1-Man IT Department

Farewell to Another Great Podcast

A little late, but still an important passing. You will notice to the right, in the podcast section, another [RIP] tag has arrived.

Chess Griffin decided to end his fabulous podcast Linux Reality at an even numbered 100 episodes in March. I have listened to most of the beginning ones, and most of the end ones, while taking a big break in the middle. I just noticed last night that he is offering a DVD with all 100 episodes that he made for sale. The cost is $30 USD, and is done through PayPal. I am not sure if there are any other options available or not. I am sure that you can ask Chess about that. All that you have to do is email him at linuxreality@gmail.com and he will send you a PayPal invoice and then send out the DVD after he receives notice of payment.

Interviewed by the Fresh Ubuntu podcast

Yesterday, I was interviewed by Harlem Quijano and Peter Nikolaidis from the Fresh Ubuntu podcast. I have been a fan of Fresh Ubuntu for quite some time, and it was an honor for them to ask me to be on. We had a good time, and I got to give a brief overview of GTD and how it may evolve technologically speaking.

Peter has began to practice GTD, and Harlem was interested in what it was all about. Hopefully, I will be able to make a return appearance so that we can delve into some more GTD topics a little more in-depth.

For now, you can go the Fresh Ubuntu site to listen: http://urltea.com/31av

Thanks to Harlem and Peter for a great time. And I hope to join them again soon.

Michael

Popularity: 39% [?]

Things on my Mind

Hello again from the Deep South of Alabama. It has been 9 days since my last update so I thought that I would jot down some things that I have been thinking about lately.

Forgot to Mention:

I did forget to mention in my last post that I successfully completed the requirements for attaining my first IT certification. I talked about it in some previous posts that I was attending the SANS Institute’s Security Essentials Bootcamp in Sept 2007. In February of 2008, I took the requisite two tests and passed with flying colors (90 and 89). So now I am a GIAC Security Essentials Certified (GSEC) professional. I was quite excited since it is my first certification. My next goal is to get a Cisco CCNA. I am putting 4 new Cisco routers in my enterprise so I think that I need to get proficient in using them. I would like to complete the study for this cert in 2008 and have the cert by the end of the 1st quarter of 2009.

Ubuntu Twitterers join @pulseofubuntu

Ubuntu member, Jorge Castro, put up a great writeup about a new movement to consolidate the growing number of Ubuntu twitterers. I know that Christer Edwards and Dan Trevino were some of the first folks to talk about setting this up.

From Jorge’s blog:

One random day Christer Edwards said something along the lines of “we should organize all Ubuntu people on twitter and put that to good use.” Poor Christer made the mistake of having a great open ended idea, so I convinced him to implement it. :)


Pulse of Ubuntu is a twitter account that follows people around from the Ubuntu community. As you can see, there’s already a good list of people being followed.

You can check out the Pulse of Ubuntu site to see the conglomeration of Ubuntu folks. Not everything said directly relates to ubuntu. Maybe there is a way to parse it out by using hashtags (#ubuntu). I am an idea man, and not a programmer, so I will leave that up to smarter people than me. **hint hint Christer **

Back with a Vengeance!

Well, not really a vengeance because I am not really mad at anything. I have decided to try to kick start my blogging career on both my tech blog (what you are reading) as well as my productivity blog. I am starting here, with 1-ManIT, because there have been a lot more changes in my life in this area then any other. I will hit some of the highlights now with more meaningful posts in the following days.

Farewell to a great podcast

I am a bit sad this week as I learned my favorite IT podcast has recorded its last episode. In the Trenches was the first IT podcast that I found back in the summer of 2006 and it quickly became my favorite, while opening me up to other great podcasts including Casting from the Server Room and all of the Friends in Tech (FiT) podcasts and websites.

I was able to strike up a relationship with one of the hosts, Kevin Devin, as we had a number of things in common personally and professionally. He is not in IT anymore (he has moved to User Education), but he is still a geek at heart. Now he redirects his geekiness to his photography. He has some amazing shot, including this one that is my favorite. We are both baseball nerds (he loves the Mariners and I am a Braves fan).

SANS Training Updates not forgotten

I have not forgotten to finish the SANS Security Essentials recaps. I was preoccupied the nights of the 4th thru 6th days of the training. I will fill this in, hopefully this weekend so that the whole series is complete.

Popularity: 77% [?]

Security Bootcamp - Day 3

Well, what can I say about today. At the end of it, we will be halfway through our course books. Today was a lot of fun for me. We talked about a lot of stuff that I did not know anything about. So let’s just jump into it.

Day 3 - Internet Security Technologies

Security Essentials - Day 2 Defense-In-Depth

Well, another day, another 500+ book to go through in Security Training.

Today was Defense-In-Depth day at Security Essentials Bootcamp. I really enjoyed today a lot. We finished the fundamental stuff yesterday and started hitting the ground cracking (literally).

We started with a discussion of what Defense-In-Depth entailed. We hit on multiple layers of protection, the CIA Triad, risk management and the differences between threat and vulnerabilities. Then we began a rather lengthy talk about the differences between viruses, worms and trojans, and hit on some of the big hitters from years past…Melissa, Sasser, Slammer…ahhh, the good ole days. After a brief overview of malware and it effects, we moved on to the next section.

SANS Security Essentials Bootcamp Day 1

I am spending this week traveling to Birmingham, Alabama to attend the SANS Community Event that is teaching SEC401 - Security Essentials Bootcamp. The class is me and 23 others from all over the country. Most are from Alabama, but there are some from my home state of Louisiana (Louisiana Lottery Corp.) a couple from Georgia (including one gent who had to wear his University of Georgia Coachs shirt today, argh!), and then individuals from Arkansas, North and South Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee. The class is being taught by Matt Pierce who is the Security Administrator at AdTran in Huntsville, AL.

When we each arrive at the hotel, we are greeted with a black zippered bag with the SANS logo on it. When I lifted mine up, I thought that I had thrown my back out again. I looked down and saw 6 books that are each at least 2″ thick in them. Upon closer inspection, there was one book for each day, and they are each at least 500 pages. WOW! That is over 3000 pages of documentation for this training course.