Ok, I have sucked  pretty bad over the last few months with only personal updates.  I apologize.  I do have some good idea’s in store for technical articles and such but overall, I’ve just been really really lazy.  I haven’t been putting in more than maybe 50 hours a week at work, I wouldn’t say I’m avoiding work but I’m surely not a “go getter” right now.  Hopefully I’ll have a few articles done this week and next for you all to chew on.  Let me know if anything in particular trips your trigger…

Yesterday, my wife and I had a great surprise from our doctor. We have been trying for about a year now and finally are pregnant. The doctor says she is 5 weeks along and we just feel very very blessed.

Earlier this year she was diagnosed with poly-cystic ovarian syndrome. I’m not sure if I spelled that correctly So with that getting in our way and me being around high powered radio waves for a while when I was in the Marines, we are definitely relieved.

Wish us luck.

Well, last Friday my wife and I added a new edition to the family; an Asus eee PC (XP Home, 1Gb Memory, 120 Gb Hard Drive).  We bid the highest on the computer at my companies yearly Christmas Party.  I really didn’t want it at first but now that I’ve had a little bit of time on it, the computer is actually pretty fully functional.  There are a few minor issues that I see so far but overall, the computer is very very usable.

So far this weekend I’ve really only had time to do some light surfing and software installs to get my core app’s installed but I do have to say that it is very functional.  The size and weight are great, it’s “fast enough” which I have mentioned before is a relative term.  I won’t be playing WoW or Unreal Tournament any time soon on it but it allows me to surf from one page to  another without delay, watch online video via YouTube, Fox on demand or ABC online and it has different power settings depending on how I want to use it (Super Performance, High Performance and Battery Saving Modes).

I will complain that the keyboard takes a little getting used to especially if your normally on a desktop or large laptop, the touch pad buttons are a bit stiff but I can always use a mouse if needed, and I absolutely hate the way they partitioned the hard drive.  They did 2 60Gb partitions for C: and D:.  Why, that’s all I can ask?

We ended up keeping the black model that was the Christmas party prize but I tell you, I had to defend my manly stance pretty hard against the wife so that she wouldn’t want me to trade it for the pink model. 

In some respects it feels faster than my desktop at work (AMD something? 2Ghz, 1Gb Ram).

A few weeks ago I go the go ahead from my wife to build myself a new computer.  I have been rocking a P4 at home for quite some time…so long in fact that I just started using my work laptop as my home computer.  It wasn’t horrible but definitely time to upgrade.  I knew I wanted to keep the cost down even though I think I could have gotten my wife to agree to nearly any reasonable price and I knew I wanted it to be FAST!!   That is a relative term but the items I did purchase SEEM very very fast to me.  It would blow my mind if I were to get all the high end stuff .

Case:     Ultra X-Blaster ATX Black Mid-Tower Case
Power Supply:     Ultra LSP550 550-Watt Power Supply
Memory:     Corsair Dual Channel TWINX 4096MB PC6400
Processor:     AMD Phenom 9500 Processor
Motherboard:     Asus M2N-SLI Motherboard
Hard Drive:     Seagate 500GB Serial ATA
Video Card:     XFX GeForce 7600 GT (already owned)
Operating System:     Windows Vista Ultimate 32Bit (already owned)

Total:  $374.98 + Tax/Shipping

I thought that price was pretty darn good.  By the way, I don’t have all 5.9′s on Vista’s experience rating, I only have 5.9′s on everything except graphics.  I have 5.5 there but will hopefully be able to get a 9800GT Video Card here soon which will put me up to 5.9′s   The operating system was free because I let Microsoft spy on my Windows XP machine for a few months. In return, they gave me a copy of Vista Ultimate 32/64 Bit.

While I was in the Marine Corps doing one of my tour’s in the middle east (Iraq), I was often reminded that we needed to take great measures to secure our network systems.  We took several approaches to this task.  During my second tour I was in a way mentored by a contractor, Andy Garcia.  He worked, If I remember correctly, for Northrop Grumman and was part of the Information Security team for the Marines.  He sort of took me under his wing and showed me the ropes on basic information security.  I sort of became obsessed with it.  Just knowing how easy it was to exploit little things like unpatched Microsoft OS’ and buggy IOS or even wireless network with so called wired equivalent protection (WEP).  It just flabbergasted me watching him gain administrative access on systems that I once thought were “secure”.

I then found a blessing from the National Security Agency (NSA).  They had published baseline security lockdown guides for the majority of technologies that we were deploying.  I started using them to secure our systems along with a large number of recomendations from Andy and the information security team.  It was and still is my favorite part about the job.

Just as an overview, the guides go through getting rid of some bad default settings, teach you to run services with a less priviliged user, and best of all…common sense.  Securing systems is a lot of the latter.  Don’t use default passwords, don’t run as root, etc.  They go into great depth on certain subjects, an just glaze over a few others but the documents are well written and if uses appropriately WILL help you protect your systems.

This have been around for a while now so you may have already know about them but even if you have seen them before, please take a look again just as a refresh.