Master & Commander

We watched Master & Commander last night, which exceeded my expectations by quite a bit. I thought it was going to be one of those cheesy movies intended to draw a large audience that's completely predictable from the outset, but was surprised at how much originality there was to the movie. If you haven't seen it, it's now available for rental, and is certainly worth your money. The DTS soundtrack is great, when the scenes were down in the lower areas of the ship you can hear people walking or running on the decks above you, and it sounded so real that I thought there was someone upstairs in our house.

Can I keep it?

I'm testing out a 1.25 Ghz 15" PowerBook this weekend, in the hopes of being able to keep it. It's coming out of our on-campus Apple store, and has been used as a demo. Hopefully my dept. can come up with the money to make it mine permanently, I miss the iBook I used to have. I requested one of the new 12" PowerBooks, but our Director told me to check with the Apple Sales group first, as they'll usually give us a hefty discount on these slightly used models. This one has the SuperDrive, 80GB hard drive, and AirPort Extreme already built in. What more could you want? There are really some great apps for the Macintosh these days, and OS X is a lot more mature than it used to be. I think when my grandparents need a new computer, I'm steering them towards Macs from now on...

I'm back

Well, I'm back in Iowa, and back at work. I came back today for my first annual review since joining my new department. It was a good review, pretty accurate, both in where they complimented me, and where I was criticized. I was rated "Highly Satisfactory" overall, so I think that means they're keeping me. :)

Higher Ed. Blogger

Just so I don't forget about it when I get home, I need to add this site to my list of daily reads, it belongs to another Sysadmin in Higher Ed who also runs NetBackup.

Wireless Hacker

I hacked my first wireless network today, but don't worry, I had my white hat on. One of the neighbors had left their wi-fi network wide-open to anyone and everyone, and didn't even bother to change the default password. It took me 15 seconds to gain control of their access point, but once I did, I merely changed their wireless channel. If you have a wireless access point, please set it to something other than channel 6, as that's the default channel of almost every brand of access point, which leads to a lot of access points (4 in range of the house here) that are speaking on the same channel, which is a bad idea. It's too bad I couldn't easily identify which house the network belonged to, or I'd have set their password for them, and let them know that they need to secure their network better, but I don't really have any easy way to track that down.