The Aerie
So the other day I'm leaving the Post Office when a voice calls out "Nice hat!"
I turn. The speaker is a chubby little fellow bucking an enormous backpack that looms over his head.
"Thanks!" I say smiling. It's so nice to receive a compliment.
"It's a little pretentious, but it's okay."
A cloud settled over my mood. "It's not pretentious!" I object, feigning hurt but actually rather annoyed. We continued to draw apart, I walking into the parking ramp, he proceeding along the sidewalk, separated by a concrete wall.
"Sure! You look like Clint Eastwood!" he chortled.
Rolling my eyes I climbed into my car. Why can't people just say something nice? Why does it have to be qualified with rudeness?
As to what to visit in London, well, there are the usual tourist attractions - Big Ben, the London Bridge, etc., etc. But one of my dream-locales? Cardiff. "Why?" do you ask? Because that's where they shoot 'Torchwood!' Okay, so it's two hours there and two hours back, and my only real interest is to visit the seaside plaza where the show is filmed. Silly! We'll see what I end up doing. My birthmother suggests going to visit Stonehenge, however, and actually it's rather on-the-way to Cardiff, so maybe I could make a day of it and visit both!
So over the weekend I upgraded the firmware on the firewall, which was quite out-of-date. The new firmware seems to be working fine, no reboots necessary. During the upgrade process the installer made quite a show of "Saving settings"... and later "Restoring configuration settings." And since it worked after the upgrade I made only a cursory review - yep, all the settings seemed to be there!
So today I go in to make some changes to it, and what to I find? The settings were all there.. but the firewall functionality was turned off!
Fortunately I have a SECOND firewall! You see, originally my connection had a "bridge" on it, which didn't offer firewall protection. So I spent real money and went out and bought a firewall appliance in order to protect my network. Then the ISP changed from a bridge to a modem with firewall capability, and suddenly there I was with two firewalls. Well I set them up and got them working with each other, but I kind of felt silly about having TWO firewalls for my little home network.
Not anymore! I can just imagine the mess I could have had if my kids' computers were discovered by some Internet hacker-bot... *shudder* Hooray for two firewalls!
The big job opportunity I was looking for fell through - oh, they said they're going to make an offer, but I'm going to turn it down. From an entrepreneurial, groudbreaking leadership position, the job slowly morphed into a lone clerical position, with broad responsibilities, no staff, no resources and no power. Sorry! Not interested! A pity, but what can you do. I can already tell the job wasn't structured for success, because the more invested I became in the role, the less my potential bosses seemed to regard my opinion. My first visit they were all ears about what I would recommend: my last interview my proposals regarding the position received flat "No" resposnes. Why is it that someone from "outside" an organization is regarded with more credibility than someone from "inside" the organization? It's like a Dilbert cartoon, "Well, if you work here you must be a moron."
Well that's it for Odds 'n' Sods - more random, disjointed thoughts later! For now, back to work...
Posted by Albatross at March 13, 2007 1:47 PM | TrackBack