Jeremy Wall - Diary

Greets and an update

Heya folks had a spare moment at work here so I thought I'd take the time to update you all.

Today is my 8 year anniversary of marriage to the cutest little pixie you ever did see. Thanks for a great 8 years, Hon. I pray we have many more. Work keeps sailing along and I enjoy it very much. They all like to tease me about open source here but I take it all in stride. I will get them to see the light eventually. :-)

Well it's time for me to get some more work done so I'll have to update some more later on. see ya!

the poor motherboard

It seems my motherboard has gone the way of the dodo. It is in a work kaput. It sings in the choir celestial. It has gone into that great network in the sky. It is in point of fact dead. So until such time as I get my system working again you may be seeing less of me for a while. I don't have a whole lot of time at work to post on here. :-)

I have a license to terminate

My new skill for the week is terminating ethernet cables. I can now terminate cables with an rj-45 connector. I even have my own set of crimpers and a supply of connectors. I also picked up some scrap cat5 cabling from work and am proceeding to wire my mom's house. Ok I feel geeky again I'll go to bed now.

Strange hardware problems

The other day I had the strangest hardware problem on my personal computer.
I was trying to install a scsi card. Everytime I plugged it in though my sound card disappeared. I'm trying like crazy to find out what the conflict is. Finally I notice something. When the scsi card is plugged in the sound card's back end is pulled slightly out of the pci slot. Apparently whenever I plugged in the scsi card it pushed the motherboard down just enough to unseat the sound cards back end. The sound card had a defect in the metal screwdown causing it to not go down perfectly straight into the pci slot. The end result? I had to unscrew the sound card so it could sit straight when the scsi card was installed. Strange how this stuff can happen aint it?

Wise words from a former Microsoft Insider

Now that Microsoft has expanded into so many different areas there is reluctance from some developers to continue to invest in a Microsoft platform because they wonder how do they build a business? How does it become their business and not Microsoft�s business? So people are looking for alternative platforms that create new ecosystems that allow them to build. -- Brad Silverberg

This is perhaps the clearest explanation of how the software ecosystem is changing that I have heard anyone say before.

for those of you on smaller monitors

You may have noticed the menu doesn't get in your way any longer. I fixed the CSS so the body maintains a fixed distance from the menu.

Enjoy,
the proprietor

ok the promised new entry on the job

I haven't worked a day which wasn't at least ten hours. the avreage is about 11 to 12 hours in a day. 15 hours aren't at all uncommon. The work is fun if a bit frustrating at times.

I will have potential to excercise my unix networking skills, my programming skills, and learn more about each as I continue in the job. I am mostly doing computer maintenance and backups on machines at the moment. We go to each school and clean up and repair the machines there. Basically just get them ready to go for the school year. A lot of spyware andware and viruses are the norm. The average user really has no idea what they put their poor machine through as they go about their daily online lives. I've seen machines so infested they take an hour to finish booting. Some machines are unfixable and have to be wiped and reloaded. The data in those situations is usually not recovered. Luckily the company is taking steps to cut down on what the users are allowed to do in an attempt cut down on some of it.

So there you have it. The current lowdown on my job. not its time to go vegetate and let my brain recover from the past three weeks.

just checking in...

don't want to let ya think I'm ignoring the place. **jeremy starts tidying up a bit**

Been workin a LOT so haven't had time to post **jeremy hides the dirty clothes under the mattress**

Just wanted to let ya know I've been busy relearning a lot of windows networking stuff. **jeremy sweeps the dust under the rug**

hmmmm that should hold er for a while **jeremy dusts off his hands and goes back to his email**

]]> ** julie comes behind jeremy and pulls out clothes, does the laundery and sweeps up the dust**

Julie - MEN!!!!!!

I just want to say.....

That if any of my family or friends EVER installs or downloads HotBar or any of its cousins I will personally FDISK their hard drive and leave it that way.

LOL I just spent my whole day digging through the windows registry on multiple computers uninstalling that insidiouse little peice of hellspawn and I'm thoroughly disgusted with the experience.

P.S. I bet ya thought I was kidding about the fdisk didn't ya? .............

WELL I WASN'T So let that be a warning to you.

The New Eclipse 3.0 IDE

I've just recently downloaded the new 3.0 beta for Eclipse. I must say my initial impressions are.....

SWEEEEET!!!

Its got a great new look, easier updating, and easier install procedures for plugins. I'll post more about its useability and power as I get more comfortable using it. Eclipse quickly became my favourite IDE about a year ago and IBM has been impressing me ever since. I think I might even start using it for java even. lol

Uncle Sam wants YOU........

To use firefox. This just in the office of Homeland Security recommends not useing IE. Apparently IE just makes it too easy for cyberterrorists. As this last problem demonstrated.

More about the job

Yesterday was a 20 hour day. Today promising to be a little more normal. Summer is the busy season around here since most of the clients are schools. I'm enjoying the work right now despite the fact that it is really just a glorified janitor job for computer harddrives. You do still find the challenging user who somehow managed to mangle their OS beyond all recognition. It looks like I will be seeing some opportunities for coding too. They are looking for updates to there help\trouble ticket site and also for new utilities to help automate some of the more routine maintenance tasks, not to mention the need for a unified way of keeping hardware and software inventory lists for each school in a central and easily accessible location.

Once I have settled in enough I also plan to start pushing the use of alternative browsers and email clients such as firefox and thunderbird. Some of these computers have been heavily infested with spyware and viruses. The winner of the week so far? a computer from office number 38 with a grand total of 450+ viruses at final count.

Well so long for now I'll keep you folks updated as I can.

The Job Details

So, I'm sitting here at work. Its only 7pm and I have a long day ahead of me still. I've already been working for over 12 hrs.

We are cleaning up and setting up on the network all the computers for this particular school. Viruses are abundant, adware is everywhere, and everyone of the computers had this insidious app called GoBack. It is suppose to take your computer back to a previouse state when things go wrong. WE DON'T WANT it to do that. The solution? get rid of it. That's when things get messy. It just so happens that GoBack doesn't like to be gotten rid of. Some of the people tried to do it manually without the uninstall. BIG MISTAKE. It seems that this program maintains itself in the MBR and keeps a mini partition with all its data. If you didn't uninstall it just right then you have to fdisk to get rid of it. Luckily we managed to solve the problem and get a method to remove it safely. So that a day in my Work Life. Now I have to start a windows update so I'll catch ya later.

I got a JOB!!!!!!!

QNS just called and hired me. I start Monday at 7 am.

I am so glad I use Firefox.....

A very seriouse potential threat has surfaced for IE users. See the details here. Or if you just want to skip to the part about protecting yourself then Go Download Firefox. There really is no need to go through this everytime.

Oh and in case you were thinking I'll just avoid those sites. They didn't tell us which ones they were for security and other reasons.