What's been keeping me busy.

I've been really busy with work lately, and I've been running out of time to finish a project I've been working on. I'll be getting ready for my assignment to Germany after Christmas week, So I only have 3 weeks left of real work.

The wars in the Middle East cost money, especially the Iraq war. Part of the cutbacks across the Air Force have been the discontinuation of a Towel service at our gyms, and a major Lean focus, looking for ways to save more money.

The USAF is moving towards putting desktops into S3 (standby) and S5 (off) at night, but will require Wake on LAN capabilities for after hours patching. WoL implementation by vendors have been spotty in the past, and thankfully, our largest vendors, HP and Dell, have some pretty neat tools to make all the required changes in the BIOS. Since we were going into the BIOS, we thought it would be a good idea to secure boot orders and radios as well. This is where my project comes in.

I created secure BIOS settings for each specific Dell and HP model ordered through our Quarterly Enterprise Buy, and developed the ways to implement them. I've even had a chance to work with the HP engineers at the old Compaq campus in Houston to implement the settings to all current and future production. We hit some snags along the way, such as HP's older dx5150 model, which runs a home use oriented Award BIOS with limited manageability. I've had to develop scripting, and recovery and implementation procedures, for a firmware upgrade that allow remote password settings. Like pushing a giant red button labeled "Do not press", the most fun part was testing the recovery procedures by yanking the power cord in the middle of a BIOS Upgrade. They didn't work, turns out, the 8k boot block bios would not boot from my bootable CD, and I had to find an internal floppy drive to hook up to it.

The biggest challenge I had was integrating all the Dell WMI sample scripts into one large Visual Basic script. With some help from our office VB guru, I put in some named variables to allow for command line parameters instead of just the ordinary %1 %2 %n variables that I normally use for my batch files. I also added an array to support multiple password variables, so that portable systems that may have missed a password change can still get the BIOS settings.

This has been really good insight on what it takes to prepare a releasable product to a massive organization. There was a lot of testing and double checking that went into it, as well as all the licensing headaches that prevented me from distributing a self extracting floppy image, or GPL'ed floppy image writing program.

When every thing is done, my little project will have three releases posted on the USAF software distribution site, and implemented globally, at least until the Altiris Client Management Suite gets fielded. I'm just surprised that as long as WoL and ACPI has been a standard, it has taken until now for Microsoft to really embrace it out of the box with SMSv4.

Learning to run

I've been getting into running, with my most recent achievement being running 48 miles in 4 weeks. I've gotten faster, and I've even run non-stop for 60 minutes. What has helped is running on an empty stomach, the ability to track my progress, and Audio books. One of the problems I've been struggling with lately have been shin splints, but not where they normally occur, laterally to the tibia, but posterior and medial to the tibia. The Soleus muscle is responsible for foot flexion, and is located behind the tibia and fibula, and helps to pull the foot in. I kept on running toward my 48 mile goal while my shin splints were getting worse, until, the week after I finished, while attempting a 10k (6.2mi) run, the pain became so unbearable that I had to (painfully) walk back home after only 2.5 miles. The pain was so bad, that sticking rock solid ice packs directly on the area felt good. After taking a week off, and then only running sporadically for the 2 weeks after that, they have begun to feel better. During a follow up to the great Physical Therapist I see on base, I was given a run analysis. It turns out that I was running wrong, keeping my knee locked and projecting forward with my foot and toes. Instead, I have to teach myself another way to run, by using the hamstrings and thigh to push off. The problem is that it feels unnatural to me, and is really straining those muscles while they adjust to the extra work. While I did not have much shin pain from the 3 mile run today, I did feel like bigfoot while I was running.

Apple castoffs

I've been needing to upgrade my mp3 player for a while now. I spend around $150 for an IRiver 256mb back in the day. It is still a good mp3 player, and it still has more features than an iPod, like FM tuner, line in and built in microphone with real time mp3 compression, but is a little lacking in the size department these days. After the Apple store came back on line following the Apple fanboy nerdgasm on September 5th, I picked up an now obsolete, "refurb" 2nd Gen iPod Nano for $90. I also got the Nike+ sensor that I've been wanting, and an armband. I am getting this primarily for running, so all the cool features that the iPod touch, or the other newer iPods are not really relevant. I still wish it had an integrated microphone & FM tuner, and maybe a standard Micro USB connector instead of the proprietary iPod connection. You would think that the company that makes laptops with all the extra's built in like a webcam, and all radios (except cellular), would do the same for their mp3 players.

I plan on having a real convergence device like the n95 to be my main portable media player / web browser / phone. The iPod Touch is cool and all, but without bluetooth and GPS, it wouldn't be able to tether to my phone when outside a hotspot.

body work

I've been wrecked for a while. I've gradually put on 20 pounds since last Thanksgiving, and when I went back over 200 and started to develop a tertiary roll, I was compelled to take action. While googling for a calorie calculator, I came across this good site. Since I have to run at least 6 miles a week, and I am going back to the pool this summer, I decided to plug in some numbers. When I swim 2000m (20 laps), about 60minutes, at lunch, I burn 4000 calories for the day. When I run 2 miles, I burn around 3700. I am forcing myself to aim for a 4000 calorie per day average, and I'm still not quite there. This is the first week I am trying this out. Hopefully this will kick start my metabolism enough to get me back down to 180 soon.

Also, in related news, I have gone back to Troy University. I will be taking some Biology and Anatomy and Physiology classes, in order to meet some prerequisites for a Physicians Assistant program that the Military Offers. Even if I decide not to do it, I will enjoy the extra Science classes that I didn't take for my Business degree.

One of the things I've found out is that when the 36 mounths of GI Bill benefits run out, I will be covered under Texas' Hazelwood act, which waives all tuition to state public Universities for up to 150 hours.

Updates

I've been really bad on updating my blog, even though a lot of things have been happening. This is to get Mom off my back, even though she already knows about all this.

In late May I had a spate of bad luck.

I over reacted to sudden breaking of all cars on I-85 by pulling the front brake too hard. This must have pulled the handlebar to the right, resulting in the bike laying down in front of me, and throwing me down on my left side. I escaped with some small but deep scrapes on my knee and foot, but my Jacket, gloves and boots were torn up.
The following week, when I was driving the Expedition through downtown, I was hit by someone that didn't stop for a stop sign, and caused me to roll over onto the drivers side.

All the money I had made from my deployment to Tyndall AFB was put into a 2003 Honda Odyssey minivan that we bought at auction in June.

A deaf man walks into a bar... stop me if you've heard this one.

I just returned from a visit back home to Montgomery, and suffered from some ride related injuries. One of them was a persistent ringing in my ears that sounded like a low reverberating bell. This was probably a result of all the wind noise from the ride back combined with the recently installed helmet speakers that I got from Aerostich for $15. The other injury was some neck pain from the constant wind buffeting and leaning over the tank and highway speeds, forcing me to keep my head tilted upward.

To combat the potential for hearing loss, I purchased some 26dB ear plugs at The Walmart. They really do a good job of cutting down on the noise level, especially at above average highway speeds.

To fix the wind problem, I have two solutions. The first is to find a taller replacement windscreen for my bike, which shouldn't be hard to find, considering the popularity of the XJ600 globally. The 2nd solution would be to buy a motorcycle with a taller wind shield.

Insurgent IT departments, and how to really deal with them.

Slashdot just recently posted a link to a great article that CIO magazine wrote about how unresponsive and/or repressive IT departments create insurgent shadow IT departments. CIO's advice to CIO's is to embrace and adopt the shadow IT departments. Out perform, or meet them halfway. The most important messages from the article are:
*Messy but Fertile beats Neat but Sterile
*No one jumps through hoops, they go around them.
*If the default answer is no, people will just stop asking.
*People who think outside of the box are not troublemakers, they may just know what they are talking about.

Why do I think this is important? Not too long ago, I got into trouble because apparently, I wan't supposed to have admin rights on my work computer, and got fussed at for syncing appointments between Outlook and my Sony Erisson P910. The only reason the PDA sync was bad was because there was a policy against non-government provided PDA's being connected to my laptop. I was doing things that made me work better and more efficiently, and the only thing I got was the riot act for violating policy, and creating potential security holes. No one cared that I was working better. Realizing the perils of going into details about work on a public blog, I will leave it at that.

All I will say is that this article is great advice for anyone in charge of a enterprise level information system. It will help them find a good balance between user efficiency, and complete lockdown.

My paid vacation just got better

My wartime deployment has been to Panama City, Florida. I've been down here for a little of 30 days now, and I've been living out of a 2 star motel room with wifi slower than the GPRS on my cell phone. I've been moved on base to an old dorm room with a shared bathroom, and NO Internet access. I have to go to the main office to use their wireless router.

As far as my job goes, I just sit around and monitor a few conference calls on the old legacy phone system. This office is staffed around the clock, and uses around 8 personnel to essentially baby sit old telco equipment. This could easily be replaced with VOSIP phones, but then they wouldn't be able to waste money on all our paychecks. I basically sit around and watch TV, work out at the Gym, or, when the proxy server is down, surf the Internet. I am not being used for my abilities, or skills. I am being used for my security clearance, and it sucks, because I am not being challenged, and I do not have a chance to excel.

Now, this "deployment" is getting better because I have been allowed to move off base, provided I can find somewhere for $27/day. Along with another guy from my base, we are moving to West End Harbor condos in Mexico Beach. This is the floorplan, with 1791 square feet.

If anyone has a boat, they are welcome to come down and park it in our boat slip. We are a stones throw away from the beach.

Terrorist Conspiracy in Bean Town

Ask A Ninja Question 30

This has got to be one of the most funny Ask A Ninja's I've seen in a while. I spewed coffee on my monitor while watching it this morning.