find an excusable (at least in their mind) use of the application, that doesn’t mean that they have the right to tear down everyone who does. And yeah, I saw the blurb at the end of the article saying that “it has its place” but you can tell what general ambiance the writer was shooting for here. I guess the simplest response to this would be, who cares if people write about themselves on Twitter, you’re not forced to follow them are you?

(Image Courtesy : www.aoddesign.com)

BUS 250 "I'd like a slice of crackberry pie please.."

I begin my story with a trip to my parent's house. I had a few hours to kill so I decided to go visit my mom, sister and niece at my mom's house in Washburn. As I was walking through the living room I glanced something out of the corner of my eye. It looked like a Verizon logo..but...Verizon hasn't performed the switch-over yet..had they?
Not only was I excited about the Verizon logo on the box but I was completely overjoyed when I saw the label on the box that read "Blackberry Storm". When I say overjoyed, I am not exaggerating in the least bit. I literally pipped a squeak of happiness and said "ooooooo" out loud. Upon questioning my sister's boyfriend(And I did..I questioned him like a lawyer who hasn't won a case in years) I found out that Verizon is currently performing switches for customers who buy new phones and request it. I remembered seeing the "Buy one get one free" deal on the Blackberry Storm..so I had to check it out. After playing with my sister's boyfriend's phone for a while, I was hooked. Also, while playing with it, I noticed something else...it had a signal! I've NEVER been able to get a signal in Washburn. I instantly called Alyssa to tell her what I had discovered. She wasn't as excited as I was, of course she had yet to play with the phone itself. So, being the good tech nerd I am, I decided to do some digging, read some reviews and go over every single detail of the phone. Slowly but surely, I became more and more impressed with it and in the process managed to convince Alyssa that it would be a good move to buy these now since they are normally $599.99 retail and with the BOGO deal you can get two for $150. We ended up getting two, and the monthly cost (with the unlimited data plan) is only slightly higher than what we were paying for both of our crappy cell phones. So let me get down to the details of this thing and explain why I just had to have it..
Its official title is the BlackBerry Storm 9350 but I like to call it the crackberry. Mostly because I've yet to put the thing down since I purchased it. Both Alyssa and I have an iPod touch..we bought these in lieu of the iPhones we are unable to get in this area. Let me put it this way, we love our crackberries so much..we've barely touched our iPods since we bought them. The first noticable thing about the Storm is that it is the first touch screen BlackBerry on the market. Its screen is comparable to the size of the iPhone and the iPod but it also has a couple extras. The resolution is higher AND it uses a "SurePress" technology that allows you to actually "Click" the screen so you have that tactile and auditory confirmation that whatever you are touching is actually being selected. This is much better than the iPhone/iPod..I never really knew what was being selected ..until I saw that I had mistyped it in the email that I had already sent. So ..just by clicking the screen once..I knew I was in love.
The next great feature was the ability to highlight and copy/paste. OH MY GOD! Copy and paste? Who'd have thought that you could do that on a touch device? Certainly not Apple. They apparently didn't think it was pertinent to include the most basic of features on their iPhone. This was really the thing that sold me. The Storm also gives you control of other things as well...like your file system. I believe that if you own a device you should be able to control what you do with it, where things go and what they do. Apple's devices lock down the entire file system, you have no control over anything but the order of the icons on your screen. The Storm allows you to create folders, move files around, copy, paste and pretty much gives you full control over everything. On top of all this it gives you great email and messaging capability, voice dialing that integrates seamlessly with your contacts. You don't even have to train it. You get a full fledged GPS service..internet browsing..and many other things..for less than the cost of an iPod. The best part is, you get to use Verizon's high speed EV-DO 3G network which gives you internet speeds comparable to basic home broadband..and you have it anywhere you get a signal. All of this combined with the little things like the 3.2 MP camera with a flash..the amazing battery life(I had 12 + hours on it just messing around..and it was still about 1/3 full when I put it on the charger) and the easy to use calendar..the only thing it's missing is Apple's flashiness and need to control everything you do..as well as make you pay for it. I'm currently selling my iPod on Ebay if anyone is interested. Crackberry Storm..ILU.

Oh..and if you decide to buy one, DO NOT shell out for the VZ navigator or text messaging. They want 9.99 a month for either of them and you can just go home and download Google Latitude for free to get the GPS service. Same service..better maps. Actually, the service from Google is better because you can share locations with friends and family. Also..when you buy a BlackBerry you get a free BlackBerry account that you can use with BlackBerry messanger. That coupled with Windows Messanger, AIM, Yahoo Messanger and Google Chat..you can pretty much talk to anyone for free over the broadband connection..why pay for SMS and Texting?


(Image Courtesy : www.techfresh.net)

BUS 250 "I know what you did last browsing session"

Yesterday I was introduced to a new firefox addon called Webmynd. Thanks to @rmbyrne on Twitter for this one. Webmynd is an excellent tool that records every website your visit and saves a virtual copy of it to your hard drive. The greatest part is it doesn't just save an image or the URL of the site but it actually saves an HTML copy of the actual working page. This way you can go back in and review the website with full browsing capabilities later. You have the ability to turn recording on and off at any time by using the control located in the lower right hand corner of your browser window and there are different recording options to choose from. All of this is great because you don't have to spend all that time tagging and bookmarking sites that you want to revisit later on. Webmynds records them in the background and allows you to do a quick search later to find it again. Also, as an added bonus..it allows you to completely personalize the entire right hand side of your google searches with wikipedia, flickr..or whatever websites you choose. The basic firefox addon is free of charge. This allows you to keep a week's worth of history. 6 months worth of history is $10 and a year's worth is $20. The reason for the charge is because they actually index all of your history on one of their servers online. This increases costs for them but reduces the load on your own personal computer.
I suggest checking it out.
In other news, I messed my leg up last night and bought a new Blackberry Storm..more on that stuff later.

(Image Courtesy: http://abductit.com/)

BUS 250 A day like today rarely happens...

To the left of this sentence is a photo of the Apple Time Capsule. Supposedly this little device makes backup and restoration of your computer data a breeze. Up until today, I would have agreed with that. I spent the majority of my day today remotely controlling the school nurse's macbook, trying to force the damn thing to backup to this Time Capsule. I blame the Time Capsule, but actually, it is the Time Machine software that is causing the problem. No matter what I did, this thing would NOT create a sparsebundle that would stick around on the Time Capsule. I could see it trying to create it, but there were errors all over the system logs and eventually it just gave up and told me it wasn't going to happen. I tried deleting the sparsebundle, renaming the local network name on the macbook and starting a completely new backup..nothing worked. Eventually I had to give up. I've now got a choice in front of me, reformat the computer and try again..or..calling Apple tech support. You'd think the obvious choice would be the latter..but the majority of the Apple tech team hasn't a clue how our MLTI program works, nor do they have any idea of what kind of restrictions have been placed on our OS's. The MLTI division of Apple is no help either..as they do not support the use of Time Machine or Time Capsule on MLTI machines. Lame. I will probably just end up backing her stuff up the old fashioned way, reformatting it and then resetting the backup on the Time Capsule. It was working fine before and something changed..unfortunately there's no way of telling what.
Also, the rootkit won. I've tried everything imaginable to remove this thing from the operating system. Three rootkit scans with different programs and 2 malwarebytes antimalware scans. Nothing is working. Again, I'm going to have to suggest a format. I hate formatting machines but I don't feel as bad when the threat of identity theft or the theft of personal information is present.
Okay..going to go read to the little one now, good night all.

(Image Courtesy: http://images.appleinsider.com)

BUS COM 250 ..just a small one

I'm just going to write a small post today as I am tired. After some regrouping with myself I tackled the evil rootkit computer once more today. This time my tactic was a bit different. I ended up taking the hard drive out of the computer, tossing it into an external enclosure and running the scan from a non-vital PC on the external drive. I left work at 5:30 and the scan was STILL running. Elapsed time was something like 6 hours and 40 minutes when I left. I will win this battle. Another battle I had today was with Mac OS X's time machine. Time machine is the software included on Tiger and Leopard that allows you to perform time stamped automatic backups onto an external storage device which can be either directly connected or networked. It works best with a device called "Time Capsule" which is basically an Airport with a built in hard drive. You can find information on Time Machine here and Time Capsule here. Anyway, we have 22 macbooks and a wireless network and I thought it would be a good choice for a simple backup/restore system. It seems to have a few nasty bugs here and there though. Today a staff member's macbook would NOT back up at all. It would go all the way through the back up and then just say it failed..and it wouldn't even go as far as to place a log in the console for me to look at. 3 hours of fiddling and I realized that it was a corrupted sparsebundle ..I ended up having to change the local computer name in sharing, deleting the old sparsebundle and creating a whole new backup from scratch. Apple...please work out these kinks..the whole point of a backup is for reliability..doesn't make much sense for me to delete an entire backup just so it can continue backing up..does it?
Off to make dinner now.

BUS COM 250 "This computer doesn't have a virus..it has contracted the plague"

Well here I am, back from vacation! I wish I could say I am as ecstatic as the exclamation point indicates but, I am not. Winter vacation was far from uneventful as has been the past couple of years. Alyssa I and went to Bangor and stayed at the Hollywood Slots hotel. We decided to hit up the casino where Alyssa, with her last 12 dollars, managed win double our money back. We went to the Texas Roadhouse..which I love and we also found an awesome deal on Microsoft Office 2007 at the Circuit City liquidation. Bought two copies for 45 dollars each which have already sold on Ebay for twice that. Don't judge me for taking advantage of a liquidation either, poorly run companies SHOULD suffer. What else..oh, we bought a new 46 inch Sony Bravia LCD TV for our living room, it's pretty sweet. My Xbox died again, had to send it in for repairs. Oh..yeah..and I got engaged! :) Over vacation Alyssa and I scoured every jewlery store within 200 miles and I ended up buying her ring on 02/17/09, proposed on 02/18/09 at Napoli's in Caribou. Since she picked the ring out, she obviously loved it..and me for not being an idiot and picking out something she would hate. We plan on getting married soonish, we plan on taking a cruise, at least that was the last plan:)
Okay, now down to business. I returned to work on Tuesday thanks to the fun little snowstorm we had on Sunday/Monday, only to be inundated with strange little issues. Somehow our Administrative secretary managed to update the Maine State Retirement figures in her accounting system not once..but four times. Each update applying itself to the previous update and therefore giving everyone a nice huge retirement sum. I was called upon to restore the previous tables from backup. No problem right? Wrong. Our accounting system is DOS based..so..yeah..I had to actually compare file modification dates and update individual DOS files. Took a good 2 hours. Once I was done with that, I received a computer in my office that was doing some funny stuff. First it was mentioned that a spyware scan kept starting itself and it kept nagging them to download and install this software that it recommended. So, my first thought was "great, another antivirus 2009". Wrong. It was something called System Security. I originally had pointed the user to a place on the web where it listed step-by-step instructions to remove most malware, including antivirus 2009. The user told me that she couldn't install Malwarebytes antimalware as instructed. She said that it would close the second she tried to install it. I found this a bit strange so I decided to take a look myself. Not only would it close anything you tried to install, whether it be malwarebytes, avira antivir..or any other antivirus...it wouldn't let you uninstall anything. Also, if you tried searching for anything related to malware removal..it would close your browser. Nasty little bugger. I'm still fighting with it. I've tried everything I can think of, including a rescue cd provided by Avira that works by booting into a linux OS included on the disc and running the scan from there. It found some stuff but didn't really help much. I'm afriad this may call for a reformat. Sad part is, it was all caused by uneducated computer users playing around on the internet without a care in the world. I could tell the second that I looked at the computer that they download anything that flies in front of their faces. One of the malware programs I found is attached to an opened mail message...so that tells me that they open email attachments from people they don't know. Adaware and spybot were both last updated in may of 2008. That was when I worked on the computer last. Antivirus..well..I couldn't check it because it wouldn't run at all. At first I felt bad telling the user that the computer would probably have to be reformatted and they would lose all of their stuff...but...after seeing how they've been using it...I'm hoping it'll turn into a learning experience for them. I took the time to explain safe internet practices and recommend good preventative maintenance software. Lets see if they put the advice to good use.

UPDATE: So I've discovered that I'm dealing with a rootkit..mass password change and reformat here we come!


(Image Source: http://blog.fotogenia.info)

BUS COM 250 Journal Entry "Big Brother isn't only watching..he has hit record"

Today, the topic of the day was ediscovery. Lucky for those of us in the IT world, the federal government decided to update the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure to better suit our legal system in this "digital age". Basically, we're required to archive, backup and maintain all electronic information. This includes email, instant messaging and even includes websites visited in some extreme cases. If the e-documents that were requested aren't provided the institution could be subject to things like monetary fines, sanctions and beyond that, could even affect the outcome of a court case. One example would be a superintendent of a school district who was busted for surfing child porn at work. The IT staff were smart enough to keep a log of all the websites that users visited. Bad news is, they didn't cache the websites and when the judge asked them to prove that the website was child porn (it had been taken down and was a godaddy placeholder when the judge looked at it) they couldn't do it. The superintendent got his job back and is still working in the district. So..adverse court rulings, that's a pretty big reason to comply. The sad part is, no one understands the full complexity of the issue of non-compliance and since it's such a huge job to tackle, no one wants to face it either. I've been trying to rally the state technology directors and coordinators to get our ISP, who services over 80% of the schools in the state, to comply with this. They want us to do all the legwork even though it is their legal responsibility to comply. I tried to get together some support, and the ISP even offered to facilitate a working group for us to come together and plan a solution, but I believe they did this because they think nothing will come of it. Realistically, how impossible is it going to be to get all of the tech directors together at one time to discuss anything? We're all too busy to even sleep most of the time. So today, in a desperate move, I decided to corner our superintendent for a few minutes to explain the issue to him and see what his take was on it. Thankfully he's going to contact the school attourney and find out how serious the issue really is for us..and he will back me in pushing the ISP to provide a solution if necessary. But man..the appliances that people are selling to take care of e-mail archiving and internet content record alone..the prices are unreal! I was looking at a model that topped out at 500 gb of space. They want $50,000 to purchase it and then $20,000 per year for support and maintenance. WHAT?! It's basically a glorified packet sniffer with a hard drive attached to it ..the thing your paying the most for is the application that they've created that saves the captured packets and leaves them in a user-friendly state for later reference and retrieval. $50,000? They know schools are becoming desperate to comply and I'll bet $50,000 that some schools are paying this outrageous price too. I'll keep you updated on my crusade to archive every piece of electronic media in the state educaitonal system...if you want to read more about ediscovery, google it, you will find plenty to keep you busy.
I'm going to end with a gripe. Sorry folks, but I have to get it out somewhere. Let me toss a question at you. What do you do with a user who refuses to learn. It's not that they CAN'T learn, I know better. It's a complete refusal. It has to be. I've instructed this person numerous times, taking a different approach each time. They've even sat through a 3 hour instruction by yours truly on basic file management. Yet they keep doing the same things wrong, over and over. They keep blaming the issues on the computer instead of themselves and I'm pretty much at the end of my rope when it comes to patience. I've gone as far as to suggest to their superior that they take college classes. I don't know what else I can do, but I may flip out if I keep getting spammed with mail bouncebacks and things like "I don't know where I saved that file to, I don't think the computer saved it right". Any suggestions? I believe I've done all I can do.
In other news, we're getting a new TV, my Xbox broke..going on number 3, and I really need a vacation...from the county.

Photo Courtesy : Here

BUS COM 250 Journal Entry "I'm afraid I can't let you play that, Tim"

So many things to blog about, where to start. Lets start with the good stuff, I'll move to the bad stuff, then I'll float on over to the thing I'm kinda indifferent about.
Firstly, Alyssa and I made a super cool purchase this week. We ordered a new TV. Yay. We ordered a 46 inch Sony Bravia LCD TV, 1080p..all the HD goodness you can handle. We did our research before we bought this TV, unlike the last one and we decided to order it from Walmart because the price was a cheaper one than in-house and also because the salesfolk at Sears ticked me off with their multiple sales pitches of their damned Sear's credit cards. No sir..I do not want the credit card of a company that seems to be going bankrupt in the near future. No thank you. So the TV will be here by the 19th. That's the good news. We, in our old age had decided to purchase a new TV because we could no longer see the 32 inch TV we have now. You know...ocular degeneration..all that. Even though our TV is nice, it was completely an impulse purchase. When Alyssa bought my Xbox 360 for me, we went to hook it up to our old RCA CRT TV, and I said..you know..we really should hook this up to an HD TV. So, we went out and bought the first decent HD TV we could find at 8 pm on a Friday night. It has lasted through the years, and is still in excellent shape, we plan on moving it up into our bedroom. Something that HASN'T lasted through the years though, would be the Xbox 360. Here comes the bad.
I will begin with a story that took place last year. I had recently purchased the game that the world was raving about, "Halo 3" and was excited to play the crap out of it. I played it for a few hours the day I got it but had to get back to my responsibilities..you know, life, so I ended up having to come back to it a few days later. I had a whole day of gaming planned out, I had my meals planned, my breaks, had all the friends gathered..couldn't have been more perfect of a Saturday. I remember, I was bouncing around trying to keep myself from being run over by a Ghost (if you don't know what that is, you need to play Halo) when suddenly all the landscape turned green and the rest of the screen into other funky colors. Odd. I repair things for a living and have learned not to panic when things don't work properly...even if it happened to be one of my most prized possessions. I restarted the Xbox, completely confident that everything would return to normal, convincing myself that it was just a glitch. My Xbox never came back on. After a huge fight with Microsoft, and $100 later, I ended up sending it away to be fixed because of some GPU issue. The Xbox they sent back however, was not the one I sent to them. Different serial numbers and different MAC addresses ( I use MAC filtering on my network). So, either I got a refurb or a new Xbox..hurray for me right? Wrong. Fast forward to last night. Alyssa and I enjoy the show "Hell's Kitchen" and I had downloaded an episode for us to watch. We stream almost everything to the Xbox so we can watch it on our TV. I pressed the power button on my remote..I couldn't wait to see Gordon Ramsay rip these chefs a new one...then I saw it. The thing that all Xbox owners fear..
The three red LEDs of doom.
The indication of hardware failure.
The thing Microsoft had to pay billions to fix.
The issue that over 1/3 of all of the Xbox 360's have.
Yep...it happened to me.
I've shipped it off, and since we have no cable and our Xbox is our media center, we have no TV.
Best part is, next week is vacation. We'll have our new TV..but I won't have my xbox back for 3-6 weeks. So..there's a good chance we'll have a new TV but no way to watch anything on it. Curse you Microsoft.
Finally, before I eat my dinner, I would like to mention my plan for storage and back up for the staff in my district next fall. This year, for storage purposes, I issued every staff member a 1GB jumpdrive. Based on average storage, this seemed to be an adequate amount for each of them. However, most seem to be too irresponsible to keep track of the jumpdrives, and some have gotten into creating/editing videos..and working with larger files. My plan for next fall will be to work Dropbox into the image. Get everyone signed up with an account, and then just have them use that for storage. Best part about it, it backs up to the cloud automatically..and they can sync it with other machines. It's just an idea but it IS more storage than they currently have..and right now I know they're not backing up much of it. Thing is, I need free options, at least until my budget comes out of the ice age...yeah.."deep freeze" were the words that were used the last time we discussed the budget.
Anyway, my Tuscana soup is done..Alyssa rules. Later folks

Picture Courtesy : Here

BUS COM 250 Journal Entry - "Education for the educators"

Another short post, as I'm tired and have to get up super early tomorrow for my PD presentations. Today I spent the majority of my day finishing up a presentation on our webmail system, tossed in some internet safety guidelines along with my other presentation on digital citizenship. I'm proud of the work I've done on all of these presentations, they're all informative and I think they'll do well to educate the staff on all the things that I think that they are lacking in..technologically speaking. So, I'm probably going to run over my time for my section of the PD but I had a hard time cutting things out to make it fit. I'll just have a discussion with the principal beforehand to make sure that's it's cool if I run over a bit. Even though I've been instructed that digital citizenship and internet safety are not "things that the teachers can bring back to their classroom and use", I believe that they are a fundemental foundation to using technology responsibly and appropriately. I may bore them to death, but I hope they take some valuable information away from it. In other news, I went engagement ring shopping today..and Alyssa and I decided to buy eachother a new 46 inch tv for Valentine's day. Hooray! Tired, time for bed. Internet safety..ensure you and your children are protecting yourselves out there on the net! www.netsmartz.org. Check it out..have your kids check it out. Good night.

BUS COM 250 Journal Entry "Back to the basics"

For the first time since I've started my career as a Technology Director, I've been requested to work on a Saturday. After nearly 3 years of working the same schedule and having all of my weekends off, Saturday has become almost like a religious holiday for me..I was almost stupified when they asked me to work this one. It's a teacher inservice day, a make-up from one lost to a snow storm. No, I'm not a teacher, so why do I have to go? Well, let me answer that for you. The staff of the Elementary school decided to nominate Technology as their topic for professional development. So, in essence..they nominated me to facilitate the workshops for them. At first I paniced a little, I had no clue what I would talk about. I decided that digital citizenship would be an excellent topic so I got to work putting together a nice presentation on it. A few days later, I was working on our Student Information System..and a teacher came in and literally asked me if I could copy and paste something for her. I was kinda stunned that they didn't know how, but I'm accomodating and decided that even though I couldn't leave the work I was doing, I would write down instructions for them. I wrote the instructions and then sent them on their way. Not even 10 minutes later, they came back in. In the instructions I wrote "Open Microsoft Word". They were stuck there. They didn't know how to open Microsoft Word. I realized right then that we had a huge problem. Today I spent a few hours putting together a detailed and easy to follow presentation covering computer basics. Included were things like "this is a megabyte" all the way up to file management. When I see these teachers struggling with what I consider simple tasks, I sometimes have a hard time believing what I'm seeing. Let me tell you though, after putting this presentation together, I got to look at things froma different point of view. I can easily see now that if no one had ever stopped to show these folks anything, and if they didn't spend a lot of time geeking out, as I do...that these tasks that we computer nerds find so menial..could actually be difficult for those who are "old-school" as they say. I hope my presentation helps.

From now on, I'm going to try to get my blog posts done earlier in the day, this way I'm not half asleep while writing them. Sorry for the hurried posts, gotta get my message out before my face hits the keyboard and I start snoring.
Good night all.

Photo Courtesy: Amazon

BUS COM 250 Journal Entry - "Oh how you move me"

Today was another uneventful day, so I decided to do something I hadn't had time to do. The head cook in our elementary school cafeteria has been working on an old Pentium II 450 computer at least, since I had started working in Easton. She desperately needed a new machine and I finally had the means to give her one. There was one small problem..the entire Nutrikids system was located on that computer. This includes her menu programs and the database. Being familiar with Windows programs I knew there was no way to just drag and drop anything, since Windows installations usually drop files in the system folders and have registry entries, you know..things to make your life more complicated. This is why I love Macs so much..applications are so neatly packaged and you can just copy and paste them from one place to another...so nice. Anyway, I remembered working with this program called "PC-Mover" when I was a tech at Staples. I used it to move data and applications from some older computers at the Presque Isle water district over to some new Vista machines that they had purchased. It worked beautifully. It copied over everything I instructed it to, all the linked dlls and system files, registry entries..everything. It was all put in its proper place on the new OS and everything worked perfectly. So, I figured I'd give it a try again. Aside from having to clear some space to hook the computers up side by side, everything went well. Only after hooking the machines up next to eachother with the USB bridging cable did I realize that I could have performed the move over my network..wish it said that on the box somewhere! Anyway, now she has a new computer..the lunch program is still intact..and the kiddos will be having their chicken nuggets tomorrow.
I give PC-Mover two thumbs way up for making my life 100 times easier.

Photo Courtesy : Laplink Software

BUS COM 250 Journal Entry- "Don't Cut the Blue Wire.."

Short blog post since nothing super exciting happened today. First off, I would like to say that all teachers should be heavily screened for stupidity before being allowed near our children. Also, I believe that whoever hires any teacher who is deemed an idiot after said hiring, should be held accountable and fired along with the teacher. Case and point: Click Me. I don't know, maybe I'm being too harsh..maybe she's not a moron and she just doesn't understand that posting something like that on a public site where almost anyone can see it...COULD..possibly come back and bite her in the hind-quarters. I've seen many cases of people using the internet improperly and sharing information where they shouldn't. The internet is a public place people, email is considered a public document..would you stand up on a soapbox on the street corner in Presque Isle and yell obscinities about your boss? No..well...why would you say it on Facebook where everyone can read it? Use your head.
Work was pretty uneventful today. There was a little bit of a mix up with a library computer that hosts our Accelerated Reader program. Two blue ethernet cables were running really close together so the ed tech who was doing the trouble shooting for me yesterday ( I was sick at home) assumed that they were the same cable and told me that the computers were connected with a blue cable. I thought that was odd..assumed someone had been messing with my gear. Upon looking at it today, yeah..two separate cables and the whole reason there was a problem with the computer to begin with was because I had inadvertantly deleted its MAC address from my network management db so it wasn't picking up an IP address. Oops!
A pretty ho hum day over all. I did take a look at the Acer contest that I'm entered in, we're in line to receive 30 Veriton desktops and 30 Aspire One netbooks if we're one of the three schools chosen. That'd be nice...especially since my budget is frozen and I'm not allowed to buy new ...anything. I'm so tired of scavenging old computers to fix the LESS old computers. Ugh:P
Have a good night.

BUS COM 250 Journal Entry. "Thank you for calling Fairpoint Communications.."

By now everyone has probably heard something about the Fairpoint fiasco but I'm going to run the entire thing down for you anyway, from start to finish. I woke up this morning feeling ill so I made the decision to stay home and work today. One of my morning rituals is to scan the email archive for any suspicious messages, like from the students, or things like bounce errors. You know, just doing my part to make sure everything is running like it's supposed to. I was scrolling down through the emails, sipping on my chicken soup..and yes..it's okay to have chicken soup at 8 am. I came across a bounce message from Verizon, not a common occurance so I took a closer look. A teacher had sent a message to the easton rec dept. and the mail server sent a message back saying that the message was refuse by the mail server due to abuse. How odd. I know our mail server isn't blacklisted for spam anywhere. I noticed something a bit funky about this message as well..apparently Verizon's mail server had attempted to forward the message on to a fairpoint server which then rejected the message from Verizon's server, saying it was spam. Great..a server battle royale! In the mean time, no one's receiving their email. I called up MSLN to see if they had any other reports but the 1st tier tech guy I spoke to hadn't heard anything, so he escalated my issue and sent it to the upper tier. A few minutes later I receive a call from Doretta, the "2nd in command" so to speak, telling me that she had a similar issue over the weekend and it seems to be a problem with Fairpoint. Little did either of us know, how big the problem really was. A friend of mine runs an ISP here and his entire mail system was killed. Apparently Fairpoint, in their switch over..had taken control of my friend's ISP's IP pool..and didn't properly forward DNS to his servers..so basically, Fairpoint highjacked his network. Poor guy was up for 20 hours straight the last I had talked to him. The problems have hit thousands upon thousands of people in Maine, Vermont and NH. You can read about the issues here.
I feel bad for everyone that this screw up has had an effect on. This is the perfect example of what NOT to do when you head into the IT business. It gives everyone an excellent idea of what can happen with improper planning, lack of experience and lack of knowledge in a certain area. I spent most of my day fielding phone calls and handing out free tech support on DSLreports.com because I felt bad for all the poor folks that had been left stranded with no support and no options. You couldn't even call Fairpoint to talk to tech support for the majority of the day..you just got a busy signal. The scariest part of the entire situation is, they even messed up the 911 system. 911! Hasn't anyone over at Fairpoint heard of TESTING things before putting them into action? I don't know who is responsible for everything that has gone down, but someone had BETTER be fired for this. There is no excuse. I leave you with this. Funny..yet frightening. Good night all.

BUS COM 250 Journal Post

Let me start by saying that I love my job and that I'm grateful to have it. Not everyone gets the chance to work in a job they really love and get a decent compensation for it at the same time. If you came to me a few years ago and told me I would be a Tech Director for a school system, I probably would have laughed at you but I've grown a little since then. One of the best things about my job, other than being able to geek out and get paid for it, is the social network that I instantly became a part of when I was hired. Through different mediums such as listservs and Twitter, I am constantly connect to dozens of like-minded individuals who all work in education in some manner. I have come to rely on these individuals as a source of support when I need it as well as an invaluable source of research and information. No one can know everything, but everyone can know a little about something. When we all collaborate and share what we learn, it makes us all more knowledgeable in our professions. This brings me to my subject, the Acer Aspire One netbook. I am a religious user of Twitter. Twitter, in case you don't know, is one of the world's most popular microblogging apps. It's completely free and lets you communicate simply and quickly with anyone you like. Anyway, one day Dave Trask, a colleague of mine from Vasselboro, Maine, posted an offer from Acer onTwitter. Apparently Acer was offering free trials of their new Acer Aspire One netbook to educational institutions. The best part about the free trial is, once your 30 day trial is up, you have the option to purchase the netbook at a nicely reduced cost. On top of all of that, by participating in the offer, you automatically enter your school in a contest to win a new lab's worth of computers! How could I turn that offer down? Especially when all you needed to do to participate was fill out a short application and field a couple of phone calls from Acer? It was the perfect opportunity for me to test out a netbook, which I had been wanting to do for a while..without actually having to purchase one! Well, the netbook arrived yesterday and here's a quick run-down of the machine's specs:

Aspire® OA150-1126 Netbook

• Intel® Atom™ Processor N270
(512KB L2 cache, 1.60GHz, 533MHz FSB)
• Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition
• 1GB DDR2 533 SDRAM
• 160GB hard drive
• Multi-in-one card reader
• SD Card reader
• 8.9" WSVGA (1024 x 600) TFT display,
Acer CrystalBrite Technology
• Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950
• 802.11b/g WLAN, 10/100 LAN, webcam

I've got PCs running in my school that have worse specs than the netbook. I've been using it for two days now..and I've got to say, I'm impressed. The first thing that impressed me was the combination of size AND usability. I have an iPod touch, which is a full fledged computer in its own right, but I've had some issues with usability as most people do with devices of a small size. I was worried that the keyboard would be impossible to type on and the screen may be difficult to see. After about 10 minutes of use, I found my worries drifting away. The keyboard is nicely designed, the keys are curved and typing is easy. The screen is just big enough that you don't need to squint to see it, but people fighting off ocular degeneration may need some specticles. I am using the netbook to type this blog post right now and I haven't had a problem yet. As you can see in the specs it comes with Windows XP preinstalled, which runs beautifully on this hardware. It boots quickly and programs are snappy when they're loading.
The battery life is astounding! It makes every other laptop, even the Macs, look like power-hungry fiends. Just as an example, when I pulled the netbook out of the box and started it up, I didn't bother charging the battery. It was about half charged when I powered it on and I then used the laptop for 4 hours straight before deciding to plug it in. It's now fully charged and I will have to update you on how long the full battery lasts. Amazing.
They also did an excellent job designing the mouse software. They built in a copycat type of Mac-like multi-touch support, like the pinch to zoom in..etc.
The whole laptop weighs about a pound and a half to two pounds WITH the battery. It's small enough to fit into a woman's purse. We verified this when our HS secretary thought it be funny to try to sneak off with it in hers.
The only gripe I have with the netbook..and it's the same gripe I've had with ANY commercially crafted computer...is crapware.
Crapware is all that garbage software that they decide to load on the machine before shipping it..that no one EVER wants.
The crapware on this machine was particularly bad, because it was McAfee Security Suite. I classify McAfee as crapware because, in my opinion, it's one of the worst security suites in existence. It completely takes over your machine and you usually have to have a PHD in McAfee to figure out how to get it back. So, obivously the first thing I did when I received the machine was uninstall McAfee. And, being experienced with crappy security suites, I looked up the correct uninstall procedure ..and followed it to the letter. Everything SEEMED to go smoothly..until I tried to connect to my wireless network. My wireless adapter was being funky..it would try to grab its connection info from the DHCP server but then it would fail and give me the "Limited or no connectivity" error. Well..the macbook sitting right next to me said that my wireless network was fine..I knew it was the computer. I tried a few different things before I remembered..oh..McAfee was on here. I went into the startup programs and turn off a few processes that I didn't recognize..restarted and VOILA..my connection was up and running. It took about 20-30 minutes overall..but that is way more time than anyone should spend getting a brand new computer onto a wireless network.
Oh, and there isn't any optical drive in the netbook at all. This saddened me for a moment, and then I realized that I hardly use optical drives for anything anymore..and anything that can fit on an optical drive can fit on a jumpdrive..and if it's absolutely necessary to boot from a CD/DVD for any reason...Magicdisc will work fine for me.
End gripe.

Overall this netbook looks, performs and feels like a nice sturdy machine. It makes me wonder why technology couldn't have been a couple years ahead of its time ..so I could have had this through college, instead of lugging that giant laptop with me the whole time. I think if I add some more ram to this thing, I could use it on a regular basis.

One last thing..did you guys hear about the new 32 Gb RAM modules that were created by Samsung? Holy crap! I won't be able to afford them anytime soon but...it's nice to think about all that RAM. I could find no use for that much RAM in a workstation at this point in time but man..some server jockeys must be drooling over that right about now:)
You can find the article on it here.



Photo Courtesy of Gizmodo.com