Tag Archives: Work

Dec 25

Recap of 2011 and Looking Forward to 2012

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I got a new job in November, I’m now a “Service Desk Resource I” (basically, tech support) at BDO (an international accounting firm). Since I’m no longer commuting as much, I finally had some time to catch up on my various to-do items lately, and one of those was to make at least a small update to this site. I’m still trying to decide if I like the new theme I picked, though. Also the Links page has been updated – all of my current social network profile pages are on there now, in addition to the buttons in the right sidebar.

Barton and I recently rented a self-storage unit, and have been seriously hammering away at all of the stuff we own that we don’t regularly use, to get it in boxes/totes and moved into the storage space. Some of the things getting packed away are items that we would love to have at our fingertips or on display – if we owned a house. But an 800-ish square foot apartment? Nope, there is just not enough room. We still have a long way to go though, and I expect the unit will be mostly full by the time we’re satisfied with our de-cluttering efforts. This will also make moving a slightly less monumental task.. I hope.

We also joined a local ham radio club this year – MARA (Michigan Amateur Radio Alliance). Interacting with those folks, and attending the monthly meetings has been a welcome break to the usual work-chores-sleep-work-chores-sleep monotony. We also joined the ARRL as well. I’ve been studying, off and on, to get ready to take the General License exam too, hopefully I will have that accomplished by sometime this coming spring.

If you have looked through my Tumblr (Warning: do not click on that link if you are at all sensitive to sexual content.. especially giantwtfomgbbqrobosex) at all, you’ve probably noticed I’ve had a huge resurgence in following Transformers/Transfandom this year. I’d hoped I might be able to attend Botcon 2012, but alas, it is now prohibitively expensive to go. Maybe 2013? Urgh. HOWEVER, I am still immensely looking forward to the second season of Transformers: Prime which premieres in February.

If you have waded through this massive update and are still with me… thank you… and…

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Mar 18

<3 My Coworkers

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Reading thru the work chat backlog:

Severin: from where I sit, I can only see the back of her Stormtrooper monitors, so it’s funny to hear muttered curse words come from them, throughout our overlapping shifts
Severin: “omfg, this guy is retarded”
Severin: sometimes I think I hear her say stuff in Samuel L Jackson’s voice

Mar 05

the progression of the internet is funny

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Benny just published a post on her site about WP and caching. It makes me chuckle to think about, because essentially the web has come full-circle.
The web was first populated by sites that were all static html pages.
Then, someone thought of using databases and a whole bunch of other neat things to make websites “dynamic” – meaning, you didn’t have to spend hours tediously re-writing static html to make a change across your whole site.
Then, these dynamic sites were great, but if the site was popular, then you needed to back it up with a shit-ton of hardware and load balancing and etc, etc in case you had a lot of visitors.
Now, caching (turning the dynamic site back into simple static html) keeps sites light and serving to millions of visitors.
Strange, innit?

Oct 26

Awesome Phishing Spam

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Below is the awesome phishing spam I got today, sent to my work email address. Apparently I was the only actual user account to get this email. The actual email addresses/domains have been redacted. However, just imagine if you had received this email in YOUR work inbox? The .exe payload was a virus.


From: "System" <redacted@redacted>
To: <redacted@redacted>
Subject: Attention - Mail system upgrade
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2009 19:47:54 +0530

Attention!

On October 30, 2009 server upgrade will take place. Due to this the system may be offline for approximately half an hour.
The changes will concern security, reliability and performance of mail service and the system as a whole.
For compatibility of your browsers and mail clients with upgraded server software you should run SSl certificates update procedure.
This procedure is quite simple. All you have to do is just to click the link provided, to save the patch file and then to run it from your computer location. That's all.

http://updates.redacted.com.secure.s-data1.net/mail/id=7254828-redacted@redacted.com-patch5370226.exe

Thank you in advance for your attention to this matter and sorry for possible inconveniences.

System Administrator

Apr 01

Longing for a simpler time.

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Remember when all websites were just text and hyperlinks and maybe a few images? Now everybody has to have some crazy php-based content management system application (yeah, yeah, pot-kettle-black, I know). Working in the webhosting industry and specifically, in Security, has really made me long for those simpler times again. Sure, editing html is tedious and time-consuming, but its pretty rock-solid safe once its web-accessible. Nobody can exploit flaws in your plain html code to send spam, upload phishing sites, or kill other webservers.