Diary of a Network Geek

The Gulf Coast is well into Hurricane Season. Are you prepared?

Here in Texas, hurricane season is kind of a big deal. And, with global climate change making tropical storms more frequent and more severe, it’s getting to be a bigger deal all the time. Usually, we have more than enough time to prepare, if you’re paying attention, but it never hurts to get ready well in advance so you’re not fighting for bottled water, bread and canned food with everyone else at the last minute.
So far, since I’ve been in Houston, I’ve been through one horrible tropical storm, and near miss and two actual hurricanes. After that first tropical storm, since my ex-wife and I were looking for a house, I chose one that wasn’t pulling up carpet. That turned out to be a pretty smart decision as not far away the neighborhood has some flooding issues. Thankfully, in the 18 years I’ve lived in my house, that’s never been a problem. But, all that said, I still worry about hurricanes and do try to take some reasonable precautions.

There are a couple of philosophies when it comes to hurricanes. Mostly, it’s either stay or go.
If you stay, you need to think about what you need to get by for an extended period of time. Most emergency preparedness sources suggest that you need to have food, water and other supplies for at least 72 hours. A great resource to help you plan is the Ready.gov site for hurricanes. They go over what to expect and even have really helpful PDF downloads to help you plan and prepare. And, actually, Ready.gov has a lot of resources for other kinds of disasters, too, like Wildfires, Tornadoes, Volcanoes, Floods and more. It’s definitely a resource worth checking out.
If you’re in the Houston area, like me, the city has their own disaster preparedness site, Ready Houston. It’s a good site and they offer a free DVD you can use to help you plan for emergencies with advice specifically for the Houston, TX area. They have videos on the site, too, as well as links to training other places, like FEMA.
One thing to consider if you have pets, for instance, is what to do with them during an emergency. FEMA has a training course for helping you with your animals in an emergency situation, which I found via the Ready Houston website. (They also have a more general, but, apparently, pretty complete course in general emergency preparedness.)

If you decide to make a run for it, you may want to put together what’s alternately called a “go bag” or a “bug out bag”. Personally, I feel the name “go bag” seems less paranoid and crazy-survivalist sounding, but it amounts to the same thing.
The idea is simple, really, it’s just a bag with all the things you need for anywhere from three days to a couple of weeks, ready to go on a moment’s notice. Not unlike a hospital bag for a pregnant woman, the main thing is that it’s packed and ready so when panic hits, you can just grab the bag and, well, go. Personally, I do NOT have a regular go-bag already prepped, because I frankly don’t have anywhere I’d run to in an emergency. And, if I did, I’d be neck deep in other people doing the same thing. But, again, you can take this as far as you’d like, assuming anything from temporarily relocating to another city and staying in a hotel to running off and hiding in the woods for a couple weeks. It’s up to you. But, either way, consider what might go into that bag. For some good examples, check out Scott Kelley’s Bug Out Bag on Kinja, who even provides links to what he bought so you can get it easily, too, and the oddly less woodsy approach to a bug out bag by American Rifleman Magazine, though I’m less convinced that you really need to be overly concerned with being armed. Remember, it ultimately comes down to just being ready for what ever you think might happen wherever you are.

I would also suggest that you have some long shelf-life food on hand, like every good IT guy has in his desk. In the past, I’ve used Millenium Food bars, actually, since they provide a lot of calories and energy with a five-year shelf-life, but really any good protein bar will do in a pinch.
One really good idea is to scan important documents, like a home-owner’s insurance policy and financial information and IDs and put them all on a LaCie USB key Flash Drive, or something similar that you keep on your keys, in case all the original documents get destroyed during a disaster or when you’re not at home.

So, in short, the idea here is to be like the Boy Scouts, prepared.
Have you gotten ready for hurricane season yet? Start now!

This post originally appeared on Use Your Words by J K Hoffman.

Most of you don’t realize that I’m a closet survivalist.

No, really, it’s true.
Back in high-school I read books about surviving the coming nuclear apocalypse.  For real!  All about how to hide in the sewers until after the fallout was safe and all that stuff.  Oddly, much of that comes in handy during hurricane season here in Texas.  Strange, but true.  Okay, not so much the part about hiding in the sewers, but a lot of the other stuff.  Like how to get drinkable water and stocking up on canned goods and the like.
Which brings me to the links I’m about to share with you.  If you’re from disaster prone areas, you probably hear all sorts of things about making sure you have enough survival rations to last for at least seven days, until help can arrive.  So, how about longer?  I mean, what if the zombie plague pops up one day and you, thinking strategically, don’t really want to leave the house for groceries?  What’s a survivalist to do?  Apparently, go to Costco, where they offer a 1-year supply of dehydrated and freeze-dried food, with a shelf-life of roughly 25 years, for $799, plus tax.  No, I’m not kidding.  In fact, Costco knows their market so well they offer an entire range of emergency food kits and supplies.  For real.  And, honestly, the pseudo-survivalist in me really wants to buy some of this stuff, just in case.  I especially like that 55-gallon emergency water drum.
And, if you don’t like the look of what you’re getting for your money, just compare them to what the troops are eating in Afghanistan in their MREs!  Trust me, this selection is way better than mil-spec!

Well, hurricane season is basically over for us here in the Gulf Coast, but, it never hurts to stock up for next year!
Also?  There is no season for zombie plagues.
I’m just sayin’…

LittleYellowBird2

Originally uploaded by Network Geek

No, this is not a post about migrant workers.

But, you have to admit, it caught your attention, didn’t it? And, I’ll be honest, I’ve ranted about illegal aliens and off-shoring and all that, especially in the IT industry, before. Interestingly enough, that had an Indian IT worker calling me a racist because I advocated American jobs for American workers. I think I’d be more accurately accused of being a Socialist, or even a Communist with that, but because there were non-Americans involved, somehow, that accuser made the illogical jump to making me a racist. Go figure.

In this case, though, I’m talking about a bird that doesn’t seem like a Texas native bird which showed up in my backyard Thursday. I saw it at lunch and grabbed my camera and zoom lens and snapped this from the back door. Go ahead and click on this picture and it will take you to a bigger version that will let you see the invader more clearly. Well, it may not be an actual alien, since I don’t recognize the bird, but I’m hoping one of my regular readers will be able to tell me what it is. Also, I figure that since we’re in the Gulf Coast, and in the middle of the migratory pattern for quite a few small birds, it’s quite likely this is one of those species that’s just “passing through”.

If no one can tell me what this is, I’ll send it to a friend of mine who works for the Houston Zoo who can probably tell me what it is. Or connect me with someone who can tell me what it is. But, I know that I have genius readers, so I thought I’d get you to tell me first. Besides, my buddy from the Zoo is out of the country at the moment.
So, uh, anyone?

(Also?  Don’t forget to vote in the poll!)

I really don’t mind flying with my boss, but I wish he’d stop saying that.

So, Thursday last week, things started to go wrong with our server in Bellechasse, or, as I think of it, the Sweaty Armpit of the Gulf Coast. First, it was a user who just couldn’t seem to connect. Then, there was another user who couldn’t connect, though that turned out to be a totally unrelated problem. After dinking around with the server and the workstation over the phone, we finally rebooted the server and the problems seemed to be solved.

Turns out, not so much. Friday I got a call shortly after 8:30AM letting me know that now four users can’t connect to the server. So, again, after a few minutes of screwing around with a work station, I had them reboot the server, figuring that what worked the day before should work again. Seems like sound logic, right? Well, it is a Windows 2000 server, so logic probably wasn’t the best tool to apply. Everything seemed fine, right up until the server hung up at the “Preparing network connections” message. We rebooted the server at least three times after that and even tried Safe Mode, but, to no avail. So, I broke the news to my boss who was barely able to contain his joy at having an excuse to fly.

I should mention that I’ve flown with him on several occasions without incident and, as far as I can tell, he seems to be a very fine pilot. Certainly the flight itself has been smoother than most commercial flights I’ve been on. And, being able to bypass any sort of security checkpoints or limited schedules is really nice. It means, generally, that I can fly over, fix the problem and fly back in the same day. All with out needing to fill out an expense report, I might add.

So, well before sunup on Tuesday, we flew over to a little flat spot on the edge of New Orleans they call Lakefront Airport. This trip, I noticed that the same roofs seemed to have the blue FEMA tarps over them, but more yards had the pre-distressed FEMA trailers in them. Not sure if that’s progress or not, but, somehow, it seems like it should be. At least more of the traffic lights were working. Certainly, that has to be considered progress.
In any case, we got to the office about 9:00AM and I walked right to the server and got to work. I started by rebooting, just to see if I was going to get lucky. Naturally, I wasn’t or this post would’ve just ended. So, I cycled through several different boot options and finally, after much weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, I got the server into a semi-stable state by booting into Safe Mode with Networking Support, but via the Repair Mode on the Windows 2000 install disk. (No, don’t ask me to recreate the steps because I wasn’t taking notes and I was probably running a fever.)

So, guesses on what was wrong? Out of disk space. Or rather, there wasn’t enough disk space for Active Directory to run properly. So, I killed a bunch of temporary files and cranked down on the size of the virtual memory paging file. Sure enough, when I rebooted into “normal” mode, the server came up and everyone was able to log in and all was well with the world. All done before lunch, I might add!
And, so it was that I humbly asked to be brought an oyster po’boy, dressed, sans tomato, with fries for lunch while I attempted to kill all spyware and adware and other such nastiness. What I got was a catfish po’boy, two hours later, and one machine that still has some spyware remnants on it that need to be cleaned up. How fleeting is glory… Oh, and that’s not to mention the several requests I got that were far, far outside the scope of “fixing problems”, which was, in fact, my stated purpose.

Interestingly enough, when we touched down again in Houston an essential piece of navigational hardware in the boss’ plane locked and threw an error message. Then, up popped the infamous Windows NT “Blue Screen of Death”, upside down on that oh, so essential monitor. Yes, boys and girls, our lives depended on hardware that runs the most unstable, buggy, crash-prone version of Windows I’ve ever worked with.
Yeah, we sure cheated death again. Barely.

For data disasters, not hurricanes and such.
Although, I suppose one could result in the other. Still, the article on TechRepublic is about a system for categorizing systems disasters. Five levels to help you decide appropriate responses, ending in total loss that might result from, of course, hurricanes and the like. Yes, as much as I’d like to ignore them, they are a very genuine concern here in the Gulf Coast. And, now, in this brief “off-season”, is when people who manage data should be planning for them. Now. Not two days before they hit. Or, a day after. Plan now for data loss due to hackers, or virus infections, or failing hardware. Not after the loss of data. The article is a good start on what to think about when planning.
Now, I have to go find the rest of my server so I can start ignoreing all that.

Well, more brackish than fishy, I suppose.
I’ve been having some pond problems. First, there were the leeches in the skimmer. No, not the little red worms that turn into some kind of tiny fly that the dragonflies love to eat, but actual leeches. How do I know what leeches look like? Well, let’s just say I was the only one smart enough not to swim in that “special” lake at Boy Scout Camp. So, I poured a bunch of salt into that filter to get rid of them. That seems to have worked so far.
Then, the waterfall started to leak. Well, to be fair, I’ve been expecting this. The waterfall is really not all that great. It’s not very good as a waterfall and had gotten clogged with the nasty papyrus the former owners seemed to have liked so well. I tore all that out, trying figure out a way to fix the leak. The problem is, the leak is caused by the fact that the rotting wood which makes up the sad, sagging framework has given way in one corner, pulling the pond liner down below the water-line there. So, I had to bypass the waterfall with PVC and redirect the water flow back directly from the filters into the pond. I have to replace the water fall with something more aesthetic than two, plain PVC pipes. It just does not work with the rest of the decor!
And, now, two of the three pumps that run the filtration system seem to have given out. So, I have to buy at least two pumps and, if I do what I’m contemplating for the waterfall, most likely, three pumps. No small amount of change, but, unfortunately, neccessary. And, again, not entirely unexpected, considering the age of the pumps. I knew I’d have to replace them eventually, but I’d hoped to do this all next Summer at least. Ah, well, it never rains but it pours. (Which is true here in the Gulf Coast, but the additional fresh water going into the ponds works to my advantage at the moment, so I don’t mind!)

So, now here’s what I’ve been thinking about for the waterfall replacement… Imagine a boiler, or some other similar structure, with its top cut off and plants growing out of it with the final, center auxillary pipe emptying into the pond. Imagine a symetrical network of pipes feeding out of the structure, wrapping around the outside of it, being topped with three plumbing fixtures that have plants growing out of them and feeding into that final pipe before it drains into the pond. Of course, this entire monstrosity would have to be created out of PVC, so as to not poison the fish, but the exterior could be painted so that it would resemble old metal of some kind. It would be strange and surreal and, hopefully, fantastic, but I’m not sure that I’ll actually do it. It’s not the work or even the expense, but, rather, I’m not sure this is the artistic aesthetic that I really want for that portion of my backyard. If it works, it would be a great, cool, wonderous thing, but… But, if it doesn’t, it’ll be hideous. Thus my dillema.

And, yeah, this has been going on for weeks, but I’ve held off posting about it for fear of giving one of my regular readers more information about my life than they deserve to know. In fact, I may end up shelving the project for several months for that same reason. Or not. We’ll have to see.