Diary of a Network Geek

No, not geek professionals, in this case.

Normally, I don't blatantly promote other people who aren't either ultra-cool geeks or paying me money, but, in this case, I'll make an exception.
I'm really into photography.  I wasn't always, but the December after I finished chemotherapy, I bought my first digital SLR camera.  It cost what I thought of as a small fortune, but it was worth it.  Shortly after that, I took a couple of seminars.  One from the ever popular Joe McNally and another one by a guy named Syl Arena.  The class I took eventually became the book [amazon_link id="032171105X" target="_blank" ]The Speedliter's Handbook[/amazon_link] and is pretty much THE book to have for someone shooting with Canon Speedlites.  The class, and book, were fantastic.  Syl was a genius teacher and a really nice, patient guy, too.
Well, he's the inaugural "pro" on the Pros You Should Know feature at the Borrowlenses.com blog.  It's worth checking out, not just for him, but for the rest of their blog, too.

And, if you're not into photography, I apologize for not having something for you this week.  If you ARE, though, trust me and go read up on Syl Arena.  It's worth it!

Looks like they're about to go up.

And, if what I'm reading in the media is any indication, by quite a lot.
I know I mentioned this a couple weeks ago, but the tech media seems to just be really catching on to this.  The folks over at ExtremeTech, who are really into their hardware, have a great article about what's going on with drive prices.  And, perhaps more importantly, what they think is going to happen to drive prices.  In short, it's not good.
Seagate is expecting shortages in their supply chain for "several quarters", and that, of course, translates to a higher demand.  And, for all of  you who slept through your basic Economics course in school, higher demand on a limited supply results in higher prices.

Of course, this is all due to the terrible flooding in Thailand, where key components are made for a number of electronic systems.  I'd expect that shortly after Christmas, a number of things will go up in price.  Anything that relies on a drive for a key component, like PCs or laptops or network attached storage, will clearly cost more.  But, I expect a lot of different cameras and similar electronics to go up in price, too.
This is the downside of a global economy.  And, it's also why we should be concerned with the welfare of our fellow humans on the far side of the globe.  We're all interconnected, now more than ever.  I hate to equate such an enormous disaster with our creature comforts and the price of consumer goods, but, well, it's the only way some people can get their mind around how important it all is.
The world is so interconnected now, what happens in any one country, no matter how small, has far reaching effects on the entire world.

Like Wikipedia, but on the micro scale.

It may surprise some readers here that I'm a geek in my professional life.  (Okay, so it may not have surprised many readers, but, still...)  And, as such, I tend to use computers in a lot of my daily life, including my creative life.  One tool that I've been experimenting with a bit is tiny, low-overhead wikis, sort of like a tiny, personal Wikipedia, only it's on my desktop and not publicly available via...
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(Incidentally, this is a great way to setup pretty painless documentation for a small IT department.  And, in fact, I've started doing just that!)

No, this isn't a post about eating disorders!

Rather, it's a post about secret places to eat in New York City!
I have to admit, I've always been fascinated by people lining up to get into places so secret that they have no name or no sign over the door.   Maybe it's having grown up in Chicago with a grandmother who was actually around when speakeasies were up and running that's made this so interesting to me.  Maybe it was just being a geeky kid who was always on the outside.  Maybe, it was the idea that my great-grandfather was friends with Bath-house John Kenzie and Hinky Dink Kenna, two of Chicago's most notorious aldermen and crooks, who ran a "pool hall" with a secret room.  In any case, places like that fascinate me and the idea that they might exist in New York RIGHT NOW is almost irresistible to me!

So, tell me, New York readers, have you ever tried one of these "Secret Eateries" in New York City?
Inquiring minds want to know!

Hackers are porting Linux viruses (virii ?) to OS X.

Last week Monday, ZDNet reported that hackers have ported code for a trojan from Linux to Apple's OS X.  For those of my readers who don't know what a trojan is I'm referring to a malicious program that opens the door for other, usually even worse, programs to come into the infected operating system, like the Greeks did in the classic stratagem known as the Trojan Horse.  It hasn't been seen in the wild yet, but apparently the C source code for this has been available for quite some time.

Frankly, I'm surprised that this doesn't happen more often than it does.  In the old days, virus writers had to really know something because they used assembly to create them.  Now, with Windows and all the other object-oriented programming languages filled with bloated libraries of programming calls, along with the availability of existing code on the internet, they hardly have to know anything to write fairly nasty malware.  And, as I've mentioned before, as Apple laptops become more popular, more malware will start to show up there.  I'm sure it's only a matter of time before they figure out how to infect iPads and iPhones, too, if they haven't already.

I hate people like this.
I spent most of my day today cleaning a malware infection off a machine.  This little bugger had not only disabled the Windows Task Manager, which is pretty common these days, but it also cleaned out the Start Menu, including all the built-in things like the link to Control Panel and My Documents and all those things on the right side of the Windows XP default Start Menu.  But, it also flagged most of the drive as Hidden and System, making it even more difficult to load the software I used to clean it.  I had to go into Safe Mode just to get the system clean enough to restart into Safe Mode with Networking so I could update Malwarebytes, which is what I eventually used to get rid of the beastie.   (I used Spybot Search and Destroy to keep the malware from loading to make the machine useable with networking support so I could update Malwarebytes, incidentally.)
So, yeah, these slimeballs keep me in a job, but, really, I'd appreciate it if they stopped helping me stay employed.  I promise I can find plenty of other things to do!

So, look lively out there people!  Be suspicious of what you download and click on!

UPDATE:  Apparently, this has been found out in the wild now.  And, according to TechWorld, it has a purpose; to use your system to generate BitCoins for it's evil masters.  Very clever.  Nasty, but, still, very clever.

Well, Halloween is just around the corner, if you aren't celebrating already.

I could go on at length about the historical and cultural phenomena that is Halloween, but, really, if you cared about that, you'd just go to Wikipedia.
So, no, instead, I'll just share a quick fun link to some Halloween LEGO creations over at Blastr.com If you remember playing with LEGOs as a kid, you need to go check that link out, because I can pretty much promise you that you weren't creating things like they've got over there.

And, remember, when you're out trick-or-treating, or drinking yourself blind, this weekend, please, be safe.  Not just for you, but for the people around you, too.

There is one, apparently.

So, it seems someone has figured out the answer to an old question which has often plagued IT professionals: How long are your skills good?  According to Eric Bloom, over at IT World, longer than you think.  He claims that the tech skills you have now will be half as marketable in two years.  If you read Slashdot, you've seen this article and the comments that followed.  Here are my thoughts, though.

First, I think it depends on the skills involved.
For example, if you're working on Windows Server, your skills will probably translate fairly well and that two-year half-life is about right.  For Unix, maybe a bit longer than that.  For Novell, well, sadly, I'm not sure who actually uses that old warhorse any more, as much as it makes me sad to write it.  For other, less vendor oriented skills, I think two-years may be a bit short-sighted.  Take routers, for instance.  Now basic routing hasn't really changed in quite a long time.  Even Cisco routers, the creme-de-la-creme of enterprise routers, haven't really changed that much on the inside in the last 15 years.  I was in one the other day and I have to admit I was shocked at how quickly the skills came back to me after quite literally years of disuse.  Far more than two years, I might add.
Also, skills that are a little harder to quantify certainly stay "fresh" longer than those hypothetical two years.  Things like troubleshooting and the so-called soft skills involved with user support are something that I think are deeply engrained in someone.  They're part of a work ethic.  So the customer service skills I learned more than 20 years ago when I worked for Hyatt Hotels are certainly still more than "good".

Secondly, Mr. Bloom is talking about marketability, not actual utility.
So, the fact that, for instance, I don't have a Cisco certification, even though I'm clearly capable of configuring a Cisco router, means that quite probably was never what he would have considered a "marketable skill".  In fact, based on what many recruiters may have felt about the marketability of my skills, I should be farming beets right now, not working as the Lead Tech/IT Manager of a fairly prosperous design and manufacturing company.  Instead, of course, all through my career, I've managed to talk my way through the door and then show the people in charge that versatility and adaptability, not to mention mad Google-query-crafting skills, are far more important than any specific past experience or certification.

So, what about you, gentle readers?  What do you think?  How long are tech skills "good"?  And does working on legacy systems harm your future employability?

Well, this is interesting...

Some time ago, I read about a revolutionary new idea in cameras; focusing after taking the photograph.
Having had autofocus occasionally grab the wrong thing in a photo, this idea intrigued me.  The idea that a camera could simply capture all the available light, store it in a photographic format, and let you choose later where you wanted to focus seemed, frankly, like an impossibility.  It seemed like science-fiction.  Well, apparently, the future is now, because this camera...
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Getting ready for a job interview?  Be prepared!

I'm an old Boy Scout, an Eagle Scout, in fact, so I'm always thinking about "being prepared", whether it's a trip to the zoo for photography or a job interview.  Scouts taught me, among other things, to think about situations long in advance of being in them, so I can prepare for what I might need and what I might need to do if things go wrong.  There are thousands of ways this applies to being a professional geek, but, today, I'm going to focus on one way in particular: job interviews.

DICE ran an article back in November of last titled Interview Questions for Network Managers.  It's good.  If you either are a Network Manager of some kind or plan to interview one, go read that article.  Seriously.  Of course, when I've been the interviewer in these situations, how the candidate got to the answer mattered to me as much as the answer itself.  The point of questions like these, for interviewer and candidate, is to display how the potential network manager thinks.  How we think about our networks and solve problems on them matter a whole lot.  I remember working with one guy who, basically, tried things randomly over and over until something worked or he broke it completely.  He never did understand the concept of changing one thing at a time to find out what was wrong so we could stop it from happening again.

In any case, I know a lot of my IT comrades are out of work out there and interviewing, so I thought I'd remind them of this resource to help prepare for future job interviews.
Good luck out there!

Yes, I'm cleaning them out.

I've had this blog going, in one form or another for more than eleven years.  In that time, I've gone from writing the HTML pages by hand, often in a text editor, to using two different blogging software packages.  Currently, I'm running WordPress, which I do my best to keep up to date.
However, along the way, I've written a lot of posts that didn't quite make it to the live blog.  So, I've developed a small backlog of posts.  Some of them, I've deleted because they were a little too topical and their time has passed.  Their "freshness date", as it were, has expired.
There are, though, a few posts that are still, I think, relevant.  Those, I'm editing and updating and, in some cases, finally finishing, so that they can see the light of day.  I can't tell you for sure how many there will be, but, as you see posts here referencing old articles various places on the web, that's why.  It's just me working through an eleven-year backlog of incomplete posts that, I think, still have some merit.

I just thought you all should know, in case anyone was curious.
Thanks.