Waiting to get new tires at Costco

Waiting to get new tires at Costco

Glad I got to Costco early to get new tires. People are already waiting

Growing zucchini

Tomatoes and zucchini are going to be ready to eat soon. =)

Harvested the first stringbeans of the season. Yum.

Creditors may bring America to the brink of Revolution

Enconomist will tell you that the economy goes through cycles of ups and downs and right now we are on a downward spiral. In my opinion, this recession was brought on by greed and such a drastic recession could have been avoided. In order to line their pockets, the creditors and mortgage lenders knowingly issued credit to indivudials that would have normally not gotten the line of credit. Now hard woking people are being crushed under a mountain of debt unable to make payments and losing their homes. Then when people file for personal bankrupcy and banks foreclose on homes, the creditors that initially issued that credit are losing money casuing the creditors to shut down. Normally this is type of cause and effect economics is played out daily with no intervention. But this time, the government decided to step in a save the creditors that gambled and lost using more of American money to bail them out of trouble. Top execuitves of those firms are still getting their multi-million dollar bonuses.
Now, the creditors are increasing their rates to generate more income using the recession as an excuse for the rate hike. Does it make sense to raise rates on people who are already having trouble paying their bills?

Banks encourage you give them your money for a tiny percent of interest in return, but they turn around give us back our money in the form of credit charging 20 times the interest! We are fighting a losing battle that the banks and creditors are reaping rewards on the breaking backs of Americans. Today, in a economy based on debt, the creditors and banks join the focus of our fustration and contempt.

One of the reasons that the USA was formed was because of the people were tired of the government increasing taxes and fees making difficult to live. If you keep pushing people to the edge they will push back. One of my favoraite lines in the move Fight Club, describes this sentiment: 

"[T]he people you are after are the people you depend on. We cook your meals, we haul your trash, we connect your calls, we drive your ambulances. We guard you while you sleep. Do not... fuck with us."

 

Everyone is not a victim here. American culture is somewhat to blame as well. We belive in the American dream and that involves new cars, big homes, and comfortable living. This culture in conjunction with seeming unending credit has allowed Americans to live beyond their means. Instead of reducing our expenses, we open a new line of credit to pay for the things we already can not afford, digging us deeper into the hole. Americans need to take responsiblity and change their thinking to understand the reality of what they can and can not afford in order to stop this downward sprial. However, this does not get all of those companies that sold us the noose and gave us enough rope to hang ourselves off the hook. --

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System Center Operations Manager Maintenance Mode Scheduler

I can't believe that this feature is not built into SCOM 2007. It is a common enough occurrence that a server is rebooted weekly for whatever reason. It would be great to schedule SCOM maintenance mode during the same time so the reboots do not send out alerts. Secondly, if the server does not come up after a reboot, you would be alerted when it came out of maintenance mode. Well, it turns out the work around to this is to create a powershell script and use scheduled task to run it. Here is a cool utility that provides a GUI to do that.

http://www.scom2k7.com/scom-remote-maintenance-mode-scheduler-20/


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Twitter, Facebook, Xbox Live Down - What's next

The recent outages that Twitter, Facebook and now Xbox Live have experienced are apparently from a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. This type of attack is difficult to defend against since it is inherent in the way that computers communicate. Actually it is quite amazing that the TCP/IP protocol has worked well for over 30 years. Can you think of any technology that has lasted that long before being obsolete? I have not researched if IPv6 will provide some sort of protection for a massive flood of data that can cause these types of global outages. The fact is that everyone on the web is susceptible to an organized DoS attack and while there might be some remediation actions that can be used to restore service, the protocol will need to be redesigned to react differently to this type of attack.

Operations Manager 2007 Report Errors

I was getting the error Cannot initialize report. The item ... could not be found when trying to run performance reports that show up as a task on the right side of the Operations Manager Console. After troubleshooting with Microsoft, we found that it was a permissions issue. We needed to make the account that is the action account, sdk_config, Data Writer, and Data Reader account a local admin on the RMS and the Data Warehouse server. Also if you have created a SCOM Admins group, also make this a local admin on both servers. Then restart the Operation Manager services on the RMS and watch for error/warnings in the Operation Manager event log.

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