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Protecting yourself after the Equifax personal information leaks

The Equifax leak of our personal information is particularly harmful; it makes identity theft of most credit holding Americans trivially easy for the rest of their lives. Not for just one year, but until we pass away. The problem is that the information leaked is all the personal details that do not change. Steve Rubin […]

Freedom of speech and public access

I had to stop and think about the possibility of my own hypocrisy today… I have been casually following the story of Dreamhost (full disclosure, I’ve been a happy Dreamhost webhosting customer for many years) fighting attempts by the US government to collect detailed information on visitors to sites organizing protests against Trump. http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/15/politics/dreamhost-department-of-justice-trump-opponents/index.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/justice-department-trump-dreamhost-protests.html […]

Career Change

Friday, March 31st, was my last day at a job I have absolutely loved for three amazing years. Cvent is a great place to work, and they will have an opening for a Linux/Windows systems engineer. I highly recommend this position with a great team and many excellent learning opportunities in a truly integrated DevOps […]

No wonder American voters are so poorly informed

I am usually very lucky to mostly be sheltered in a wonderful cocoon that is essentially free of commercial television. When I travel I get disgusted at the number of places that have the propaganda, sensationalist, and fake news channel Fox News on and blaring loud all the time. I don’t get that crap at […]

A personal message about the importance of backing up your data

Woo hoo! Time Machine to the rescue. My personal laptop, work laptop, and Dreamhost shell account all auto-sync a few personal data files of very useful data between them… This morning I corrupted one instance and that corruption was synchronized, wiping out all the work in all three locations… Thankfully I have two redundant backup […]

Microsoft Surface Studio, impressive!

Microsoft announced a new desktop computer yesterday, and I confess I usually am in the habit of ignoring Microsoft announcements because they typically offer nothing I am interested in; but yesterday’s announcement is stunning and ground breaking. The new Surface Studio is the first Microsoft product I actually want since Photosynth launched in 2008… Microsoft […]

Firefox 49.0.2 update – beware…

So apparently the new Firefox update (49.0.2) overwrites your cert8.db file – for many people that does not matter; but if you have a lot of self-signed certs and internal to your company certificates to trust this is a catastrophe unless you backed up your cert8.db or can get another from your corporate IT folks. […]

The importance of good examples in coding and configuration files

My employer has chosen to use DataDog for some of it’s monitoring, and I have been having a really hard time getting simple process monitoring to work reliably. Turns out that the process.yaml file syntax used by DataDog agents is very dependent on Python language psutil calls, and there is quite a difference between single […]

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3rd generation Ford Focus owner/driver tips

Ford Focus, DCT transmission anomalies explained, and some useful information for 3rd generation Ford Focus owners/drivers. We’ve been reading loads of useful information and tips at: focusfanatics.com In particular – this posting makes a a LOT of sense: Ford Powershift DCT Transmission info use guide new owners look here

Trump, the GOP, and The Fall

This is absolutely brilliantly written and worded; and expresses exactly my feelings on the current election and self-destruction of the Republican party… I confess I never know if I should cheer on that self-destruction, or lament the loss of a reasonable and rational counterpoint to the Democratic party, which does need a healthy check against […]