Hurting the environment by conversing

Prior to our son being born almost 2 years ago, my wife and I decided that we'd use cloth diapers with him (she did the research and I just nodded my head). They are a bit of work to clean and wash (my wife does most of it), but we figure in the long run, they will be better for the environment. How can we say that? Well, we believe that there will be clean energy in the future (solar, wind, etc.) and we'll (as a society) be able to cost effectively desalinate water.

On the other hand, disposable diapers possibly use less energy to make, don't require any water to clean, but they will end up in the landfill where they can't decompose (decomposition requires sunlight and most items in a dump don't get any sun).

Our mayor has announced that we'll have water cutbacks this summer and there will be fines for excess use. Since we use a lot of water to do diapers, we have to consider if we're going to eat the fines or switch to disposable diapers. So if we conserve water and are unable to wash diapers, we'll have to use disposable diapers that will basically hurt the environment.

Stuck between a rock and a hard place.

The joys and pains of a VPN

After many years of securing each service, i.e. email, web site, etc. for my servers and servers I managed, I came to realize that the only way to secure a company with more than 1 server is with a VPN. Now that I've used a VPN for about a week, I'm extremely happy with it. This will allow us to stop maintaing the firewall on 7 separate servers! My IT coordinator has done an amazing job at getting it running and when he was stuck, he called in a pro (knowing when to say that you don't know something scores points in my book).

This week, we were trying to connect our San Diego office to our main Minneapolis office. This proved to be much harder than it should have been. We have Cisco routers on both ends and used the EZVPN in the router to establish the connection; turns out it wasn't very easy. We had it working yesterday, but when I took it into the office, it failed to work. I took another stab at it today. After lots and lots of Google searching, I stumbled across some information about MTUs and made a few changes that amazingly got the VPN working flawlessly! The problem was that I could make connections that only sent a little data, but SSH connections and full web pages over the VPN failed.

The following are changes I had to make to the Cisco 871 on the remote side:

crypto isakmp keepalive 10 periodic

For the Vlan and Ethernet interfaces, I set:

 ip mtu 1400

and on the Vlan1 interface, I set:

 ip tcp adjust-mss 1200

(The last bit was the key.)

I'm tempted to get Cisco certified, but I'd probably pull my hair out if I encountered a problem like this again.

Picking the right shoes

When I was young, the only shoes that would fit were the blue ones! That was then, now things are a bit more complicated. Up until I started running, I just got some cheap shoes and didn't really care. Road Runner Sports has a free service called Shoe Dog that helps you pick the right shoe based on so criteria, a tread mill test, and an analysis of your arch. I had been using the same series of shoe, Asics GT-2100 series for a few years. When I went to get my latest pair of shoes, I went with the GT-2140, the latest in the series. Turns out that they made some major changes to the shoe that made them very painful when running. Luckily Road Runner Sports has a 60 day guarantee on the shoes (if you're part of their "club") that allows you to run in them. I ran a few times and had such pain, that I returned to Road Runner Sports, did the Shoe Dog again and picked a Saucony shoe that so far is a bit more comfortable.

I'm amazed that I never paid much attention to shoes even though I have spent a lot of time walking and running; if I had known how much a shoe could make a difference in comfort, I would have spent the money for a good shoe a long time ago!

Courteous neighbors

Last Sunday, I went to take in our trash can and found a surprise, dog poop wrapped in a paper towel (no, I didn't touch it). The trash got picked up on Saturday, but I didn't get around to bringing in the can until the next day. To make matters worse, it rained, so I had to attempt to clean out the trash can by scooping out the poop with a stick and then hosing it down. What kind of neighbor, a) puts their dog's poop in someone else's trash can (I always take my dog's poop in a bag back home as I think it is rude to deposit it in someone else's trash can and b) didn't use a bag to scoop the poop!

Uggh. We live in a pretty decent neighborhood and have friendly neighbors, but I guess when people aren't watching people just do whatever they want.