ksagarsee

Well, last night it happened. Jeanette and I were on the couch watching Elf. I had my head in her lap, and I finally felt it. Our baby kicked me in the head for the first time ever. There’s not much cooler and weirder than having the baby INSIDE your wife kick you THROUGH your wife.

Those of you who are fathers will remember the first time you felt your son or daughter kick you while inside their mother. I strongly recommend reliving the experience. Here’s how:

1. Get your kid to roll up into a tiny ball
2. Have your wife lay on top of them
3. Now you lay on top of them
4. Experience the magic of those little fists and feet kick you through your wife again… but get up before your child runs out of air. (That part is VERY important, as they just spent about 2 minutes under 2 grown adults whose combined weight is potentially around 350 - 400+ lbs.)

    
    

   Or, if you aren’t too keen on potentially squashing the guts out of your child, just lay on the floor and have little Johnny or little Susie (those are your kids names… you should have recognized them.) come and just kick you a few times in the head as hard as they can. You may think to yourself, “Hey! These kids are a LOT bigger! They kick really hard now!” That’s when you get to thank God for how well they’ve grown since you felt them move for the first time, and also thank Adidas for making their soccer cleats so darn affordable.

   Whether you pick the first or the second option, I hope you can take some time to relive what it was like when YOU were waiting for your first baby to be born.

Our Toshiba eStudio 3510 has systematically ruined my day.

Dear estudio 3510,

I freaking hate you. Stop sucking! Why can’t you work like your exact twin downstairs? There is no difference between the two of you except that it works and you screw up everything.

Just when we think we have you working and happy, you find a new way to screw everything up. I don’t have time to deal with you, and looking at you just makes me angry.

Sincerely,

Kyle

We just ordered some new Dell D830 laptops for some of our staff that have Vista Ultimate on them, and I’m experiencing the wonders that are Bitlocker for the first time.

Bitlocker is super easy to set up.

1. In BIOS turn on the TPM chip on the motherboard.
2. Do Updates (make sure to get them from Microsoft, not from your system administrator if you use SCE or something like that) and get the Ultimate Extra Bitlocker Drive Preparation Tool which will get you rolling.
3. Run the Bitlocker Drive Preparation Tool which will create a partition that won’t get encrypted so the computer has something to boot from and activates the TPM chip on the motherboard.
4. Run Bitlocker it will save the Bitlocker password for you to a USB key, and you can print it off as well. (They recommend storing it in multiple locations AWAY from your computer).
5. Do the recommended system check where it will attempt to start the computer and read the USB key’s password you just saved there. It will reboot and make sure everything is good.
6. Bitlocker will run in the systray while it encrypts your drive. This takes a LONG time. Our laptops have 160gb hard drives, and it takes around 5 hours to encrypt them. But once it’s finished, you’re done!

    
    

   Ok, here’s where I give you some added info you won’t easily find on Microsoft’s website…

   I had to swap a hard drive into a different laptop (the original laptop had some hardware issues out of the box) and when I booted it, it asked for the USB key with the password, which is fine. I put it in, and it started right up. However, I rebooted again to test it, and yet again… it asked for the USB key. The TPM chip on the motherboard didn’t match the encryption on the hard drive. Dang it. So, here’s what I did after checking microsoft.com and not really getting a clear answer.

    
    

7. Run Bitlocker again, and choose Turn off Bitlocker. It will ask what you want to do, whether you want to decrypt the drive or just disable bitlocker… decrypt that sucker. This takes a while, but not as long as encryption.
8. You guessed it, Run Bitlocker and re-encrypt the drive. Is it faster the second time around? No. Of course not. That’s dumb.

    
    

   So lesson learned, don’t encrypt the drive until you know the computer is in good working order… cuz it takes all day to re-encrypt a hard drive.

    
    

    
    

    
    

As an IT guy I hear a lot of fear and complaints whenever Microsoft rolls out a new product - whether it’s a new version of Internet Explorer (”Oh NO! It’s gonna break our poorly coded portal site!” and “tabbed browsing? What the heck do I need that for?”) or Office (”A Ribbon? Are you serious?” and “A new format? Why isn’t it backwards compatible?”) to everyone’s favorite… Windows (”Allow or Deny. Allow or Deny. It’s soooo stupid!” “All of my hardware is going to break I just know it!” “I hope it has a compatibility mode for my COBAL program that our entire company is run on” and my favorite, “I see no business reason to upgrade! It’s just prettier!”).

Before I give you my business case for MS Vista, let me give you a little background on Vista and I. I’ve been using Vista since last November (wow, almost a year) when it was a Release Candidate. I of course fell in love quickly with the pretty new interface and initially had a hard time dealing with UAC and finding where my control panel applets were. While I worked at Notre Dame, I was part of the planning team for the move to Vista and as such did a LOT of testing on it, to make sure it would work well for our staff and faculty. When Vista was released I was one of the first adopters at the university. When I came here to GCC I was handed a laptop and was given the option between XP and Vista and quickly chose Vista. So, point is… I’ve used the thing. I’ve used it a LOT. I’d say pretty confidently, I’ve used it more than most of the people I talk to who have an opinion on it. So, from experience, let me tell you why I think Vista is a GREAT investment for your church/company.

1. U.A.C. I would say this is one of the most maligned parts of Vista, so let me hit it first. Yes, it’s annoying. That’s the whole point. NOTHING gets installed on your computer without your consent. Actions that are going to affect the registry do not happen without your consent. This is excellent for your basic user in a domain environment, because they can’t install their good buddy the AOL toolbar or whatever smileys they get advertised in that forward their aunt sent without someone with Admin credentials allowing them to do so. (Those of you with macs might recognize this. They (apple and unix) do the same thing with their user accounts. You can’t install unless you use an admin account to do it, AND the great thing about U.A.C. (yes I said great thing) is that I don’t have to log off their account and log on as my admin account to install it! YAY!!!! Soooo much time saved for your helpdesk guy!
   1. Now. My caveat (I spelled caveat right!) As an IT guy, I trust myself. I do not run U.A.C. on my machine. I know what I’m doing when I install something and know that I’m trust worthy. If you’re an IT guy, you can and probably should turn U.A.C. off unless you feel that you should get a good feel for what your users are experiencing, which is always a good idea.
   2. And my second caveat… yes, U.A.C. CAN screw up SOME programs. In fact in our environment it messes up Great Plains (yes, it’s a MS product. I see the irony as well). You should be testing ALL of your software anyway before it gets rolled out to your users. From my experience, if their website says that their software works with Vista, you’re golden. If it doesn’t say it… CALL THEM. That will do 3 things: 1 tell you if it doesn’t work yet. 2 encourage them to get off their butts and fix their product. 3 more than likely they’ll have a work around until they have a version that works with Vista and it’s a lot easier to just ask them to try to search for it on the internet and hope what you found works.
2. Search is by far, my FAVORITE part of Vista. You don’t realize how much time you’ve been wasting until you start hitting the Windows key and just type “outl” and hit enter to launch outlook, or the first few letters of ANY program on your computer to find and launch it. So much faster (and faster = productivity in the business world right?). Search for your documents fast by doing the same thing. Don’t remember the name of the file? That’s ok! You might remember a word or two in the file, and you can search for that. If for instance I search for the word “Jeanette” (my wife’s name) I get a ton of results including images, word docs, emails, internet history, calendar items… you get the idea. This is the best feature.
   1. Vista is all about metadata, so you can tag files and search by tags instead of dealing with folders if you’re the tagging kind. It seems like a lot of work as far as I’m concerned, but it’s a sweet feature none the less.
   2. Small caveat, there are times were it takes a while longer than you get used to for searches to come up. More than likely it’s like indexing or something. This seems like something that will get fixed as we go to SP1 here in the near future.
3. Volume Shadow Copy will save your life. Well, maybe not your life, but dang. When it comes to accidentally deleting something, which we all have done… this has got your back. I can right click on a file (or a whole folder) and look at its list of previous versions and I can choose from the list of one’s I’d like to restore. Now you try and tell me your CEO won’t appreciate that, and you won’t appreciate not having to go scrambling through your back up solution to restore some word document for him/her when you could be doing other things. VSC = GOLD. You want this, you need this. No, like seriously. You do.
4. Vista is easy to use. So far I have sat down with every person here at GCC I’ve rolled Vista out to and walked them through the basics of Vista (focusing heavily on search) and gave them about a 10 minute walkthrough of Windows AND Office 2007 (also worth the investment). I then check back up on them later that day and a few days down the road. I’ve found that the questions and problems I’ve gotten from my Vista users have been few and far between and usually easily resolved. I hear a lot of, “Well, at first I couldn’t find X but then I tried the search thing, and there it is!” Users that figure stuff out for themselves make me happy.
   1. Case in point, our senior pastor had a computer running XP that was extremely slow. I upgraded him and his assistant to Vista together and now rather than doing most of his work from home because it’s less painful, he can be here near his assistant, and near the rest of his staff. I’ve talked to him multiple times and the few concerns he’s had are minimal and were easy to resolve. He is VERY excited about his new computer and loves Vista.
   2. Second case, our Executive Pastor is a much stronger techie kinda guy. He knows his stuff and when he switched to Vista (on his own) we rarely heard a peep from him regarding Vista (granted, he did have some issues with Outlook 2007, but that had to do with the huge size of his mailbox, an issue that Outlook has always struggled with). Now let me tell you, getting buy in from your executive pastor and your head pastor on something like this… HUGE win.
5. Vista is pretty. Yes, you knew I had to mention it. Dang it, it just looks cool. I like shiny black things and Vista gives me that. I feel like I’m in some car that I can’t afford every time I start my computer. The Aero glass interface just adds coolness. Do I need to be able to see through my taskbar? Well… no. But it sure is cool. Real time previews though, are AWESOME. I can have a video going, or a game and if I switch windows, and mouse over the program in the taskbar, I can see LIVE what’s happening. Coolness. Vista recommends a big graphics card, and it delivers on it. The resources are there, and Vista uses them well I think. Heck, even solitaire has its first upgrade since Windows 3.1 and is now all 3Dish.

   So those are my top 5 reasons to go for Vista.

    
    

   The most frequent comment I get from tech people who try vista (and no Ed, not just you ;-)) is that it’s different. Yes. Yes. I know it’s different, but who notices and minds the differences? You and I who are smart enough to work through and around differences, or the end users who just need to be able to use Office and the Internet to do their job? Sure there are differences, but we adapt, just like we did with Windows 95 and XP and like we have to do with Vista.

    
    

   Hope this helps you all, I really believe in Vista, it’s been a great ride and I look forward to the future of Windows!

today as I was drivin to work there was this accident that happened right in front of me, this guy totally hit this car, just T-boned the thing and flipped it over, it was the car right in front of me. so I got out and checked on the car that got hit, and there was a mom and 2 little kids in car seats. the 2 kids were screamin, but the mom was unconscious. I stopped for a minute, not sure who I should help out of the car first, but I figured the mom would want me to get the kids out first, so I crawled in through the window and started unfastening the little one in the back and got her out and sat her down in the ditch, then went around and got the little boy out of the car seat in the front. he had a big cut on his forehead and was bleedin a lot. some other cars had stopped so I told this guy to call 911 while I tried to get the mom out.

I came back around and tried to talk to her, but she wasn’t responsive so I checked her pulse and she was still alive, but she didn’t look good. the other car had hit her directly. I couldn’t get her seatbelt off, so I went and got the knife out of my jeep and cut it off and tried to pull her out of the car, but her leg was stuck under the steering wheel where the seat had been lifted up and had her kinda pinned in there. so I crawled around to the passenger side and got in and started working her leg free. just as I got it unstuck I heard the ambulance and they ran up and were able to pull her out of the car now that I had her leg unstuck.

the two little kids were still screaming, but a lady had come out of a house nearby and was holding them and trying to comfort them. the guy who was in the other car who had hit them was totally fine, he had gotten out of his car and was just sitting on the curb in shock. I think he was drunk. the cops showed up and I had to tell them like 5 times what happened, and they got the car towed away and the mom and the kids to the hospital. I’m gonna call later to make sure they’re ok. the mom didn’t look too good but at least the ambulance got there quick so they took care of her and kept her breathin and stuff… they left for the hospital, and the cops told me I should go ahead and go to work, they were gonna clean everything up. (I asked and they don’t really use coke to clean up blood off the street like everyone says they do. they use this bleach stuff.) so ya, I left for work and got here about an hour late, but once I explained what all happened, they were obviously cool with it.

man I wish some of that had been true. today would have been a lot cooler.