TheNyeLabs.com

what’chya listenin to?

So…. as geeky as I am, there are still geeky things that I just have never really got into, one such thing has been podcasts. Not necessarily geeky I guess, but it’s the nerd equivalent to traditional radio, so I see it as the tech way to listen to yer favorite shows. So anyway, I’ve never really got into them until I got hooked up with a little 8g Zune for a graduation present, which was arguably the coolest gift I have gotten all year. Well I have much more music than an 8g anything could handle, and I already was toting an iPhone around with me, so I figured I’d use it for jogging or working out cause the form factor was great. Well since I’ve taken my job now, I have a few 1 hour drives a week and then several 15-20 minutes jaunts to a store or friends house. So somewhere along the way I realized I could be using the time for something a bit better than …. well doing nothing with it, and since I’m a big fan of talk radio anyway, I went searching for good podcasts to fill my time on and have since converted the Zune into my 8g’s of podcast loving updated nightly. And since I’ve been through quite a few, I thought I’d share with you what I got and why, so if you decided you wanted to hit it up, you could have a place to start. Continue Reading…

umm

A comic I read frequently, xkcd, posted this today and I laughed out loud…. seriously I lol’d. I do sometimes go on a crusade to argue, it’s the lawyer blood in me that wants debate, wants to be challenged, and I will troll till I get it. I’m getting better, it’s called growing up I think, but still, nothing is quite as satisfying as internet arguments….. riiiiiight. :>)

I also watched a documentary called King of Kong about two guys competing for a world record on Donkey Kong. It’s like a little window into my world, that was disturbingly accurate.

facebook is starting to lose some serious face

so I was logged in to facebook today just thumbing around some friends pics and I got an advert from facebook that was straight up nudie pics. Needless to say, I was genuinely surprised, mainly because thats the draw I have to facebook over myspace is that the ads are a bit less obtrusive and vulgar. But in all fairness, myspace has never thrown straight porn at me. A little disappointing, especially considering that a 13 year old is getting the same thing. wtg facebook, step one, build an online society, step two, introduce all the little kiddies to the ways of the nekked, step 3, see mark zuckerberg on dateline’s how to catch a predator. suh wheat.

see what I’m talking about after the jump
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Photosynth

MS Live Labs has a way sweet site up called Photosynth, where they have collections of photos from all kinds of sources and have reconstructed areas and buildings to allow us to zoom in, walk around, etc, the entire area or building. It’s pretty much the greatest link I’ve come across tonight. I’m like a little kid with this thing, and loving every minute.

Check it out -
here

site upgrade – more comments, less spam

Just installed the reCaptcha plugin for wordpress, and I like it. While it’s kind of a hassle to read the words sometimes, it will make commenting instantaneous, and it’s for a good cause -

reCAPTCHA asks commenters to read two words from a book. One of these words proves that they are a human, not a computer. The other word is a word that a computer couldn’t read. Because the user is known to be a human, the reading of that word is probably correct. So you don’t get comment spam, and the world gets books digitized. Everybody wins! For details, visit the reCAPTCHA website.

See, so comment for the keiki

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UPDATE

And to be fair, I did a sweet motherlode of other upgrades to the site, it’s like eye candy now isn’t it? mmmm daddy.

vmware solution for my university

So I’m an employee of the Information Systems (IS) department of the university I attend and have been working on innovating some ways to improve the teaching of our upper level IS classes here. The IS classes we teach are your typical Windows 2003 server, which is essentially a MCSE prep course, advanced networking, which is essentially CCNA prep, systems development and implementation, more business process yada, your intro and advanced linux coursen, as well as some database flavors. The traditional setup we’ve gone for is open up as much as we can in the advanced classes to give the students a real feel for using the networks and servers and so on. The problem comes in the fact that if you have more than one section of a class, every student who sits down at the machine personalizes the heck out of it, causing frustration to the other students using the machine, and ultimately to myself as I spend time rebuilding Active Directory after one student tries to teach the other one a lesson and ends up hosing the machine. The traditional solutions of Deep Freeze, Altiris weekly imaging, or any other non persisting software just doesn’t work because often over the course of the semester a student does projects that build on projects, they need their data to persist. Additionally, if you build an AD setup, or a linux network and build yourself a firewall to sandbox with, you run into the problem where the big stuff, the stuff every kid wants to play with, is only one in a classroom (one promoted domain server, one firewall everyone connects through, etc) and if they want to play with it, they’re just out of luck. Continue Reading…

ahhh yeah….

aight folks, it’s all new, the front page look is new, I wanted something with a little bigger image right off, and some wider columns, and I went with a more robust photo gallery theme. I put another 120 gig of space up too, so the images will be much more abundant and such. Let me know what you think…

Enjoy,
Al

btw, props to Angus Woodman for the major work on the design of this theme, and a decent start on the code. Too bad he’s retired from pumping theme’s out, he has a good look about em.

AngelBeat 2006

hrm, so I just spent a whole day, waking up at 5:45 am mind you, at a conference touting itself as Angelbeat 2006.  I don’t know why I’ve been getting the chance to go to all these conferences lately, but I have, and who am I to not take advantage of a learning opportunity right? 

So we head down there, and my main goal is to build some ties for those students who will follow me in the IS discipline, hopefully giving them some “conference” atmosphere experience in the future.  In that regard, today was a success.  I made contacts, and got enough experience to be able to recommend students for a sponsored trip next year.  In all most other regards, the conference was meh.  I did appreciate a few good presentations by a few companies who seemed interested in selling their product, though the technical aspect of their products was offered in your typical “_____ for dummies” format, which I found to be less than engaging.  The rest of the presenters didn’t have much to say, which made for some long 30 minute speeches.  All in all, they took great care of us, were gracious hosts, so to Ron and Angelbeat, thanks a ton.  To two hours of vista love from Microsoft presenters….. good riddance.

VMWorld 2006

So I was given the opportunity to attend the big VMWare event of the year thanks to the folks at BYUH who were my kind sponsors. I was pretty excited about getting to be at the event where all the who’s who of virtual computing would be around to rub shoulders and answer questions and the like, and through the whole experience I was not disappointed.
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email!

I just got gmail support for my domain email, which is great, so you can now have a “yer name” @ thenyelabs.com If you want one, just email me using the contact link up above, and it will be go time. Everything will work just like gmail, in fact if you want to check out the login screen, hit – https://www.google.com/hosted/thenyelabs.com

Let me know what you think