Thursday, March 29, 2007

New Computer

I've decided it was time to wipe the old computer and move to a new one here at work. They both are actually pretty similar (i.e. the CPU, RAM, and drives are almost identical) but at times my current computer gets a little slow. I've installed and uninstalled so much software over the years on it, it's just best to move to a new one. Yesterday I started late in the afternoon. This morning I'm still going on it. The thing that sucks is it's taking forever to move my data from on to the other. 30Gb takes a while to move. So while I'm waiting for it to do this, I figured I'd write a post. It's been a pretty boring week otherwise, and I really wanted to write something here at least once a week.

I'm starting to get a little excited about my trip next week. I'm going to Vegas, and it's been a while since I've been there. This will be the first time I'm flying in. I've only drove there before. It's only a 4 hr drive and it's pretty scenic most of the way. I figured this time I'd try flying. It's pretty cheap to fly. It's only $50 each way, in all though I think I'll only save 1 hr of travel time. When you count in the time it takes to get through security at the airport, and since you can't take any liquids as carry ons now, I have to check my luggage so I'll have to wait for it in Vegas. The actual flight time in only 45 mins. After all that though, I'm expecting it to be 3 hrs of travel. The bonus is, you get to drink on the plane. Also while you're there, you don't feel obligated to take your car when you go place to place, it's all taxis and walking. It will be a good time of year to go to with the weather still being nice. I may go back to driving though once they finish the bypass of the Hover Dam. I don't know, we'll see how this trip goes. The main reason we're going is, my roommate is into F1 Racing, and its American counterpart Champ Car. Well they're having the first Champ Car race there in Vegas and we're going. It should be fun. Plus there's always the gambling.

Friday, March 23, 2007

FRIDAY!!!!

It's still early in the day, but I love Fridays. I don't know why I like them so much (other then the obvious). I mean I go out. Nothing really special though. I usually hit the local bar with my roommate and have a couple beers and Jack & Cokes, watch whatever sporting event is on and that's about it. Pretty routine. It helps that the bartender is very cool and hot, and knows me as a regular.

As I started writing the boring thought above, I have a nice little scene happening outside my window right now. Apparently two people got into a minor fender bender. I initially noticed the chick involved as she parked her truck and kept going from the front seat getting out and then going to the back seat, then back to the front, then back to the back. So this action intrigued me (not to mention she's kinda hot). Then I saw a guy park his car. He came over and talked to her and then she continued her moving back and forth. Maybe she knew the guy and they had planned to meet. They both went back to their vehicles, but stayed parked. I ignored it then looked back out about 30 mins later and saw a cop talking to them. "They must have hit each other", I thought. Then about 10 mins after that, I notice a guy and is boy getting out of there car, looks to me to be the dad of the chick that was in the accident. They are just hanging out off the to side as mom (the chick) is talking to the cop. Then another car arrives and the lady that gets out appears to be the mom of the guy that was in the accident. She hands him a camera and he starts to take pictures of both vehicles. It looks as if the chick hit the guy, as the front of her truck is dented and the driver's side headlight it busted. Because of the angle to the guys car I can't see any damage to his car. I assume though that it must be the back passenger side of his car but not the very back. The guy is done taking his pictures and comes over to the dad and kid and starts talking to them. Friendly discussion, the accident guy hands the dad what appears to be a business card and they shake hands. Mom is still talking to cop. Accident guy talks to his mom, and she drives off, then gets into his car and he drives off. Dad and boy hang out for a bit and mom finally comes over they hug and go look at the damage. Cop drives off on her motor cycle.

Nothing like a little drama to help pass the morning.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Phishing scams

So I gave the guy I'm training access to our spam filter here at work. Just a little background on the filter. We use a third party which we route all our mail through to scan it for spam and viruses. Suspicious emails are then put into quarantine. There is an option to allow users to release or delete the emails that are in their own quarantine folder. Knowing my users though, I know that most will release all emails, as they "may be important". So being the extra good admin I am, I set it up so that they don't get the email, I go through the quarantine folder my self. It's not like I have to open each person's folder, I have it set so all go into one folder. Even still it's not a lot, about 150 a day for everyone (the spam filter has many levels, and most I have it auto delete, these are just the ones that might be spam but it can't rule out). So I go through them, which is pretty easy to notice which are spam and which aren't. It takes maybe 10 mins. out of my day so I'm ok with it. We'll I need to train the new guy (there's only me and him for the company in the IT department). So today was his first day with handling the filter himself. I figure spam is a petty straight forward thing, you can tell just by looking at the from address and the subject line fairly quickly if it's spam or might be legit. You delete all the ones that you know are and then scrutinized further the ones they look like they might be good, or false positives as they're termed. We'll he saw a Phishing email (you know the ones, your "bank" is sending you an email stating your account is expired or your password is expired and you need to click on the link below to re-activate it) and thought this is legit and released it. Well it must have had a bunch of people in the "to" field because I get emails from about 5 people in about 5 mins asking "what's this email about". These are my good users. If something doesn't look right, they email me or call me on it before proceeding. I am confused by the email. Surely our spam filter should have caught this email. So I investigate, and low an behold it did catch it. I ask the new guy, "do you know what a phishing scam is?", nope. He's a new guy, so I explain. I then have to explain to my manager, that no we don't need to put a specific block on for this email, that our filter did catch it, it just was released by accident by us, and it won't happen again. Then I have to write a big email to send to everyone, "If you see this email, just ignore it and delete it". It's a good time again to send a little reminder to everyone too, that this is what a phishing scam looks like and that this is what it's intended for. Made for an interesting morning with one of our Terminal servers going down (kind of) again. But that's for another post.

Saturday, March 17, 2007

I've finally created something

So I've finally started a site that actually has a little something on it besides pictures of my truck. Hopefully I'll actually keep this stuff updated and post things here from time to time that may be interesting.

Enjoy