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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).
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The joys of syncing
For over 4 years now, I've actively been doing development in the sync arena trying to get devices to talk together (I actually did some synchronization stuff in college so my history with sync goes back a bit). This is an area that is under appreciated and people seem to only say things when it doesn't work. Syncing is hard; there are no right ways to sync, just wrong ways. No 2 devices or machines match up there data exactly, so choices have to be made to get things to sync. We do our best, but don't always succeed. My recent experience with syncing has nothing to do with the software I write as I don't use it; I don't use it because I don't like it, I don't use it because I don't use the devices we sync. 2 weeks ago, I bought a Motorola RAZR to replace my Samsung A900 with the idea that I could sync it, or at least sync the contacts. Without much difficulty, I was able to sync the contacts. The calendar was another story, it seemed to die depending on what I was syncing; I suspect it had to do with detached events or some kind of repeating events. So I gave up on the calendars, but was still pleased with the contacts. That was until last week when I started noticing that I was missing email addresses for people. It appears that one of my syncs eat secondary email addresses for people. I think I've rebuilt most of my contacts and it doesn't appear to be happening more. While I was a little annoyed at the iSync team/Sync Services team initially, having worked on sync, I know how hard it is to prevent problems. Probably some minor bug that caused the first sync to nuke the entries. Oh well, at least it wasn't the stuff I wrote that ate my data.
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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.
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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!