I love it that the people I work with think of me enough to send comics to me… Funny stuff.

Twinkie on a pole…. If it was a chocolate glazed dougnut (mmmmm) then…

   So long ago in a distant land I mentioned that I had chosen the Barracuda Web Filter (formerly known as their Spyware Filter) to install in our network. If you missed my past post then check out my reasons why here or look through the whol saga of web filter choices here. Well since then I have been quite busy with both work projects and personal projects. As far as personal goes I have been doing a great deal of studying on SEO, blogging, Google and Page Rank stuff so I can try to get a new personal (and not totally techy) blog off the ground ( www.beawesomeinstead.com and also ..well more than also, mainly working on my wife’s new real estate blog (www.dicksontn-realestate.com). Now my wife is brilliant so teaching her to blog has been pretty simple…In fact she usually fixes her own issues before I ever get a chance to help her…but that is all another post entirely. So back to the Barracuda…
   I set up the Web Filter off of a stub network here for testing purposes. Energize Updates and Firmware Updates went fine and then synced up the groups and users with Active Directory without issue at all. I have been testing sparaticly for some time now and it seem to be great. For the first few weeks, after putting it between the firewall and our core switch we will monitor web usage just to get a better idea of what will be blocked according to normal web usage… I am still trying to make some decisions on certain categories and whether or not they should be blocked or allowed. The main hurdle keeping me from putting the the filter into full time service (other than coming in after hours, which in my case is sometime between 10:30 pm and 5:30 am) is out Terminal Servers. you see from talking to the Barracuda technician I will need to enable Virtual IP and I need to research just a little bit more before I am comfortable doing so. The bulk of our Physicians work through the Terminal Servers using Citrix so I really want to make sure they won’t be calling me with random error message all week. Hopefully, I’ll have an update soon.
   Let me take a second and say this about the Barracuda…while functionality and doing what it should do (filter web results) seems to work great. The reporting…well it blows goats… I mean so very bad. And I know from browsing their forums that there are third party applications that I can dump logs into and..yadda, yadda, yadda..it’s not going to happen. I have enough crap to deal with already…That’s why I bought this filter, do do some work for me. Now the kind folks at Barracuda have assured me that changes are coming to that and it will be (a direct quote) “much better”… kinda give you the warm fuzzies on the inside eh?”…more to come.

    My isp at home is Comcast… wonderful company (I’m sure to some) but keeping my internet connection is about as slow and stable as a blind, one winged duck flying through a blizzard while eating a tootsie roll…. but I digress. Either way, about 2 months ago I started using the free public DNS servers at OpenDNS, and wow. My web browsing is noticeably faster and when it comes to the stability there is no comparison. I don’t think I have had an outage yet.
   Another cool feature (especially for those of you who have children at home) is the Adult Site Blocking. With this feature a known list of Adult oriented sites will be blocked by OpenDNS on networks you designate. It’s overall pretty easy to use..just change your automatically assigned DNS entries (from your ISP) to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 or for instruction on setting it up on your router at home (I presonally have a Linksys WRT54g running DD-WRT see their help page:

http://www.opendns.com/support/category/2

Some other very nice features they offer besides faster DNS lookups is that they correct spelling errors so if you try to visit www.craigslist.or or www.yahoo.cmo they will correct it for you! Also, anti-phishing at the DNS level so if you try to visit that Bank America site in from the email you suspiciously got (even though you don’t have an account there) and you’ll see a Phishing Site Blocked message from OpenDNS.

Give OpenDNS a try by visiting their website or clicking on the icon to the right and get started. Enjoy.

   so I know my posts have been slacking as of late. I have some decent excuses but you would rather not hear about those. Thought I might wright up a small manuscript of entertaining excuses if anyone is interested… no takers? oh well.
Anyways. I have been consuming my time with two new developments.
   First off, my wife is a real estate agent. She is freaking brilliant. Passed her exams with perfect scores. Anyhow, I digress. What I have been working on his building her a website using WordPress.org. Her site name is dicksontn-realestate.com. So give that a check out and do let me know any suggestions you might have. I was going to use Joomla for my CMS but I thought I would give WordPress a try first. I really want to try and use SEO and blogging in our area to boost her visibility. Personally, I feel that no real estate agent in our area has either a clear control of the internet market or uses blogging as an effective tool here. Maybe a few in Nashville do but definitely not in Dickson. I do plan to post what I find and keep people updated, because honestly…not knowing much about real estate it’s pretty easy to get confused.

   The second thing…is that I got a mac… well at least I hope I can keep it. I may have to sell my Dell but after only a few weeks of sparatic use I’m getting more used to it and really enjoy a lot of the “mac”y features. And I’ll probably be dwelling deeper into those very soon. For those of you who have benefited from some of my Windows tips have no fear. I still have to work at least 8 hours a day on those things so I’ll still have plenty to talk about there.

Until later.

There are tons of free utilities for flickr now. And I as a bound flickr enthusiast feel it my civic duty to bring you some of those. One reason is that they are very useful and cool…another is that works is pretty slow (no real problems of interest to blog about) and I’m about braindead, so here is to content.
This web page will grab random flickr images to spell pretty much anything. So I give you Spell With Flickr.

…damn template… futility is split…I give up…*sighs

   It’s amazing how bad my memory is…at least I think so…I can’t honestly remember, never the less. I was needing to access some files on a SNAP server (basically an older NAS unit) that we have and because of complications with the O.S. on it I could not do this easily. I can however FTP to the SNAP server and transfer it that way. There was no FTP client on the storage server I was going to send it to (nor did I feel like installing one) and I didn’t want to use up my resources system resources doing an FXP (still having to install IIS on that server).

   So the simple solution…use internet explorer(not the best way I know but humor me). Now if you just get all crazy and type in ftp://ad.dr.e.ss then it will log you in anonymously. That’s no good for me because on the SNAP we have security set-up and while you can see the files, you can get crap. Now I used to remember how to type the user name, password and all that jazz in the address bar, but like I was saying about memory, i forgot.
Well in case you want to know, here it is:

ftp://user:password@ftpserver/url-path

   Let your memory serve you better than mine does me.

   So when are people not looking for a job? I mean even if your not looking and someone mentions other offers to you, it always gets you thinking. Now I am pretty happy with my job, I enjoy what I do, work with good people, drive like 5 minutes to work…what more could a guy ask for…oh yea that money thing, but I digress. But really, I naturally feel a sense of loyalty where ever I work, but I’m starting to question why, I mean honestly. They pay me to do my job…if I didn’t do it I would be gone without a though and if I need more money,benefits,or trained monkeys with jello to keep me there then I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t think to hard about it as they said (in unison) “It has been nice working with you.”

   But maybe I’m over thinking…I mean am I wrong in my thought process? Some places really do value their employees… others seem to value them up until a certain dollar amount, then it becomes easier to value someone cheaper. I suppose after thinking about it, I tent to agree with Mark Shed’s comments that “Your employer owes you nothing”…great blog post by the way Mark. I guess in the long run you do have to invest in something else…mainly yourself. I’m not even that old and I’m already sick of playing the game, working the insane hours… ah anyways. Just so I don’t leave you wondering around in the dark without a laugh here is Dilbert’s take on how most job interviews go (if we were honest).
Cheers

first of all…. sheesh..this:
Sir Elton John says we must close the internet

now this may be the dumbest things I have heard all day and yet another reason celebrities should keep their bloody mouths shut. I mean who honestly gives a damn about what Elston John thinks…but I digress… in fact…I’ll do better than digress..I will actually say he made a valid point with one argument:

“The internet has stopped people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff.”

This I tend to agree with. The internet really does keep people from going out and being with other people. Such a shame. Does remind me of the game First Life
enjoy..and go outside…prolonged exposure to sunlight will not kill you…well.. that might be debatable.

We got a new computer in a few days ago and it had a trial version of Office 2007 on it. Since it was trail version and we have the licenses for Outlook 2003, I had no desire to go the 2007 route just yet. So after uninstalling 2007 and installing Office 2003 I get this fun message when starting Outlook 2003 that reads something like “Cannot start Microsoft Office Outlook. MAPI32.DLL is corrupt or the wrong version. This could have been caused by installing other messaging software. Please reinstall Outlook.”.
I should also mention that when I went to Control Panel > Mail…I would get some random error message about not having enough memory. Either way, the first MS support article I found was of no use. And my first urge was just to delete or rename the Mapi32.dll file, but I want something solid to say “This won’t screw things up worse.” Which I finally found here (MS Support Article 926196)

The short of the fix is to go to C:\Program Files\Common Files\System\Msmapi\1033\ and rename MSMapi32.dll to MSMapi32.old (I also renames Mapi32.dll to Mapi32.old since it was referenced in the error message).

After you do this restart Outlook 2003, this will make Office rebuild the files and things should be fine.

So this last week I was in a training class for my Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA) Certification. I didn’t post much because my brain hurts. Seriously that is just a lot of information for a week of class. Either way, I took the class at New Horizons Learning Center in Nashville (and “You are Welcome” for the free publicity to N.H….though feel free to pay me for it.) and my instructor was James Bryant. Who is an excellent teacher by the way, I honestly feel like I learn and not just prepared for a test…which I suppose is a good thing.

Seriously, If your in Nashville and looking to become a CCNA I would definitely demand him as a teacher.
I have a few sites, resources and book that I will be studying for the next few weeks and then going to take the CCNA. One great resource I have found is the Cisco website (duh?), they have a CCNA prep center with some practice test and simulations that seem to be well worth your time. There are about 10,000 other resources out there, but I’m going to keep it pretty simple…a few study guides, my books from class and the Cisco site. We’ll see how that goes.