A ROM Update Scare

I was just procrastinating from marking once again and thought I would update the drivers on my ASUS P5B Deluxe system, including the ROM update. I haven't updated it in about 7 months, and since this board was fairly new when I bought it I assumed there would be have been a significant revision to the chipset and possibly the ROM. I headed over to the Asus website (which as a side note is a lousy interface) downloaded some updates and proceeded to install them. Of course I always get a little spidey sense when upgrading the ROM, but went ahead anyway. Right after I clicked on the FLASH action button, I noticed a check box indicating to set the CMOS back to it's default settings. What sent up the warning bells was that the default settings meant changing the HD configuration back to normal and out of the RAID configuration I had them set up for. My technical instinct of course told me that even if the settings in the CMOS changed the MBR and RAID configuration on the drives was untouched and therefore switching the settings back shouldn't be a big deal, but of course you still worry that you might have just trashed your system. Well the system boots up and wham I get a ROM checksum error. Not entirely unexpected, and after I got over the 5 sec thrill of the keyboard not responding and pressing on the damn FCN Lock key to activate the Fcn keys, I pressed F2 (I should have pressed F1) and reset the CMOS. I then had to reboot and go back into the CMOS to adjust the settings back to RAID. Made the change and my system booted. Unfortunately it had an issue with the video not displaying, but I have experienced this in the past and a simple reboot fixed it. For some reason my system also lost it's video drivers, but that could also have been because I updated the chipset drivers as well.

Anyway all's well that end's well, but as usual a case of simply updating a system wasn't as relaxed as I would have liked, but definitely a good procrastination chore to get the technical juices flowing.

SolarWinds Free tools

Just received an e-mail outlining the free tools offered by Solar Winds. I don't know how many net admins actually use the Solar Winds Suite. I know I find the cost of the tools (most of which you can find opensource equivalents for) to be exorbitant. However they do have a couple of utilities they offer for free:

• NetFlow Configurator v1.0
  Remote configuration utility for collecting Cisco® NetFlow traffic data
  
• SolarWinds TFTP Server v9.1
  
• SolarWinds Advanced Subnet Calculator v9.1
  

My Social Networking system

I spent a bit of time procrastinating from marking last week by trying to figure out a productive system for using all the social networking sites such as FURL, Del.icio.us, MSN Live, Stumbleupon, Linked-In, RSS feeds, facebook. One objective out of this system was to ensure that I separated work from personal; especially when it comes to the facebook side. I now have a facebook profile I use for work related contacts and another I use for more personal communication. As social networking becomes more common in the workplace and IT departments become more accepting of the technology as a tool as opposed to treating it like the anti-christ, then people are going to have to look into separating their personal and business world with these tools. Many people don't realize just how intertwined their online personal and business worlds have become. Just take e-mail for instance...how many people have personal e-mail in the sent and deleted items of their work electronic mailboxes?  I try and send personal e-mail with my personal account, but if I don't, or if I receive personal e-mail to my work account, then I dump all personal communication into a single folder and regularly archive it out of my work mailbox.

Facebook is trying to become the operating system of social networking sites, and we are seeing that with all these applications that link and tie into many of these social networking sites. For instance if you go to my facebook profile you will see that I have applications that display my regularly shared RSS articles from Google Reader, articles & sites that I have dugg through DIGG, articles & sites that I have archived with FURL,  and finally sites that I have stumbled-upon . And of course if this is my business facebook profile, then these would all be done with a consistent account name that I use to share work related, ie technology related information.  If it is my personal facebook profile, then you'll see stuff that I have dugg, furled, stumbled or G-Read for personal interest with a consistent account name I use for personal stuff. Most people would look at that and go...OMG! Where the hell do you get the time! Well...yes it does take a while to set up, understand, and fit it into your daily workflow. In addition you do have to be disciplined and not let it take over your life. However once it is set up, you really just use it as much as you have time for. It really is amazing how many cool sites you can stumbleupon or information you pick up from multiple RSS sources in a fairly short period of time. As far as my bookmarks are concerned, I'm still synchronizing with MSN Live Favorites, and haven't really cosied up to Del.icio.us. Something had to give with all the information I get nailed with, and social bookmarking was it. I wanted a way of synchronizing my local bookmarks with my social bookmarks on an ongoing basis, but nothing really seems to fit the bill. Live favorites works intermittently, and even then it doesn't allow for the depth of sharing del.icio.us does So I've kind of left del.icio.us alone. I hear they are revamping their site, so hopefully this feature will be available. Once again I would share one as a personal set of bookmarks and another as my technology/business related bookmarks, where the tags would simply be my folder names. As it is del.icio.us made me go through all of my bookmarks manually when it imported them, and their certainly wasn't any synchronization. Plus I don't see any  del.icio.us plug-ins that work as well as the local bookmarks. Although maybe I haven't searched hard enough.

Finally of course there is blogging. If you are reading this then you know that this is my professional blog. Consequently then you would expect me to have a personal blog...well...I do, but it's not something I post on the web. As a college instructor I do have to be a little careful of the personal information I expose publicly..;)..I use The Journal for personal notes and updates and store that on my local server. Again I haven't found a good blogging tool for local standalone blog management that a client such as Windows Live Writer would work well with. However that is a whole other quest I am on. I am trying to find the magic way of journal a blend of all my pictures, movies and blogs. I haven't quite figured out a good system there yet. At some point I'll figure it out.

The key with all this technology is just to make it easy and accessible from anywhere. Too much effort to use any one of these tools and you just won't bother! Therefore in order to make this happen you have to invest the time to investigate and build a workflow. The pay off is the amazing stuff you now become aware of that before you had no idea existed. If nothing else you can become a great source of facts and entertainment at the dinner table!.

More social networking

A really interesting issue that is beginning to hit the headlines, and will continue to as social networking becomes more pervasive, is the use of social networking during work hours. My theory on it all and a message I would pass on to all those network managers packetshaping, websensing and monitoring all the traffic is to just relax! Is it really a big deal if someone nips into facebook for a  few minutes, an hour or a even blows off the whole day? In reality who is it that has to deal with the lack of productivity of that individual? Well first of all if the employee has a regular job's worth of work, then they are going to have to pull in some late nights and long hours to make up for blowing the time off. If they don't then their supervisor should be taking note of the lack of productivity and questioning the employee. As a very last resort, if for example we are talking about a very well protected union worker who is doing nothing and the supervisor has no authority to make that person do the work, THEN it might be suitable to get the IT department to track that employees surfing habits. But this whole big brother thing just puts people into the mindset of trying to dodge THE MAN....the evil empire called the IT department. This is not the image we are trying to project. When did the IT department become the cops for peoples work habits? Just because the technology allows them to do it, it doesn't mean they have to. They need due diligence, and maybe the logs to allow them to go back, but it's not something I believe they should be actively monitoring and taking action on. But then and again, this is my "we are all one big happy family side" talking.