Fighting the Stereotypes

Posted on September 22, 2009 by mikerigsby

[tweetmeme source=”mikerigsby” only_single=false http://mikerigsby.wordpress.com]

A couple different things have happened to me this morning that have prompted me to do what all modern day ‘ranters’ do, and that’s post a blog entry about it. So, bear with me as I get on my digital soapbox again to set a few things straight.

No, I am not a Nerd.
I’m a geek. In fact, I’m what I like to refer to as Geek 2.0 and I’m damned proud of that fact.

However, if you ever associate me with The Geek Squad, be prepared to get your next helpdesk request pushed to the bottom of the list.

No, I cannot quote every episode of Star Trek from memory or do analytical calculus in my head.
I do, however, love watching Big Bang Theory and I can most likely disassemble your desktop computer and reassemble it with my eyes closed.

No, I do not wear taped up glasses, a pocket protector, or ‘high water’ black polyester pants, a short sleeved white shirt and a black tie.
(Although, I used to wear a pocket protector at work, but we won’t go there. We all have our private shames to bear.)
I wear Levis, T-shirts, and Nikes on casual days and khakis and button up shirts on work days.

No, I do not listen to Barry Manilow or Barbara Streisand.
I like good Rock n’ Roll, Heavy Metal and toss in ‘80s music for fun. My favorite band is Breaking Benjamin, followed closely by Metallica.

Yes, I’m a PC dammit!
However, contrary to those pretentious (although admittedly funny) Apple commercials, I am a 195lb ‘PC’ who could kick the butt of that sanctimonious douchebag on the commercials with my eyes closed.

No, I do not only eat Totino’s Pizza Rolls and drink Mountain Dew.
I like my coffee, but I also like good micro-brewed beer. I like pizza. I like Italian food and Mexican food.

Yes, I do get exercise! It may come as a total shock to some people, but us ‘IT geeks’ actually do physical work from time to time. I average 12-15 miles walking a day. I carry around a backpack that weighs damn near 15lbs. I run up and down flights of stairs carrying desktop computers and CRT monitors.

The next time you say ‘Good Morning Mike, how are you?’, actually mean it, without any other agenda.
Don’t get all offended when I answer by saying ‘What’s broken now?” I’m not an idiot.
When you don’t talk to me, unless something is wrong with your computer, I know your ‘Good Morning’ is actually ‘Help! I spilled coffee on my keyboard!’

Posted in Random Rants | 2 Comments

The gospel of coffee

Posted on September 16, 2009 by mikerigsby

[tweetmeme source=”mikerigsby” only_single=false http://mikerigsby.wordpress.com]

Caffeine is my shepherd; I shall not doze.

It maketh me to wake in green pastures.

It leadeth me beyond the sleeping masses.It restoreth my buzz.

It leadeth me in the paths of consciousness for its name’s sake.

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of addiction,I will fear no Equal™.

For thou art with me; thy cream and thy sugar they comfort me.

Thou preparest a carafe before me in the presence of The Starbucks.

Thou anointest my day with pep; my mug runneth over.

Surely richness and taste shall follow me all the days of my life.

And I will dwell in the House of Mochas forever

Author Unknown

Posted in Random Rants | 1 Comment

I love technology!

Posted on September 16, 2009 by mikerigsby

[tweetmeme source=”mikerigsby” only_single=false http://mikerigsby.wordpress.com]

As I sit here, I am remembering a time when I was a kid, watching Star Trek and laughing about how ridiculous the gadgets in it were at the time. Tricorders, communicator badges, etc.

Now, here I am, writing this on a laptop computer that has more computing power than any computer in the entire U.S. Military at the time of those episodes, an 80GB hard drive (which is even small by today’s standards), wireless capabilities with a theoretical maximum speed of 300 Mbits/s, and a fingerprint scanner.

I am connected to a computer network that communicates in the gigabit\s speeds, has hundreds of other computers, and maintains storage capacity of nearly 7 terabytes, and our network is small!

I cooked my lunch in a microwave oven, in 3 minutes, that would have taken my mother 30 minutes in a standard oven to cook when I was a kid.

I carry around a PDA and a Blackberry, both of which have about 5x the computing power of the first home computer I ever owned and they both fit in the palm of my hand. I also carry a personal cellular phone that has portable television capabilities.

In our car we have a GPS unit that can direct me, turn by turn, straight to someone’s front doorstep on the other side of the country that I have never personally been to before.

I work for a cirtcuit board manufacturing company that has machines that regularly place capacitors and resistors that are as small as .0001 inch x .0005 inch size, basically a grain of salt, and it places them at high speeds in the thousands per board.

We print barcoded labels that are .750 inch x .250 inch at 600 dpi that holds a 2-dimensional barcode that can contain nearly 100 characters.

When I leave here today I will be using my laptop, via a connection with my Blackberry, to surf the internet from the seat of a bus. The bus will be travelling an average of 45-50 mph and going through a city of over 1,000,000 other people.

You, the reader, are most likely someone I’ve never personally met and chances are you live at least across the country, if not the world.

You came across this mindless pondering of mine by also surfing the internet. You are among as many as 1,668,870,408 people worldwide who regularly surf the internet.

Take a moment to remember how your life was as a kid and compare it to your life now.

As I write this I can’t help but have a couple questions.

1. What changes and advancements will our children get to see if we have seen so much within our lives?

2. Where the hell is my Transporter and my hand-held Phaser?!

Posted in IT Insanity, Random Rants | Comments Off on I love technology!

Turning green from reading about ‘Going Green’?

Posted on September 16, 2009 by mikerigsby
[tweetmeme source=”mikerigsby” only_single=false http://mikerigsby.wordpress.com]
Well me too, but too bad! Don’t worry, this will be my one entry with gratuitous use of the over-used topic.
I can’t take all of the credit because our Facilities Department did the majority of the changes (switching out lighting for low wattage lights, changing HVAC schedules, etc.) that had the most impact, but I did develop a power saving plan for desktop PCs at work that required no expense for any extra software.
Between the two programs we will save our company about $15,000 off our annual power bill from 2008. Beer money!
Here is what I did and it wasn’t complicated, in case you’re curious.
Our Dell Optiplex desktops have a handy BIOS level option to power on the pc at a specific time. Many new computers have similar options in BIOS so check to see if yours does.
I set the desktops to power on 30 minutes prior to our opening time.
The next thing done was I wrote a batch file with a simple command:
shutdown.exe -s -f
What this does is to silently, i.e. without user intervention, forces a computer to shut itself off.
Then use the Scheduled Task function to run the batch file at a reasonable time that will ensure that no one will still be using it.
Between that batch file shutting down the computer at a set time and BIOS turing it back on it made a nice, automated, power profile that was simple enough for anyone to do.
“But my computer doesn’t have an auto-poweron option in BIOS!” Had a quite a few of those myself. So, I did some searching online and found an interesting little application called WakeOnStandby (wosb.exe).
What this little application does, is pretty much all of the above plus more. It will send your computer into Hibernate or Standby at a certain time. Then it’ll wake it back up a set amount of hours later.
Another feature of the program is that it will automatically launch a single application, such as Outlook.exe, right after waking it back up. Nice if you want your email open and ready when you get to work.
You can locate this handy little application here: http://www.dennisbabkin.com.
Support the Starving Developers Fund and give the man ‘some love’ if you use his application.
The one hitch I found in WakeOnStandby is that some programs have services that run in the background and will cause the program to stall and not put the computer to sleep.
Either that or people tend to leave programs, like MS Word or Outlook open when the go home at night.
My solution for this was another batchfile\Scheduled Task combination with the following:
Taskkill /F /IM Program name
Example: Taskkill /F /IM Outlook.exe
That combined with another Scheduled Task that is set to run right before WakeOnStandy is set to put the desktop to sleep did the trick.
There are other, more complex tips for setting up power saving profiles that are more than can be gone over in a blog entry so if you are needing some help, feel free to contact me.
Posted in IT Insanity, Random Rants | Comments Off on Turning green from reading about ‘Going Green’?

My little ‘bag of tricks’ or Tools I use to kill pesky software.

Posted on September 14, 2009 by mikerigsby

[tweetmeme source=”mikerigsby” only_single=false http://mikerigsby.wordpress.com]

Ok, not a bag but a USB thumb drive. Never the less, the following is a breakdown of the programs I use for my systematic hunting down and eradicating of malware.

Malware, for those who might not know, stands for Malicious Software. The description is a broad category that includes viruses, adware, and spyware.

Basically, any software that either does harm to your operating system and files/programs, or simply delivers annoying and unwanted advertising in the form of constant pop-ups.

At the very least, malware bogs down your system resources and slows your computer down to being a doorstop.

First off, I have a couple notes of interest. For one, every piece of software in my toolkit is FREE. A price everyone will appreciate.

Also, something technicians will likely know, but not everyone, is that thumb drives can become infected when you plug one into an infected machine.

So, as with other things in life, if you are going to stick your tool into a slot where you’re not sure who’s been poking around in there before you, USE PROTECTION!!

A virus will ‘attack’ and infect file types that it recognizes as executable, i.e. install files. So, a trick is to make it so the virus has no idea what file type it is.

What I recommend is, remove the file extension after you’ve downloaded the program to your thumb drive.

Example: One of the programs I use is Malwarebytes. The install file that you download is: mbam-setup.exe.

So, when I was first setting up my thumb drive, I downloaded that file, then right-clicked on it and selected Rename. I then removed the .exe from the end of the file.

This does render the file unusable, until you rename it again and add the .exe back to the end but it also makes it so any viruses that might be on the computer will have no idea what type of file it is, making your thumb drive essentially immune to getting infected.

So, the process is, you put your thumb drive into the computer, find the install you want, then copy/paste it onto the desktop of the computer, then remove your thumb drive. Rename the file on the desktop and put the .exe back on the end then run it to install the program.

[Getting off topic, this should always be done with the computer in Safe Mode]

On to the goodies!

I have my thumb drive organized with the following folders:

Antivirus Programs

Spyware Programs

Startup Scanners

Tools

Also, a .txt file titled Inventory Notes.txt. What this file is, is a list of all of the installs in the thumb drive and what type of file they are, .exe., .msi, .inf, etc.

[Note, Yes, I left the .txt on the file. Text files (NOT .doc files) are for the most part immune to viruses because they’re too basic. No html formatting, no macro ability, etc. So you can feel safe in using Notepad to create a list.

Please note, you can find the installs for all of these by typing their names into your favorite search engine.

Inside the Antivirus Programs folder I have the install files for:

AntiVir

Avast

AVG

BitDefender

Symantec Removal Tools (several different installs that target specific viruses. You can get them here: http://www.symantec.com/business/security_response/removaltools.jsp)

ConTest

RootkitRevealer

Stinger Anti-virus

Inside my Spyware Programs folder I have the install files for:

Ad-aware

CCleaner

CWShredder

Malwarebytes

MS Defender

Spybot

Superantispyware

WPhijack

Inside my Startup Scanners folder I have the install files for:

HijackThis

Process Explorer

Startup Lite

X-Ray PC

My Tools folder just has a few useful utilities in the battle against malware. They are:

Delete Doctor

ScripTrap

Wireshark

This blog entry is already long winded enough so if you want any specific information on any of these programs always feel free to contact me.

Posted in Computer Security Related | Comments Off on My little ‘bag of tricks’ or Tools I use to kill pesky software.

Breakfast, The Sexiest Meal of the Day!

Posted on September 12, 2009 by mikerigsby

[tweetmeme source=”mikerigsby” only_single=false http://mikerigsby.wordpress.com]

Ok, this happened to me on a Trimet bus a couple years ago but it’s a good example of the ‘interesting’ people who ride buses.

Here I am, sitting on a 3-seat bench seat on the bus, listening to my mp3 player.

There’s one empty seat between me and another guy who’s listening to his music too.

Suddenly, totally ‘out of the blue’ the guy scoots over and taps me on the shoulder. I pull out a earphone and say ‘Yes?’.

He leans in real close and whispers in my ear:

“I’ve never told anyone this before, but Maple Syrup gives me an erection.”

Needless to say, I got up and moved to a different seat.

To this day I think I think I should’ve told him “There’s a sale on Mrs. Butterworths at Safeway”.

Mike Rigsby

Posted in Trimet Transit Weirdness | Comments Off on Breakfast, The Sexiest Meal of the Day!