Life is like a DHCP Client, your given an IP address for a period set forth by the DHCP Server. You can hold onto the IP as long as the server will allow you too, or you can release the IP address in an effort to obtain a new one.

While we are limited to what life throws at us (the IPs given the the DHCP Server), we are not necessarily at the whim of the DHCP Server, we too have choices to keep the IP given to us or choose to release and/or renew.

Recently, I made a tough decision to release my IP address that was currently assigned to me. It was not a choice that came easy. One can only take so many attacks from the outside before changing your IP address is the only obvious option. You spend so much processing power on the incoming attacks that you don’t have time to perform what you where made and designed for.

Clearly, Server Admins know how many resources incoming attacks take on CPU’s… and not surprising in life, we can find ourselves in the same situation… spending brain power on processing and fending off an attack than doing the work of what the server was designed for.

While I will have to wait awhile before getting a new IP address, until the offending attacker moves on to another host/victim, it doesn’t stop me from lower my brain load and getting back to business of what I was designed for.

I thank everyone for their support during this time and for my God who has just shown He is in control of the situation, no matter what attack is being thrown at me. While some might view God as a firewall that would protect you from the attacks, I see Him more as a System Admin, letting you do your own thing, but taking control and providing adjustments along the way.

I never realized until this morning, how much the game of Frogger is applied in driving, especially crossing busy roads with no traffic signals. While I typically like to take the fastest route and go with traffic patterns because it “flows” vs stop and go routes, recently I have been forced into the stop and go with construction backing up my usual route.

It is clear that not everyone played hours on end of frogger when they where younger as I did, because they have a hard time getting across busy 4 lane roads with a middle turn lane in the middle.

For example, while I could drive straight across the road and wait for traffic to clear in both directions like most people tend to do through my observations, which can take significantly longer time to cross, I will wait for a small break, enough I can accelerate and I will make a right turn and speed up and get over to the middle turn lane and stop… and wait again until I can cross the next section of road to get to the other side. I have gone is one road over and saved countless seconds of despair waiting for traffic to clear in both directions.

The National Weather Service in Topeka has issued a Tornado Warning…. ah! I love severe weather. Back in my younger years, we had a tornado come by and take out a house just down the street while it bounced along. That happened the 2nd week of March. So, when March comes around, I make sure that the Weather Alert is working, and my chase gear is ready. Unfortunately, I haven’t had the opportunity to chase in the last few years and hopefully, I will find a few close storms to be worthwhile adventures for me this year. In fact, I’d vote for a direct hit, but I may not live through it, since my house would probably just crumble in on top of me. Plus, I don’t wish such disaster on anyone, even myself.

Of course, this year I will have my iPhone and well, that would make it easy to get the latest updates this way, now if I could just overlay radar on the Map software on the iPhone, I’d be set.

Call me Snoozer, cause I haven’t been updating my blog on my monthly basis. You’d think with amazement’s from Apple, like the MacBook Air would at least bring me back from my deep slumber. (Did I ever mention I love my iPhone and it’s still as awesome today as the day I bought it?”) The crazy thing about my absence is it really has nothing to do with sleeping, it happens to be with productivity.

How so you ask? I’m glad you asked, because I was going to tell you.

Somewhere around mid Dec 2007, I got about 4 hours of sleep one night. Not a big deal, life goes on. The next night, 4 hours of sleep. The following evening, faced with the fact I hardly slept the previous two nights I zonked out at 7:30pm. A far cry from my midnight-2am bedtimes. About 4:30 in the morning, I woke up completed rested so I got up. I had one of the most productive days I had in a long time. But with the holidays fast approaching, I didn’t really give much thought to it. I have known for a long time that the more productive I am between wake-up time and noon, the more productive I am in the afternoon. The morning time, makes it or breaks it.

Well, right after Christmas I ran into purely by chance, an article blog post on “early rising“. Normally I would not have read such rubbish but considering my experience a few weeks earlier, it caught my interest. The writer when on to talk about how he gets up around 4:30 or so each morning, and is terribly more productive and successful. He keeps his wake-up schedule no matter what, weekdays and weekends and never sleeps in. His bedtime is when he can’t stay awake anymore and it changes from day-to-day, by as much as an hour or two. This seemed like the appropriate approach. Instead of “sleeping in” to catch up on sleep, you just got to bed earlier.

I did this for about 3-4 weeks with great success. However, the 4:30 time frame was to close to my 6:30 routine of getting ready for the day and getting the girls up, dressed, fed, and taking them to school. It was a real bummer to break just when I was hitting top speed on my work. So, I decided to try 3:30am, and this was the magic number and just what I needed, by 6:30, I am ready for a break and starting the morning routine. The other end of this is I do get tired very early at night, by 6-7pm I am really starting to feel the effects of getting up early. I pretty much have to go to bed no later than 8:30pm if I don’t want to face the 3:30 alarm like a bear.

What an interesting year it has been. While it has been met with any ups and downs (more downs, mind you), I must mark it off as a successful year. While things didn’t always go the way I wanted, nor did much improve, it takes a little bit of insight to see that this was not a bad year at all. In fact, in my experience, it seems that when everything can go wrong and does, good things are waiting on the other side. With 2006 ranking in with 2007 as the least of the desired, I can only hold out that 2008 will be a year of improvement and hopefully 12 months from now, I can write, I had more ups than downs for 2008.

We have lucked out thus far in not losing power with the storms we have had. My mother, has been out for 7 days and appears she might be out for 5-7 more. I can’t imagine a week without power. They even held out on getting a generator until today. Guess even those who think they can cut it, eventually give up the rough life for one controlled by electricity.

Merry Christmas everyone. In a world of political correctness (of which is not found here), my your season be a mess, but may your Christmas be filled with joy.

My gosh, time flies. I was looking outside the other day and there was a clock just flying along. Silly clocks. Wish they would fly slower.

Seems like I typically stay pretty busy these days. My youngest daughter’s 3rd birthday was last week, along with my fathers 60th. So we had a big birthday bash with that side of the family at our place. Plus, the girls decided to spend most of last week sick, out of school and daycare. Luckily, I have managed to stay clear of the any sickness, short of just being “sick and tired” of a few unresolved issues in my life. I must admit, I did get a flu shot this year, that was a first for me. After spending most of 2006/2007 winter sick, figured it was time to take precautions and be on the offense this winter.

What I enjoy most about winter time, is that my grass doesn’t grow. It’s so nice. You can just forget about one area of responsibility for a few months. The downside, it’s cold and the potential for ice and snow. I don’t mind the cold, but I dislike the ice and snow.

That’s about it for this update. Stay tuned next month for another exciting blog entry!! Don’t hold your breath, please.

This is a first. I get done posting my previous post, and I then later (45 minutes or so) proceed to search Google for more information on Leopard Filevault features, which answered some of my previous questions such as Filevault handling via TimeMachine (which it does store it encrypted) and some other details. But low and behold, one of the search results that came up was my OWN POST. My GOSH, I tell you, I write for the bots not the humans.

Click the image to see an expanded view. I am in “new user” interface on Tiger install while a backup is being performed of my FileVault sparseimage in prep for tomorrow.

FedEx is set to deliver Leopard 10.5 tomorrow morning to my doorstep. While my excitement level does not compare to the excitement of getting my iMac, it is definitely a noteworthy day to blog about. I figure I will be spending my time working and playing with the new features, and too busy to blog so why not just blab about it before it comes.

I am really looking forward to “Spaces”. While I have had this functionality with 3rd party applications on the Mac prior, it seems since Spaces was announced way back when, that existing developers abandoned their own versions and as subsequent updates and releases came out for 10.4, those older applications became unstable and I ended up just having to stop using them and wait ever so patiently for tomorrow to arrive.

I am curious to how Time Machine deals with security, if at all. Will it have the option to encrypt your backups or to backup to an encrypted DMG. It would be nice if it was a built-in functionality. How will/well it work with FileVault? Will it store your FileVault contents unencrypted on the backup drive? Not so cool. I am not a “go back in time” type user of backups. If I need multiple copies or versions of files, I keep them. I rarely lose anything or desire to retrieve something from a week or month ago. Keeping current backups is essential in my book, if my hard drive fails, I can be back in business with a current backup.

Speaking of backups, I have recently been testing out two software/services for both Mac and Windows. One is called Mozy, which allows you to backup an unlimited amount of data to a geographically distant location for $4.95/month. While it takes a week or two to upload 60GB of data, once that is done, then just the changes to your system are backed up and not a big deal or time consuming task. This is great if a fire destroys your home or office, perhaps where your backups are stored as well. A tornado comes through and re-distributes your goods to some other state for some farm boy to turn into yard art. Or a thief breaks in, and takes your system and your backups as well. Whatever the reason, off-site backups are desirable.

Another application I have been testing, but still waiting on a newer software release is called CrashPlan. I believe CrashPlan has the most potential. While they offer a $5/monthly option, much like Mozy, they will start charging you 10 cents per GB stored beyond 50GB. But, what separates CrashPlan from Mozy is the ability to backup to other systems not only on your local network, but other systems on the Internet that you may either own, maintain, or know… like a friends system. The data is store encrypted, and once the license fee is paid for the software, you don’t have to maintain monthly maintenance fees. Of course, a good friend desiring to harbor their data in your castle, would supply you with a separate external hard drive to store those backups on. CrashPlan supports more customized features on the number of revisions to store and how long to store deleted files, with the option to store it indefinitely, for which Mozy’s only setting is 30 days.

In other news, I sure wish I could plug a 3rd monitor into my iMac. That would be the bomb.