Diary of a Wolfeman

Over the past few months, I have been on both sides of technical interviews, and had the (mis)fortune of interviewing a couple of guys with bright and shiny new certifications – who didn’t know a damn thing about fixing computers. Sure, they passe their respective tests, but the tests were written in a theoretical environment, not an actual shop. To solve this problem in the future, I have developed…

The CTAT – The Cyberwolfe’s Techincal Aptitude Test

(Post your answers in the comments, I’ll grade them later.)

1. What two tools must you have to work on a PC?

2. What is the first thing you have to do to network two home computers for file sharing? Why is this stupid?

3. A computer comes to your bench with the “about::blank” problem, tons of pop-ups anytime you access the internet, and at least 5 things you know shouldn’t be in the task list. What two things do you ask the customer?

4. You have installed a new PCI soundcard in a machine, but it won’t work or the computer won’t boot correctly. What do you do?

5. Name three software applications a computer should not be without.

6. When all else fails, what do you do?

7. What is the most dangerous thing in a computing environment?

If you can answer those 7 questions correctly, I can train you on the rest.

Sorry about the silence around here lately, folks, but there hasn’t been much in the way of personal news, and no groundbreaking developments in the world at large for me to bitch about.

The girlfriend is, as always, the best :)

The rugrats are healthy and happy.

The job is, well, a job – it has it’s highs and lows, but it beats the holy hell out of being unemployed. I am at least doing something I like for the most part.

The car gave me some troubles the other day, but was easily repaired. It decided to blow the coolant hoses. Annoying, but not near as bad as it could have been, and the parts only cost $15. I did discover, however, that my AC unit is toast. :(

On the lighter side of things, your favorite Wolfie is turning 33 at the end of this month…

Me? Greedy? Never! Read the rest of this entry »

If you drink alot, and have been known to sleepwalk, put your laptop away before the drinking starts. Or at least seal it up in a waterproof bag. Yes, there will be a “hazardous duty” surcharge for trying to clean that up.

If your Linksys router is giving you fits about a static IP, flash the firmware.

The FCC requires you, Verizon, to make your copper infrastructure available to outside agancies. You are getting paid for the lease. Calling the customers of those other agencies to harass them for not buying your service while you drag your feet on the install will not endear said customers to you. Bite the bullet and complete the circuit before people like me start to badmouth you on public forums. Having worked in the industry, I know it takes precisely fifteen minutes to configure a DSL line, so this whole “three to five weeks” line is pure bullshit. If your customer service was as good as the outside agencies we recommend, then we would be recommending you. Think about it.

It is possible for an Intel processor to outperform an AMD64 proc – but there is a $400 price difference to use the Intel silicon. I can’t imagine anyone thinking that would be acceptable, were they aware of the choice.

Okay, maybe not quite that many, but it sure feels like it at the end of the day.

Today was devoted to moving BtFR into the empty apartment at the other end of my building, making him B:TNG

I wonder how long it will take him to spot and identify the reference.

Anyway, this is somewhat funny, since B and I used to live at opposite ends of a building back in Tigard when I first moved back to Oregon. If we can get another old friend to somehow move into the middle apartment, it will be just like old times :)

Only in a better neighborhood. With better apartments. With no second-floor apartment for TS. Okay, so maybe not just like old times…you get the picture.

The move itself went pretty smoothly, us all being old hands at this sort of thing. I drive the truck and act as Loadmaster, since I play a decent game of Tetris and can usually manage to pack everything into one trip. The Ratboy acts as Stevedore, since he’s 17 and has the energy of youth. Pookie, of course, just tries to help. Today she assiduosly swatted at the dirt on the truck ramp with a broken branch bearing leaves in an attempt to sweep up, succeeding mainly in sweeping it onto us.

Anywho, the end result is we moved 98% of his stuff in less than 7 hours. Not a bad day’s work.

“Friends help you move. Real friends help you move bodies!”

In my previous post, JustADog posted a comment and brought his own blog to my attention, where he has his own opinion on the RealID bill:

There are the obvious opponents, like the ACLU and Kennedy et. al. that are against a national identification standard – but I really don’t recall any dissent about passports, and that is a very federal ID – photo, magnetic strip with ID information, record of travel, etc.

The point here is that a passport is not required to travel inside the United States, and this RealID may end up that way. The Federal Gov’t already has in place all the personal identifying data it needs: I have a Social Security Number, which is tied to my birth records, and they have the IRS, which is tied to Social Security. They already know who I am, where I live, what I make and have paperwork to back that up. The Fed already recognizes my State-issued driver’s license as a means of personal identification.

Quite frankly, the machine-readable clause scares me. I am a technician and know how easy it is to fool (or forge) machine-readable code. I WANT a human to inspect my papers when travelling overseas. I’ll wait the extra few minutes.

Hopefully the next step would be to require any employer to only employ those with proper ID (in otherwords, NO MORE employment for illegal aliens!).

I have to ask, “where’s your brain”? There have been laws in existence for decades specifying this very thing! Those who employ illegals are breaking the law and can face serious fines and jail time for their actions. They choose to hire illegals, however, to cut down on their bottom line. We don’t need new laws or proceures here, we just need better enforcement for the laws we already have. The problem is that the INS and Border Patrol are underfunded.

Speaking of which, where is the money for this new form of ID supposed to come from? That part is noticably left out of the bill, which will leave it to the States to fund this on their own. In states like Oregon, where the budget is already in the shitter, this is going to be another added burden that will go straight to the taxpayer – and you can bet that the tax allotment request is going to be padded as much as possible to help make up for the general mishandling they have already done. I don’t want to be paying any new taxes until the state can fucking well figure out how to spend the ones I’m already paying.

Those of you who have read the same books I have are probably looking around you today and seeing things in a slightly more sinister light. A bill passed today with a small, un-discussed rider attached: the Real ID bill. This bill is essentially a National ID Card disguised as a driver’s license.

Opposition in the ‘sphere and even popular media has been quite open, including at least one ‘write your rep’ webpage. The bill was hidden into a ‘must pass’ funds allocation to support our troops, so it wasn’t even discussed on the floor, despite the fact that it failed rather quickly the first time it was submitted on it’s own. Near as anyone can figure, the Real ID clause was added to repay a favor to one particular politician.

The most vocal of the bill’s opponents in the ‘sphere makes one point that I disagree with, but the rest of his reasoning is sound. The bill, as written, sucks major ass and will make things worse for every citizen in the USA. I wholeheartedly believe this.

(The point we disagree on is the part that says illegal immigrants will not be able to get this new driver’s license; the author believes this means the illegals will be driving without licenses which somehow makes them more dangerous. A driver’s license is used as legal ID for just about everything, so illegals get them as a ‘gateway document’ which makes it easier to osmos into the system. I don’t think you should be able to get a license without a valid green card or visa.)

Back to the reading. Many future-fiction writers have written of post- or near-appocalyptic America where citizens are required to have their ‘papers’ with them at all times or face punishment by a corrupt and tyrannical government of some sort. The prelude to this government coming to power has always been a steady path: civil liberties are slowly eroded until the citizenry have lost their right (and will) to do anything about the fact that the government has turned them into subjects instead of citizens.

Society is polarized into the rich and the poor, with no middle ground. The poorest citizen with an ID card, however, is still far better off than the ‘unlicensed’ or ‘shadow denizens’ who lurk on the outside of society. They have no access to health care without ID, no access to public assistance, no way to get a job legally. This atmosphere breeds a new level of crime, one where any average person may suddenly and irrevocably find themselves doing anything just to survive. Desperation is rampant.

On top of this, these authors also almost universally discuss how a ‘meltdown in the Middle East’ led to some form of armed (and usually nuclear) conflict has depleted the world’s oil reserves, throwing us into an economic slump not seen since Black Tuesday. Multiple wars break out in the aftermath as the superpowers struggle to lay claim to as many resources as they can to fend off the coming dark age…

So. Here we are today. A terrorist attack makes us paranoid about our security, and our civil liberties are being eroded. We have a war in the Middle East. Gas is almost $2.50 a gallon. You do the math.

Paranoid? Moi? Read on to decide. Read the rest of this entry »

I seem to be running into this topic alot lately, so I’ll ramble a bit here.

Like many small-town hippies, my folks were never big on religion in general, despite at least one fairly devout Christian grandma. The subject really just never came up. Sure, there was a Bible on the bookshelf, but I don’t think that copy had ever been openned more than twice in my lifetime, and once was when I looked up a particular quote.

(An anecdote from a magazine described how college kids had taken to putting taglines on the front of their pants, and one smartass had put “Mathew 7:7”. Look it up.)

(truncated for easy avoidance) Read the rest of this entry »

Yes folks, it’s pretty boring around here indeed, because I’m writing about a new router here at Chez Wolfie. We upped to a Linksys WRT54G, instead of the combination ancient D-Link+Sony WiFi AP.

So, now we are up in the 802.11g range for wireless, with a much stronger signal here in the garage. I also took advantage of the shuffle to redo some of the wiring behind my desk, which cleared some tangles out. The true test comes this weekend though, when BtheFormerRoomie becomes BtheNeighbor – if he can link his WiFi kit to mine, he’ll just pitch in rather than transferring his current provider. Should it work, I’ll more than likely be bumping my service up a notch to compensate.

One of the other benefits is that the new router enables proper port forwarding, so I can let external connections in to our game servers when they are active.

Hey Impact – you need to pick up a copy of Mechwarrior Mercenaries! :)

McAfee Antivirus has been looking at Symantec’s Norton product for a while now, and they have gotten tired of being the No.2 AV product on the market. What did they do to solve this? The same thing Microsoft did with Windows: they went to the manufacturers.

New computers are mow shipping with McAfee from the factory. AOL’s AV product is from McAfee. Even Asus motherboards are coming with the software bundled into the driver disc.

All well and good, you might think, except for one small problem: in my humble opinion, it sucks. I recently ran across a new Compaq computer with the whole shebang of McAfee products installed, and they thought they were safe. I removed it and installed AVG. What did I find lurking on the hard drive of this supposedly well-protected machine? Five different Trojans.

Instead of pushing their developers to write a better product, McAfee spent heaps of cash to get the vendors to drop the venerable (and top-notch) Norton Antivirus in favor of Mcafee.

Consider yourself warned.

This post over at Greyduck’s got me thinking for a few minutes.

Scary, huh?

Anyway, my thoughts revolved around how annoying the current crop of “helper apps” is becoming. You know, all that shit that lives down in the Windows system tray, waiting in the background for you to do something with their product. HP printer utilities, MSN messenger, digital camera software, etc., etc., ad infinitem. It drives me batty to watch a modern computer chew on the ‘Welcome’ screen for a full 2 minutes waiting for it to load all that into memory when a clean XP install can boot in 45 seconds. Then it does some more chewing when you actually log in. Is it really too difficult to double-click a frelling icon?

Even worse, these programs no longer leave traces in the Startup folder of the Start list. The only way to prevent them running at startup is to dig through 5 pages of configuration options and uncheck the “run at boot” option.

Then it hit me: the software vendors are walking the same path as the TV execs – you know, the one where they pitch every show they have at the average 12-year-old. They’re pandering to the lowest common denominator…

The AOL users.

It makes sense if you look at it in a certain light – AOL has been the biggest ISP for internet eons, largely due to their marketting campaign. They have been flooding user’s screens with useless, unwanted crap for years now, and their subscribers have simply dealt with it, since they have never known there was another way. Obviously, software developers for the mass market have decided to follow AOL’s playbook, writing software that monitors your system all the time, lying in wait for you to plug in that camera or watch a streaming video. Those little things that you maybe do twice a month – but still it waits, like a circling shark…

This has led us to an unfortunate impasse, one where the average computer user, instead of getting smarter and more savvy as they continue to use this most able tool, is getting dumber and letting other people make their choices for them. This is giving us a country full of people who just basically click on everything that comes across their screen.

A world ripe for spyware pushers.

I have this to say to the software vendors of the world: Yea, though your user base may have sheepish traits, it is possible for them to learn. Write software that requires a decision to use, not something that sits there like a bandit, waiting to ambush me should I even think of hovering my mouse near the taskbar. Make them learn to use their computer, one tiny step at a time. They can do it. Really.