Dmac Blog

I have now reached the grand old age of 24. The 2nd of October was my birthday and it brought on some expected questions. The company I work for posts birthdays and makes them known to everybody. Do you know what the first question people ask you is when they know its your birthday? Thats right, “How old are you?”. This is the question that I have been dodging slightly since I took an upper management position. It didn’t take me long to realize that I was 5 years younger than the youngest person in my 11 man staff. I actually have people working for me that have kids my age. As always, I have nothing to hide so I just straight up told them. I look a little old for my age so there was a bit of jaw dropping happening around the office. People usually put me in the 28 to 32 range believe it or not. Following the revelation there were the usual references to being in diapers and others calling me young en. The disturbing aspect of this whole situation was that the next week was like being in front of the firing squad. My newly revealed age must have discredited me in some way so the technical questions directed towards me were a little more in depth. I celebrated the questions by making my answers more in depth. The questioning stopped shortly after and we were back to boss and staff. Nice try guys!

The application has been printed and now I just have to fill it out and turn it in. I have finally decided to go back to school and get my Masters. Selecting a university has not been to difficult. I was looking for a school that had a MSIS (Masters in Information Security) that was completely online. This narrowed down my possible choices to two schools. The two schools are Nova Southeastern in Fort Lauderdale Florida and James Madison in Harrisonburg Virginia. Both MSIS programs are certified by the NSA and both are regionally accredited schools. I have chosen Nova for two main reasons. Its cheaper and they will take my work experience in place of a GRE score. At this point I don’t want to study and take the GRE so this seems to be a solid route.

Padro and I have started development on a corporate identity management solution. This is basically a corporate version of our free and highly underrated identity management suite called Defygo. The encryption schema and features for the corporate version are very exciting.

I was at work the other day planning for our upcoming upgrade. We are implementing a new router with 3 merged Ts for our WAN between KC and Arlington VA where all our servers reside. We are going to be implementing prioritization of traffic to effectively use bandwidth and minimize latency. Bandwidth will no longer be distributed by first come first serve but instead will be distributed by a determined hierarchy. Shortly after this upgrade we will be implementing Juniper Peribit WAN acceleration network appliances. This will help reduce latency caused from CIFS traffic, which will dramatically increase the performance of our desktop applications that use files located on our WAN servers. I think I have officially traded in geekdom for corporate supergeekdom and stress.

Lastly, I have been looking for a thinline leather bound New American Standard bible. I am talking about a simple small bible. I have been to two major bookstores and have yet to find one. I guess I am going to have to purchase one online. Does anybody know where I can find one?