Thinkstuff

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I spent most of today at the University of Iowa, attending a seminar put on by Erb's, Microsoft, and IBM. Most of the network security information that was presented wasn't new to me, but I found the sales pitch from the IBM rep to be interesting. I haven't paid attention to the desktop market much since I moved into networking, but when it comes time to buy my next laptop, I'll be looking long and hard at their ThinkPad series. The pre-boot environments they've built to allow easy recovery and backups of the disk image are very cool, even allowing internet access without a working OS! If I had to manage a fleet of laptops, I think it's what I'd pick. They also have nifty little finterprint readers and built in hard drive encryption via a dedicated encryption chip on the motherboard. If security is your thing, look to IBM, Dell doesn't have anything this cool...

Wired

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Did I mention that Halo 2 is awesome?  It's consumed much of my free time for the last week, though I did find time on Saturday to wire my house for ethernet and new voice lines with the help of Gary and his wife Bekah.  Well, actually, they wired it with my help.  Or, more accurately, Bekah wired it while Gary sort of helped, and I watched and ordered pizza.

In any case, my house now has a 24-port cat 5e patch panel installed in the basement, with 16 ports of cat 5e wired throughout the house.  It all goes into my 24-port 10/100 switch, which I hope to replace with a gigabit switch at some point in the future.  We also ran new voice lines over cat 5e, though they're not hooked up yet.  I'm going to run coax to the same jacks as well, as soon as I find the time...

The Incredibles

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Holly & I went to see The Incredibles last night, and it was an absolute blast, and you should go see it. The movie is funny, clever, and just a joy to look at. I thought going in to it that it'd be sort of The Tick meets the Fantastic Four, but I was surprised at how original the story was, and how fresh it all felt, given the large number of "superhero movies" in the past. We went to a 9:20 p.m. show, to avoid unnecessary exposure to children, and the movie got more laughs than any straight comedy I've seen in the theatres in the last several years. It's a good movie for kids too, and one parents certainly won't be bored watching. If you want a second opinion, Roger Ebert's review is here.