You know, I love Scott Adams… He may in fact be the greatest human being ever. Take this quote from his most recent blog post Atheists: The New Gays:
Ask a deeply religious Christian if he’d rather live next to a bearded Muslim that may or may not be plotting a terror attack, or an atheist that may or may not show him how to set up a wireless network in his house. On the scale of prejudice, atheists don’t seem so bad lately.
Thank you, that is all…
My final class for my Networking degree is a “real world application” class. You get a basic RFP that outlines specs for a ficticious company’s new network, and your team has to write up a professional quote for it, pretending to be a consulting company bidding on the project.
For our project, we’re bidding on the network of a company called “Outdoor Equipment Supplies (OES)”. Our team decided on the name “Port 22 Consulting”, and we’ve got a max budget of $150,000 to spend on all the hardware, software, and networking equipment for this company.
Being a fan of networking, I decided to do the Network portion1. Essentially, it comes down to a main headquarters and a few branch offices consisting of about 35 people. The main office will have users and all the servers, which everyone has to be able to access.
Pretty basic corporate network, right? Well, tell me what you think:
Obviously the DMZ segment isn’t complete yet, mainly since we’re still fluctuating on the number of servers we’ll need. I also haven’t decided exactly what I’m going to recommend as the internet connection for each office. I was thinking a T1 may be beefy enough for the main office, and whatever DSL or cable connection they can get cheaply for each branch office2. Any input on that either?
Assuming I have time (and the motiviation later-on), I also plan on doing per-switch port lists, indicating which rooms a given port maps to. It seems so sad to do more network diagraming for a ficticious class project than I’ve actually done for our corporate network at work, but such is life…
I’ve been watching Boston Legal season 1 DVDs for a while now, and one of my favorite lines yet came between William Shatner1 and Candice Bergen2. Bergen says something about how we should care more for such and such, and Shatner tells her he knows what she’s doing… She’s Bush-bashing!
Bergen: So now it’s inappropriate to criticize a president?
Shatner: While he’s in office…!
So when I was flipping through the new and improved Google Reader and saw the Digg headline Gonzales cautions judges against second-guessing the president in wartime, I couldn’t resist mentioning the first comment:
So…adding to this list of those that shouldn’t ever second-guess Bush our president: 1) the media. 2) elected officials from the opposing party. 3) former presidents. 4) our allies. 5) past members of the administration i.e. former Secretaries of State. 6) military officials. 7) voters with questions ….we can now include our Judges.
Since when did it become a crime to criticize a President? Look, just because we were foolish enough to elect the guy (twice?), that doesn’t mean we have to agree with every damn thing he spouts out of his mouth… I thought we were supposed to be raising our children to be individuals and to develop and nurture their own thoughts and opinions… Or was I wrong about that one?
It’s quite odd. For as long as I can remember, being with my Dad meant beer (usually Coors Lite)… by the case. One after another after another, all night long.
And yet when I was with my Mom, there was always a bottle of some type of whine (usually a White Zin) in the fridge, but it would sit there for years on end, unopened.
Then I turned 21, and started drinking at home. It started off with just me, feeling a tad out of place drinking my beer with dinner on a pretty regular basis1. One night I get home and decide to mix it up. There were several bottles of wine accumulating in the fridge2, and I decided to crack one open. My mom comes home just as I’m cleaning up the mess I made from my first attempt at the use of a cork-screw, and asks whether I’m stealing her muscadine wine. I tell her I’m not sure, I didn’t pay attention, so she takes a sip of mine and tells me nope, that’s not it. She proceeds to open another bottle and pours me a glass of it to taste, along with one for herself. Not bad, I thought… While I finish the rather unpleasant glass I’d poured from the first bottle, she finishes her glass of the Muscadine and pours another. On with dinner and a typical night…
The next night, we repeat almost the same process. I had enjoyed the Muscadine wine from the previous night, and decided that after a rough day, I deserved another glass. She comes home while I’m sitting in the recliner in the living room listening to some soft jazz3 and sipping my wine and accuses me of drinking up all her Muscadine wine, and proceeds to finish off the bottle herself.
Since then, it’s been an odd progression. Now several nights a week, we’ll each have a glass of wine. Sometimes I’ll substitute mine for something else4, but it’s become a bit of a ritual. Whether anyone else is home or not, we’ll get home after a hard day5 and have a glass or two of wine. We’ve also started buying a variety of wine whenever we’re out. If she happens to run to the grocery store one night, she’ll pick up something that looks appealing. Similarly, if I’m at Greens picking up something6, I’ll check out whatever they have in one of their mid-aisle displays and see what I see that might be good and grab a bottle.
Now, I know a lot of friends whose families are just drinking families. Some are more sophisticated and enjoy a glass or two of wine with dinner after a day at the office. Others are quite a bit more liberal, cracking open a beer as soon as they enter the door and not stopping until bed. Then there are those more conservative7 families (like ours usually was) where alcohol is rarely used8. It’s just been a bit of an adjustment for me, getting used to having someone else in the house drinking.
I suppose I’m just a tad worried. Is this how it starts? Am I slowly on my way to becoming an alcoholic? If it becomes a daily ritual to have a glass (or two, or three) of wine a night, is that the first step? When do you start to worry about your alcohol consumption? When you hit a 6-pack a night or a bottle a night? Two? Three? Or is it more focused on whether or not you could go without it or not? Don’t most alcoholics belive that they could stop drinking on a regular basis if they wanted to?
So tell me… Do you drink on a regular basis? If so, how much? Have you ever felt that you drink too much? Do you think I should be at all worried about my current level of drinking, or do you think it’s a normal level thus-far? Are there indications that I’m crossing the line into alcoholism? I honestly don’t think I am, and don’t think I ever will. Still, being the type of introspective, analytical type of person I am, I constantly wonder about these things. Is it really so bad to need two or three glasses of wine (or beer, etc.) a night to relax after work? I mean, if that’s what it takes to keep from flipping out and making a mistake9, is it really such a bad thing? Sounds more like a bargain to me…
But that’s why I’m here, pouring out my slightly-inebriated thoughts on my blog… I know there are far greater sources of wisdom out there than I can offer, so I ask you… What do you think?
Life Hacker’s assinine Vista poll…
I checked out the headline Reader Poll: Will Windows Vista send you when I saw it on my Google homepage, mainly because I wanted to see what the rest of the sentence was.
Clicking on it popped up the full-text of Reader Poll: Will Windows Vista send you running to a new OS? and the no-javascript message got me interested, so I decided to load up the article and check out the poll.
Am I the only one that realizes that this poll is totally, obviously, and painfully anti-Vista and anti-Microsoft in general? I mean, every single option may as well have “if I absolutely have to…” tacked on to the end. There’s not a single positive remark made about Vista on the entire poll, despite its increased security measures and the amazing Aero glass effects.
What kind of statistical results can you honestly expect from a poll that could easily be summed up with a single “No way will I upgrade to Vista” option? We may as well have called the post “Why won’t you upgrade to Vista in the new year?”
Thank you for objective and fact-filled reporting, Life Hacker… *unsubscribed*
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