Year: 2012 Page 3 of 14

I am not alone

On October 9, 2012

The most important gift the internet ever gave me was I am not alone.

I grew up in a small town of 2,000 people with only 12,000 in the entire county. I went to high school with about 160 people in my class and around 550 in the entire school.

It was a small, rural place. I grew up on a farm and I’ve herded cows, collected hay bails and pitched them onto trailers and into barns. I’ve lived around animals most of my life and I’ve always had a vast fantasy life.

When the internet came around, my curiosity overwhelmed me. I wanted to connect with people like me. I knew there must be people like me.

There must be sensitive, kind, caring poets in the world who wanted to make the world better. There must be people out there who worked for the common good. There must be others who wore their heart on their sleeve, didn’t like to drink, do drugs or go to parties. There were the quiet ones who loved to talk and think and do interesting things with their time and lives.

There must be people I could look to for advice and help. There must be people out there who thought like I did and lived inside their heads, thinking great thoughts and had exciting ideas.

There was a future out there and it was through a 26,400bps modem.

And it was my job to find it.

The internet taught me there are people out there like me. There are people out there like all of us.

No matter how alone or weird or freakish I felt, there were people out there like me. There were people out there I could connect with and people out there who understood.

I was understood. They knew what I was going through and why I was who I was and how I was. They got me and I got them.

We are not alone.

The greatest gift the internet could have ever given me was this knowledge. It allowed me to find my people, my freaks, my tribe. It allowed me to find and befriend those people I needed in my life to realize I was not alone.

I cannot say this enough. You are not alone.
There are people out there who understand.
There are people out there who want to help you.
They want to help you for not other reason than they were you at earlier times in their lives.

There are amazing people out there in the world.
And they’re waiting to be found.

You are not alone.
We are not alone.
I am not alone.

Herding USB Keys

By Carl

On October 3, 2012

In Observations

I’ve worked in tech support for nearly a decade and I’ve collect a number of USB keys. They range in size from a hearty 32GB to a miniscule 128MB. They’re all useful and all have their place.

The challenge becomes how to tell them apart at a glance and know what they work in.

I’ve come up with two methods to ease the madness.

First, label the physical devices. Use a sharpie for a permanent name or size. If you tend to reuse them, put a piece of scotch tape on it and use that as a label.

The USB Keys from top down are:
GParted on 512MB drive.
Windows XP installer on 2GB drive.
Windows Easy Transfer on 128MB drive.
YUMI created collection of bootable software on 2GB drive.
Windows 7 install on 4GB drive.

Second, I name each drive with the amount of storage and what platform is works on.

Some drives, I have formatted for the Mac only since that’s all I use them on. Some I have formatted as FAT32 which works in everything. While others I’ve experimented with ExFAT which allows for cross compatibility (Mac to Windows) and larger than 4GB file sizes (like NTFS) but isn’t natively supported in Windows XP.

These are the little tricks I use to keep my collection of USB keys a little more sanely. I hope it helps you too if you have the same problem. If there is interest in the geeky IT setup I’ve crafted for myself over the years I’ll share more of it. Even if there isn’t I may do so anyway.

Let me know if you’ve enjoyed this post. Leave a comment or find me on Twitter.

DIY or BUY

By Carl

On October 1, 2012

In Observations

More time or more money is the solution to any problem.

I can either throw more money at a problem to save myself time. Or I can throw more time at a problem to save myself money.

When I was thinking about getting a TiVo, I debated setting up a DIY DVR system. I could reuse a small computer I have, and get a CableCARD to stick in it and wire it into our cable… I could get software setup and make it friendly and convenient enough for myself and my wife to use.

Or I could buy a TiVo. Far more money, but far less time.

We now own a TiVo.

Critical Friday

By Carl

On September 28, 2012

In Observations

All week long I am bombarded. I am bombarded with people needing me. They need my attention. They need my help. They need my time. They need me.

All day my attention is pulled in a million different directions. Just this morning, I was working on a critical ticket. The computer was failing to boot into Windows.

It wasn’t a blue screen, but there was a single line of text across the screen before the Windows logo appeared. When I arrived at the computer I saw it had the letters DDR in it so I figured it was either the video card or memory.

I removed the external video card and tried booting again. No dice. I then removed each piece of memory one at a time. Same error.

Then I looked up the error message and it seemed to indicate the video card was at fault. Since I couldn’t get it to boot, nor could I access the BIOS or any diagnostic settings, I decided to unhook it and take it with me to my desk.

As I was crawling under the desk to unplug the various cables, I received a call on my work phone. It is never a good sign when someone calls instead of emailing.

It was another critical ticket. In another building I support. Someone’s account had been compromised, and as a security measure, the account had been disabled.

I had a real life interview question on my hands. When you have a dead computer and a compromised account at the same time, what do you do?

This is how my Friday started.

When I got the computer back to my desk, I opened it up and tried some other memory to no avail. A co-worker then noticed the light on the motherboard was amber instead of its normal green hue. This meant the motherboard was bad.

Easy enough I thought. I will go to Dell’s website, verify the warranty and get a new board ordered.

So I did.

Only, the machine was over a year out of warranty. This meant no new part. This meant I had a computer I could no longer repair. I went to see the user and give him the bad news only to find out he had left for the day. So I get to have that conversation Monday. Happy Monday!

On I went to my other building to go see my user with the disabled account.

When I arrived, his account had not yet been disabled, so I thought there was a false positive or a misdirected ticket. As I verified the ticket information and as I sat at his computer I started to run an antivirus scan just to be safe.

Sure enough, the scan turned up three infections. Great, this is going to be the beginning of a long process. As the scan completed, there were only three infections, none of which appeared to be serious. I ran a rootkit scan and thankfully none were found. I then set about patching the multiple vulnerabilities with the computer using my Tech Support Triumvirate.

So I sent the logs of my scans to the security team to analyze and advise me how to proceed. I then called and had the user’s account reactivated and logged into webmail and investigated his Outlook account.

I found an email rule to send incoming messages to a suspicious looking email address. Similarly, I found a signature added to webmail with the same suspicious information.

I removed the email rule and deleted the suspicious signature and sent a couple of test messages through the system to assure nothing further suspicious was happening.

This is just a day in the life of a desktop support technician. Did I get anything else done the rest of the day? Not really. I sent a couple emails to schedule meetings with people for next week. I called and emailed the network and security teams to coordinate my restore and recovery efforts with the compromised account.

Before I knew it, the day had come to an end and it was time to head home. When I got to work this morning, my day was looking very different. I was hoping to followup with a half-dozen people and verify their issues were resolved.

Then I was planning to go see another dozen people and work to resolve the issues they were having. All until 10:30 when my day got hijacked by more important things.

I never know what each day has in store for me. I can plan and scheme and make lists of what I will accomplish. And it can all evaporate in the blink of an eye. All the planning is for naught.

Choosing a Platform

By Carl

On September 20, 2012

In Observations

Choosing a platform

Tonight I read Gnorb’s article on how he views the smartphone landscape. The problem with choosing a smartphone is no longer as simple as choosing the phone and what the phone can do for you.

With the major players producing tablets, integration into that ecosystem is something to consider. In addition, there is the possibly integration with the computer of choice sitting on your desk or on your lap.

Google Android

Android as a platform has unlimited options, choices and freedom. Android is shopping mall. It offers a variety of wares at prices all across the board and you can get exactly what you want at the price you want to pay.

Android also struggles with fragmentation and being forgotten a year after its release. When I had an Android phone my problem was there was always a bigger, better, more amazing Android phone being released the next week.

Every. Single. Week.

Apple iOS

Apple’s platform is the opposite of Android. Apple is the high-end boutique. It offers a couple of variations on a theme but overall, the quality is high and the choice is small.

Where Apple shines is control. It controls the vertical, it controls the horizontal. To use Apple products is to not just use a single product but to play in Apple’s playground and live in their world. Apple has built an experience.

Because of this totalitarian control, Apple is able to offer longer support and a consistent experience across all the devices in their playground. Apple’s control wrinkles the noses of those who feel there is not enough freedom across the platform.

Apple’s control also assures nearly no malicious applications are released to the platform and they have safe guards in place to resolve any issues that may arise.

Microsoft Windows Phone

The last Windows Phone I used was a disaster running Windows Phone 6.5 which was basically Windows XP crammed into a smartphone body. It came with a stylus and extreme frustration.

Since then, they’re built a respectable platform and have embraced Apple’s control to make the hardware and software which should help the platform. I haven’t used or had experience with any of the new phones so that’s as much as I’ll say for the platform as I don’t feel it fair to talk about a platform I’ve not used.

Decisions

So what is a consumer to do? Buy into the Apple iLifestyle? You’ll pay a hefty price but will be rewarded with multi-year support and a consistent ecosystem. You’ll also be subject to the whims of the big red fruit and their seemingly arbitrary removal of support for features in older hardware. The tight integration between the mobile and computer platform can be real benefit to those living in both. However, if you only use one or the other, there is a lot of missing value.

What about the Open Android platform? There are phone sizes, speeds and carriers for everyone. There are a vast array of tablets. There isn’t a desktop companion but they play decently with the big players. The initial price is low but quality is all over the place from excellent to appalling. The overall lack of support could mean your shiny new toy get abandoned a year later and never see another update.

Then there is Windows phone which has some real potential. Microsoft is putting together a cloud-based ecosystem and is betting big on Windows 8 which features a lot of integration and visual similarity with their Windows Phones.

My experiences

I owned an original Motorola Droid. I was very happy with it though the lack of support from Motorola was disappointing. I had to root the phone to install an Android Operating System update after Verizon claimed the phone could not support it. There was also a large gap in the availability of applications in the earlier days of Android.

Many things were iOS only and Android support was more promised than delivered on. This was before the Amazon Android store and Google’s integrated Play store. This was before Android was a household name and more the domain of nerds and Blackberry refugees.

After the Droid, I got an iPhone 4 which is the phone I still use today. The instant upgrade in camera and software quality was welcomed. At the time I had a Mac laptop so the integration between phone and computer was a welcomed change, since there was no good way to sync media to Android and DoubleTwist was just being released. Though I used the Droid as my phone and primary device, I had an iPod Touch for all my music because Android was so frustrating to use.

I had an Android in the dark days of the platform and it has come a long way since then. However, it still has many of the same issues as it did when I had the Droid. Specifically, the lack of support from carriers after purchase, lack of OS updates to hardware that can handle it, the fragmentation meaning not every phone can run every app, or run it well and the constant New Big Thing means support quickly gets forgotten for the phone you choose in weeks instead of years.

What works for you

What is comes down to is what works for you. What is the best choice for what you wan to do. Are you a writer? Are you a photographer? Are you a technologist?

What phone best fits your lifestyle and what are you going to enjoy using for the next few years since most of us can’t afford to get a new device every year.

What I have

I have the iPhone 4. My contact is up in December, though I am eligible for an upgrade now. I am looking at the iPhone 5 because while it doesn’t overwhelm me, I do get all the features that came with the iPhone 4s as well. I still like the iPhone over the Android choices because of the ecosystem I bought into starting with an iPod Touch. I feel like I know what I am going to get with Apple. Like it or not, they’re consistent and I know I will see a new operating system in a year and possibly another one after that. With Android, I don’t know if I’ll ever see an upgrade, and when the carrier loses interest, so too goes the support.

I have a Lenovo Y570 laptops running Windows 7. My plastic MacBook died years ago and I wanted to get a laptop I could play PC games on, had enough power to last me a few years and have some room for upgrades. The biggest selling point was price since I had a small amount of money to spend on a computer and a new Mac or even used Mac was out of the budget. I work in IT Support so I live in Windows and Mac OS all day so I don’t have any allegiances to one or the other. Operating Systems are tools.

I also have a 1st Generation iPad which I did not buy. It was a Christmas present a few years ago. It is also easily my most-used device and my go to reading and chill out device and the device I am itching to upgrade the most.

I have a Google CR-48 Chromebook I was lucky enough to receive for free when Google first announced the new project. I use it from time to time and while I love Chrome on all my devices, the Chrome OS is not enough to be an everyday use platform. At least not for me. The CR-48 is a decent machine albeit under-powered and with a terrible track pad. I like the keyboard and the lightness. I wrote this post tonight on it because it was sitting next to my bed and within reach.

This is what I use and what I like. It’s not going to be perfect for everyone but it works for me. And that’s all that is really important.