Slowing Down

I've been reading a number of articles about slowing down my life lately. I'm a driven person, no doubt about that, but the constant drive since I left my undergrad has burned me out and I keep seeing myself spiral further into anxiety and high stress and all the issues associated with it.

I'm not going to go on a blamestorming session at the moment, but I'll just say that I don't let the past go very well. Sure I handle things well: layoffs, grad school abuse, etc. But those items just stick with me making it hard to move on.

I really like the following sites:
http://www.slowdownnow.org - humorous, but illustrates the concept of slowing down well and
http://www.slowmovement.com


Now, the Slow Movement site is a bit liberal for my tastes and every time I read that site I get this "Margaritaville" image in my head, but then again, what's wrong with that? Shoot, I wish I could sit on a beach all day sipping margharitas!!!! Also, if you read up on Slow Food, which encourages people to cook and enjoy their company rather that scarf down a BigMac, that is a realistic action people can take.

I know this is not going to be easy for me. I consider myself an achiever. As a reflect on my past, I realize that I used to be a much more relaxed person. Maybe if I didn't always appear that way, I know that I was. I could take a few hours and read. I would put on the headphones and just listen and daydream. I would simply close the door to my room and play guitar. And yet I still managed to get good grades in school and work.

I know there was stress in my world before. I also know that it was just that, stressful times, not the entirety of the time - which is what my current life reflects.

Reflections on a Course

I taught Management of Technology for the first time ever this semester. Management of Technology is suppose to be a capstone course, a course that puts all things together. Its suppose to be that final course that talks about what it means to be an IT manager today and more importantly what students should expect out of a job.

I didn't feel that this course went so well for me. In the end I did get a number of students compliment me on the course, but overall I felt there was a massive disconnect between my goals and expectations for the class and the students themselves.

First off, the vast majority of these students can't write. I know they're IT majors. Some of them can't string two thoughts together coherently to save their lives. Some of them have terrible grammar and many of them don't turn their spell checker on (or don't bother with the results). And I'm complaining from a "who taught these kids?" perspective and I know my writing wasn't perfect, but this is pretty ridiculous. As an IT person, and hopefully an eventual manager students have to realize that writing is critical for their position. IT involves LOTS of documentation - comments in code, requirements, emails to executives, etc. Without a solid foundation of writing skills, an IT person will not make it up the ladder.

Second, I found the entitlement attitude to be very true amongst this group. Not all mind you, but there were just many students who failed to turn in assignments throughout the semester and then wanted reprieve at the end. When my manager tell me that something is due for a client on Friday, its due Friday, the expectation is that I will give it on Friday. I had assignments which I gave extra notices that they were due and sent reminders and still did not have them turned in.

This was extremely frustrating. I understand these are young and eager IT majors who want nothing more than to start configuring routers. Life is not all about configuring routers. I went through a very traditional CS program where life was all programming and when I hit the workforce I was woefully unprepared for the management crap that I was subject to. I just want to portray the importance of writing and management and timeliness to these students before they get into the workforce, but no, a number of the same students who turned projects in late are upset because they didn't get an A or B in the course.

In the end, I learned a few things:
1) Even though it was hard, I stuck to my guns and felt ok about it.
2) I need to do a better done of explaining the purpose of the course in the beginning.
3) My own preparation and documentation needs to improve.

About three weeks ago, I really had felt that I had hit the wall and wasn't sure that I would continue past the next semester. Now that I've had a little time to regroup, I'm going to keep marching forward positively into the Linux course and just work to make it as prepared as possible.

PhDs and such

Its no surprise I've been thinking a lot about academia. I'm not unhappy in my current job, I just think that teaching is what I really want to do. Then I struggle with the PhD part of it, I'm not about to drop out of life for 4-7 years to get a PhD. I just can't. I've heard all the reasons:

1. Once you get out, you'll more than make it up.
2. Its not really that bad.
3. Its better in the long run.

Rob's take on the reasons:

1. Yeah right. Let's just say that with my current salary, taking a 70% paycut (which is what I would get) for 4-6 years and then teaching at roughly 25% higher than I make now, not counting the increases I would get in the 4-6 years, just doesn't equal up.

2. HA!! I saw firsthand the hours and hours and hours put in by PhD students. Acting as slaves for their professors, expected to be there at their beck and call. Covering classes for them. And then to see the PhDs who didn't make tenure track slaving away at the bottom of the totem pole.

3. Ok, so there is some long run opportunities that having that PhD do get you. The starting salaries at the colleges are higher and you do have a better chance getting in as a Doc than not.

There's just been a lot of feasibility issues for me.
1. I'm 31, almost 32. 4-6 Years of my life is quite a large chunk of a very productive part of my life. Now I fully realize there are plenty of older students that go back, but I'm not sure that its for me.

2. I am about to convert my girlfriend into my wife. This of course implies certain new responsibilities. Also, my girlfriend would like to get a Masters.

3. The more I read articles like this:
http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2005/0511/0511pro2.cfm

The more that I would rather teach at a private college or even a community college. I continue to think about online teaching or somehow converting my existing skills and reputation into a teaching job. Then, if need be, go for the PhD.

Basically, I've been looking back and have allowed myself to be too strongly influenced by my previous graduate experience. That school was trying to sell me a PhD, its what they sell. In many ways I guess I can't blame them. Its like my own business, Frost & Sullivan isn't for everyone. However, I can't keep going around feeling bad for not choosing to get a PhD and I can't feel bad because I don't want to pay the price required by many institutions for a PhD. I don't see the need right now.


I may eventually go back for a PhD, but where and what medium (online possibly) has yet to be seen.

Email Woes...

For my class:
What a better way to start the semester than with a real-world case study?!

Ready below and answer the following.

1) How would this email make you feel as a user? Do you think it could have been written in a way to make people feel better?
2) What do you think should have been in place to prevent this?
3) How would you present this situation to upper management (who were also affected by this outage)?


Greetings all:

As many of you know, last Friday night the North American MIS team needed to bring down our mail server due to a hard drive failure that occurred on Wednesday of last week. Unfortunately, the work with our vendor (Dell) did not go well and the mail server and all of it's data was lost. Additionally, due to that hard drive failure last Wednesday, we were onlyable to do back ups until Tuesday at midnight.As a result, for those of you who use desktops to access our Notes mailserver directly (i.e. no local copy), we regret that your mail data from Wednesday to Friday was irretrievably lost.

We recommend that for important documents you check to see if others with laptops were cc'd - sothat you can try to retrieve them. Rest assured that we are already taking steps and planned expenditures toensure that this does not happen again. As it is, a few highly unlikely,sequential events all had to occur for this to happen. So, the risk going forward is still low. For those of you who use laptops, this should nothave affected you (unless you've had a problem replicating your local mailfiles with our server files).

If you have any issues or questions, please enter a help desk or contactany of the San Antonio MIS staff.

Your understanding during this unfortunate incident is greatly appreciated.

I saw this and had to laugh

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/apr2007/tc20070424_967747.htm?chan=top+news_top+news+index_top+story

I, and I think that most other folks who lived through the dot-com bust and the telco crash have a hard time NOT laughing at articles like this. There's not enough students? You're damn right there's not enough students. When companies are going to bleed jobs the minute things take a downturn and when everything that resembles engineering is being sent overseas, you're damn right that students are looking at other careers. I hardly recommend Computer Science as a degree to anyone. I tell IT majors that the best jobs are project management of workers overseas.

Now India is turning out to be not quite the deal everyone expected. Managing remote teams that operate 10 hours ahead causes work slippage and there's QC problems so now companies are making noise about the lack of skilled labor. TIME TO PAY UP YOU CORPORATE CHEAPSCAPES!!!!!!!!

I'll take requests to go back to software development. Let's start with a pay increase and good benefits...

Recent happenings...

Well, the great idea that was supposed to be this blog has been difficult to tend to. Publication deadlines, teaching, and life and general have pulled me away from the original intentions of this blog. I'm still not sure exactly how I want to use this platform in the future. Frost & Sullivan wants us to blog more, which is fine and might be the approach I will take. Its just challenging because its not like I'm given any hours for blogging, its just suppose to happen. Like the vast majority of everything at this job, its just suppose to happen.

Also, the notion of using this blog for teaching purposes turned out to be more difficult than I had thought originally. The time it takes to upload and then trying to get your students to REMEMBER to check the blog, write a response and comment, just wasn't working. If I use that format in the future, I will work with WebCT or one of the systems in place at the school and then either crosspost, post the best responses or something.

In my class, we've been talking about careers and its caused me to do some reflection. I've had a lot of interested and difficult career experiences in my life and maybe I can pass along some of my wisdom (or lack of foresight) to someone else. Please enjoy Career Advice #1!

Having credit stolen on a major project that moves on to be a success is a frustrating experience that does take time to get over. You have to learn to let go.

Here's the short version:
I worked on a large project, was lied to about future employment and was never credited with my rather large significant contribution.

This thing has actually had quite a bit of success and has become a national program. And of course I'm no longer at the institution and you'll NEVER see my name on it.

Its really brought me down over the last two years. I sweated blood for that damn thing, burned myself out, let my classes slide, all for that cause and then to feel like I got nothing for it was definitely a slap in the face. So here I am, two years later, and you know I'm realizing more and more that nothing is going to change. There will never be an apology. The people who run the program are going to keep building the prestige and success of the program (because they get paid to). No one cares about what Rob did for that thing and that's just how it is.

And its one thing to talk about acceptance, forgiveness and all the Zen concepts in the world, but there comes a point where you have to just fight yourself out of the self pity and keep going. My career now doesn't involve working with my old employer. They have no effect on me whatsoever. I see my old employer through our local ISSA meetings and that's it.

I'm see a lot of working professionals who let this stuff ruin them for life. They get looked over for a promotion, credit is stolen, whatever, and they just don't let it go. It continues to affect their life, their disposition towards others, their whole life. Life's too short. And burning yourself out over wanting an apology or explanation doesn't help.

I have had several experiences in my life where I have made people mad at me without even knowing the cause. I have had people fuming and furious with me without ever knowing why. Was it justified? Occasionally. Sometimes I had done something that offended someone without even knowing it. Most of the time though, I didn't even know I had done anything wrong at all. Most people are like that.

So, what's the moral of this long ramble? Take the stabs, outright lies, and overlooks as gracefully as possible. That doesn't mean to become a doormat, but realize when the intent is malicious or simply ignorant and decide your course of action from there. It doesn't mean to torture yourself with a bad environment. It just means take what happen for what it was and move on from there.

Ethereal has changed its name

http://www.wireshark.org/

I just discovered that the Ethereal program I have used and loved for so long now goes by the name Wireshark. I would encourage everyone to download and play with Wireshark to help understand the OSI model and network communications better. We will do a lot with this program throughout the semester.

On a related note, this is a great blog that goes through tracing network communications, has sample dumps to put in Wireshark to look at, and even talks about spyware infections.

http://www.chrissanders.org/?p=47

In Class Exercise #1

Get into groups of two.

Tell me a little bit about what you believe to be the greatest computer security risk to students at UIW. Describe IN DETAIL based on either your own experience or the experience of friends. Include the reasons behind why this risk exists, what technologies could be implemented to help, what education could be provided to students, etc. This can be a physical risk (losing a laptop, shoulder surfing), network risk, lab risk, etc.

Think of risky behaviors you have seen on campus. Think of the dorms, the labs and other locations on campus.

We will discuss this at the end of class. Could dovetail very easily into an extra credit article for a group.

The OSI Model and Security

Reference article on OSI and security

This is a sample chapter out of a book that is a good reference for the OSI model in general (which you need to know backwards, forwards and sideways) and some interesting discussion about how security and the layers interact.

I want you to pick one of the layers and post an answer to the following questions:

1) Which layer did you pick?
2) Why do you feel this layer poses the greatest security risk?

For my class...or anyone else who wants to comment :-)

I commented to a reporter for this article back in July. I would like for you to research the issue and provide me a few paragraphs about your thoughts. Answer the questions

1) What was the problem (detail)?
2) Why was this a big issue for MySpace?
3) Who do you think is to blame? Microsoft, MySpace, or Users and why?
4) How can colleges (which have a high population of MySpace users) help control/educate their users? Should MySpace be blocked?

And then Ballmer spoke and the Linux community became afraid...

(Article Here)

Quite a firestorm this thing has become. Here I thought that the Novell partnership was straightforward, that MS was finally doing something smart and that all of us would actually reap the benefits of Linux running Windows. Then Ballmer opened his mouth and all Hell hath broken loose...

If you read the original comments(found here) I think there are some interesting points that Ballmer is making and that its not all as alarmist as one might think.

My two cents:

Ballmer talks about interoperability first then makes the comment about Novell having paid MS for their intellectual property. He also talks about the way GPL is structured and that MS has to get money for their intellectual property.

The assumption is that he's talking about Linux stealing MS' IP, but I don't think this is even what he was talking about. Read the paragraph before the comments and what he's saying. I believe he means that MS can't be fully interoperable with Linux as is because they're not about to make any part of Windows open to GPL.

MS might have a real point here. I'm not a Linux expert, but one has to ask: are there pieces of Linux that deal with Windows interoperability that were reversed engineered and distributed with the kernel? Are there any services dealing with directories, printing, or networking that were maybe MS proprietary but easily decoded?

So, in order to have "true" interoperability, one of the Linux vendors had to cut a deal with MS. So Novell does the deed.

Moving forward SUSE is going to have interoperability with Windows. And you know what will happen - someone will release it to the rest of the open source community (which is what the open source community does well) and then - THEN you have the problems that Ballmer was discussing with the liability in the datacenter when some admin compiles himself a new Windows Interop package and runs it on a "non compliant" Linux.

Once something like that happens, MS can do nothing about it. Its one of the classic drawbacks of open source - who do you sue when things go wrong? Microsoft wants to get working on/with Linux and knows they can't make money off of it if they open it up, so they've taken this approach: get someone to pony up for it, and once its released to the open source communtiy, sue anyone who runs Windows on an unapproved Linux. I'm actually impressed with MS' foresight in this one. I'm not even sure that the Linux community sees it just yet.

Its definately going to be interesting to see what happens.

Tell me something I don't know -
End User's Don't Get Security.

An interesting study, and I agree for the most part. In fact I see this everyday. Actually, employees not getting security keeps me in a job. However, is it really the employees fault? I have seen firsthand the severe disconnect that exists between security and management. As much as everyone wants to point their fingers at the "bozo" employee (I've heard an IT director call his users that, and let's just say that considering some of his security practices I'm not sure who should have been wearing the red nose...another story for another time) one has to be willing to point the finger squarely at management. I'm not just talking about spending money on security, lots of organizations are doing that, but its the failure to embrace security at a operations level, the failure to have processes in place to deal with exceptions that is causing many employees to ignore security.

Case in point:

A good friend of mine works as a Music Therapist at a hospital here. She works hard and is responsible for seeing patients just as any social worker, nurse, or doctor. However, her position is unique to the hospital. She needs access to music sites, she gets grants to purchase music, she has a legitimate reason to look at sites that the hospital has deemed inappropriate for other employees. She also uses a CD burner on a regular basis, typically a "controlled" device at the hospital.

Many would consider that lack of access a good thing, but here's the caveat - there is no process in place for her to go get this modified. She has had to jump through hoops, make continued calls to help desk, and still has impediments to getting her job done on a daily basis. The solution for her is to have me download music, files, etc. and put them on a zip drive (which aren't locked down, but which is another potential security risk).

The point is this - in her environment, security is an impediment to her job. She is encouraged to go around the security in the environment, not for some self serving purpose, but in order to get her job done. She is expected to do her job just like any other professional, she has a boss, and she doesn't have hours a day to waste waiting on the help desk (she deals with some very ill patients).

Security vendors have focused on very effective technologies. There is still a great deal of FUD used to sell products, whether its about hackers or regulators, and unfortunately the end user suffer. When people cannot get their job done because of security, that is a problem. It leads to lower productivity and lower moral.

I don't have the answer. Its a combination of vendor products' design and corporate policy. However, I will say that at the end of the day I don't blame the employee for "not getting security" when they are trying to do jobs with the added frustration of security and time that of course is unaccounted for.

I am very passionate about this topic, you will hear more from me on it.

Going through Slashdot today, I stumbled upon this blog article:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000121

Fanatical Linux users at their best. I like Linux, don't get me wrong, but everything about this deal that I have read is about creating a distro of Linux that Microsoft will run with/on/whatever.

So, Microsoft wants to make a deal with Novell to create a distro of SUSE that runs BOTH Microsoft and Linux and yet the call from the SUSE folks is to dump SUSE! Down with SUSE! Abandon ship!

I understand that Novell getting in bed with Microsoft is a serious slap in the face to SUSE users. However, I wish Linux users would wake up and realize that not interoperating with Microsoft is THE single stumbling block to mainstream Linux acceptance. Look at Apple. I don't have numbers in front of me, but all indications are that Apple is starting to see a surge in new sales due to the dual-boot option. Why can't the Linux community understand that they are NOT going to get Linux on the desktop until this is resolved.

I commend Novell for yet again pulling a rabit out of it's [insert hat or body part here] and still going.

We're going to give Blogger a shot. Though I've used LiveJournal in the past and as more of a personal sounding board, I want a blog that is not going to be so tied to my personal life, friends, etc. I want more of a working blog where I can post about Information Security, teaching, and things that I hope reach a wider audience than just my few friends.

And to start this wonderful day, please see the following comics from two of my daily comic stops:

My daily readings include Dilbert, Foxtrot, Zits, Shoe, Calvin and Hobbes (yes, I realize that Calvin is just re-runs, but I still read it), and PvPOnline (a great web comic). Occassionally, I'll pop over to Garfield, but that one is a little hit and miss in my book.

I think there is something to be said for taking a little time out of your busy day for a couple laughs at some great comics.