Bill Ryan's Other Blog

In a massive security breach , the Transportation Security Agency (TSA) inadvertently posted online its airport screening procedures manual, including some of the most closely guarded secrets regarding special rules for diplomats and CIA and law enforcement officers.

$10.00 says that the people responsible will not only not be fired but won’t get anything worse than a slap on the rest (like paid vacation aka “paid administrative leave”.

At the risk of building a straw man, let’s assume that’s the case – that they won’t be fired or if they are, they won’t be looking at any jail time.  Now let’s say that I, as a private citizen, had that document sent to me by some disgruntled TSA employee. And let’s say I penned a blog post that had all that information contained in it.  I saved it to Drafts but accidentally queued it to be published.  And it got published. In which case I realized my mistake a few hours later and took it down.

Anyone want to argue that somehow I wouldn’t be put through hell by our all loving benevolent Department of Homeland security?  I’d be fined to death and probably do some time. If not, I’d at least have to spend enough on attorney’s fees that I’d wish I was locked up instead.

Bruce Schneier is so incredibly correct on the whole TSA and all of their stupid screening procedures (aka Security Theater). How can anyone seriously defend the TSA’s existence?  I could post a terabyte hard drive full of their abuses and those are just the ones we know about.  They’re expensive, rude, incompetent and worthless.  Since we’ve reinforced cockpit doors, how can anyone say we need them?  All we need is a few dogs that can sniff explosive materials and a bunch more scanners. 

As someone who travels a lot, and has flown outside of the US quite a bit, all I can say is that the whole TSA is one big, unfunny, expensive joke.  Oh yah, we had to make them federal employees b/c private sector companies couldn’t be trusted.  Sure.  The private sector couldn’t possibly find that many incompetent a33holes in one place to hire, but other than that, I’m not buying it. And why do I call them that? Am I just bitter or something b/c I get hassled a lot? Nope, I never get hassled.  Out of 200+ flights, I’ve only been singled out for search once.  But I’ve watched so many people get abused that I forgot count of them all. In just 2009, I’ve seen 7 instances (and yes, all but one were at the same airport) of a TSA employee being so abusive that a supervisor had to come over, pull them out of the line and talk to them and then apologize to the victim.  If you want to hassle people b/c they don’t speak very good English, you should at least be able to speak decent English yourself, especially when it’s your first language.

But Bill, there hasn’t been a single hijacking since 9/11.  Brilliant reasoning in that argument.  Since I was 25 I’ve spent most of my work time travelling and I’ve travelled a lot. In that whole time, I don’t recall a single plane being hijacked – you know, back when screening  consisted of them asking you “Hey, you haven’t taken any packages from strange looking middle eastern men have you?  You don’t plan on blowing up the plane do you?”  I’ll add this – and again, it’s hard to verify b/c it’s in the future – but if a plane is hijacked or blown up , it won’t be from a passenger sneaking stuff on the plane.  The largest attack vector is baggage. Right now, if you tried to pull a knife or whatever, there’d be a full scale bumrush on your a55.  Even if you were some martial arts ninja, you aren’t going to be able to fend off flying laptops and boiling coffee from everyone else so not much can happen there.  With reinforced doors, you wouldn’t be able to bumrush the cabin either.  If we fired every sideshow act TSA employee, went back to pre TSA screening procedures and spent all of that money on scanning equipment and dogs, there’d never be another hijacking again.  Air Marshalls could fill any other perceived gaps b/c unlike screeners, they actually provide value.

But this will never happen b/c the TSA (like a whole lot of DHS, is little more than a job’s program. Except in the TSA’s case, it’s a jobs program for the otherwise unemployable) is a govt fiefdom.  Seriously, next time you fly, look at all the people in each of the lines.  Other than the really young folks for whom this is a starting point in their careers, ask yourself What could I see this person doing if they weren’t working here? And be honest.  You’ll see that I’m right.

The TSA is without a doubt the most worthless agency under the DHS umbrella. It along with one other one I can think of , are just shameful.  Now when it comes to the majority of the agencies, say the FBI, the NSA, the CIA etc, love them or hate them, the rank and file employees are quite competent and well intentioned.  There is certainly some political deadweight at each, but most FBI agents for instance could easily work in the private sector earning a lot more money. 

UPDATE: 12.10.2009

I’ve seen reports that 5 people were employees were put on administrative leave.  I’m not familiar enough with govt regs to know if that necessarily means paid , unpaid or can’t tell without more information but I’ll throw this out – can you think of any private company you’ve worked for where something like this wouldn’t lead to termination of at least one person?  Ok, maybe it will in the future but I’m betting the under and will eat all the crow you want if I’m wrong.  I’d also add that every report I’ve found doesn’t mention paid or unpaid. In my experience, an omission like this is telling, like when there’s a political scandal and they don’t tell you the party of the person involved.  You KNOW what party they belong to when it’s excluded.  The govt is quick to throw people under the bus and find fall guys (or people to be politically correct) and that includes mentioning it when its unpaid in most cases.  So let’s see.

Bruce Schneier pointed to Boing Boing’s coverage which is freaking priceless:

BoingBoing is pretty snarky:

The TSA has published a "redacted" version of their s00per s33kr1t screening procedure guidelines (Want to know whether to frisk a CIA operative at the checkpoint? Now you can!). Unfortunately, the security geniuses at the DHS don’t know that drawing black blocks over the words you want to eliminate from your PDF doesn’t actually make the words go away, and can be defeated by nefarious al Qaeda operatives through a complex technique known as ctrl-a/ctrl-c/ctrl-v. Thankfully, only the most elite terrorists would be capable of matching wits with the technology brilliance on display at the agency charged with defending our nation’s skies by ensuring that imaginary hair-gel bombs are kept off of airplanes.

The more I read what Bruce has to say about security (and I’ve been following him for years), the more I realize how strong his argument is. That’s why he is always on the right side of these issues.   If you read him regularly, you know that the TSA is regularly mentioned in his posts (Reason, Wired and Drudge for instance, seem to do the same – wonder why that is   ) and he doesn’t have much more regard for them than I do – although he’s much more diplomatic about it.  The money quote from his piece:

TSA is launching a "full review" to determine how this could have happened. I’ll save them the effort: someone screwed up.

In a statement Tuesday night, the TSA sought to minimize the impact of the unintentional release — calling the document "outdated," "unclassified" and unimplemented — while saying that it took the incident "very seriously," and "took swift action" when it was discovered.

Yeah, right.

This whole thing is a disgrace from start to finish.  And if it were an isolated incident, I’d be singing a different tune.  But this is just one more example of the utter incompetence shown by the TSA.  But it’s not just incompetence, it’s the utter disregard for passengers and citizens (and the law for that matter).  Remember folks, Airport Security was just too freaking important to be trusted to the private sector – only Unionized Government employees could do the job adequately.  And as the advocates of turning it into a union shop constantly reminded us – this was only about security, no politics guiding the decisions at all.

Fortunately, when I get frustrated at the things my government does, I have a release valve. I just look at the insane rants from everyone’s favorite defender of liberty, justice and the American way– yaknow, the ones that were sent to people who may not be as friendly as one thinks.  Maybe I’ll go reread Hi Ken.doc or one of the other “Nothing is my fault, Bill is pure evil and evil incarnate both at the same time, the affects are adverse, he sabotages, and he wants to destroy destroy destroy destroy, all he does is spend every waking moment trying to destroy, destroy, destroy, It’s not lying when I do it but it is when Bill tells truths I don’t like because he’s Pure Evil & Evil Incarnate and all he does is destroy destroy destroy destroy. Did I mention he’s evil? And that he likes to destroy destroy destroy destroy? Oh yes, and nothing is my fault. Ever. All the problems encountered, caused by the Destroyer/Saboteur/Attacker of Duncan. It’s never my fault. It’s always someone else’s fault but it’s never my fault. Even when it is it isn’t” themed ones… those are always good for a laugh or two. 

And when I’m done with my chuckle, I’ll find something to destroy, destroy, destroy, destroy until I find a way to break you, never tiring, never taking a breath (or even a dump for that matter – if that’s not commitment, what is) and spending all my free time determined to do the following:

Console.WriteLine(“What does Bill do, what’s the only thing he does?”);

for(Int32 i = 0; i < 4; i++){

     Console.WriteLine(“Destroy\r\n”);

}

[tags] TSA, Bruce Schneier, TSA Security Breach, Privacy, Security, DHS, Department of Homeland Security [/tags]

Bruce Schneier covers a Wired story detailing Sprint’s alleged complicity in something that should make your skin crawl.  It’s nothing new, Luna was warning of this stuff since the first draft of How To Be Invisible and several times thereafter.  It may seem that I’m being a tad hypocritical when I say this is a bad thing, after all I find cell phone based snoopware not only cool, but very useful for many folks. Cell phone snoopware is extremely powerful, effective and easily available (and yes, in some cases, legally questionable) so to some extent, it’s silly getting all upset about stuff like this. On the other hand, I don’t have to worry about civillians abusing their power to try to settle  a score with me or make my life miserable.  Without breaking the law, there’s nothing a civillian could do with this sort of stuff to really hurt me [and for the record, I'm using 'me' in the abstract sense here].  Depending on how you spend your free time, someone could ostensibly cause you some embarassment, but there’s plenty of remedies for that sort of thing.

Employees of the various government agencies however, could cause all sorts of problems for people.  For me to effectively make use of snoopware, I’d need to access the phone in most cases and owners would be fully in their power to check for and remove any such snoopware added to their phones.  The same isn’t the case in situations such as the one alleged with Sprint.  If someone bugged my phone and I caught it, I’m entitled to pursue several different legal remedies depending on the circumstances.  If the Sprint story is accurate, the targets weren’t aware of being tracked, couldn’t do anything to detect it and couldn’t do anything to prevent or stop it.

The response from law enforcement types of course is that this is all paranoid nonsense.  If you don’t have anything to hide, you don’t have anything to worry about they’ll typically argue.  And if they never abused their positions and were perfectly honest, that’d be a plausible defense.  Personally, I think most govt agents are decent enough folks and not prone to abusing their positions, but there’s no disputing there are bad apples.  And just one of those bad apples could cause you a bunch of problems.  Whatever you think of the guy otherwise, look at the example of Joe the Plumber. He got on the bad side of some people with access to his personal information and look what happened.  Had those same people been employees of a private corporation, he’d be sitting on quite a lucrative law suit. (And yes, I know Judicial Watch either offered to or actually filed a suit on his behalf – but had it been a private company, he wouldn’t need a high powered advocacy firm to help him out).

Quoting Chris Soghoian, I can’t imagine how this situation will get addressed without government action and well, it’s probably wise to be the under on that one:

Sprint Nextel provided law enforcement agencies with its customers’ (GPS) location information over 8 million times between September 2008 and October 2009. This massive disclosure of sensitive customer information was made possible due to the roll-out by Sprint of a new, special web portal for law enforcement officers.The evidence documenting this surveillance program comes in the form of an audio recording of Sprint’s Manager of Electronic Surveillance, who described it during a panel discussion at a wiretapping and interception industry conference, held in Washington DC in October of 2009.

It is unclear if Federal law enforcement agencies’ extensive collection of geolocation data should have been disclosed to Congress pursuant to a 1999 law that requires the publication of certain surveillance statistics — since the Department of Justice simply ignores the law, and has not provided the legally mandated reports to Congress since 2004.

One thing is for sure, if a private citizen was caught pulling this exact same thing on members of law enforcement or Congress, Congress’ attitude would be just a weee bit less apathetic about responding. 

The other argument I typically hear is a reference to Evan Ratliff.  If you’re unfamiliar with him, here’s the rest of the story in a nutshell. He’s a free-lance writer and blogger.  He took a gig for Wired magazine that entailed disapparing for a month.  He was to try to hide out and anyone that found him would simply need to say the magic word, and they’d be privvy to a $5,000.00 prize. Ratliff gave it a great go, but before long he was caught. 

Following the story, there’s little doubt that people used inside connections in an attept to follow him.  The extent of that is hard to know for sure, but there’s little doubt that people used friends and contacts at various companies to locate him. Those friends almost certainly did things that, well, were out of the bounds of the companies’ rules.  Does anyone really think that you magically become some ethical angel just b/c you work for the government?  Private sector folks bend the rules so you can rest assured govt folks do it too.

Law Enforcement claims this sort of stuff is necessary.  Law and Order types will claim it’s necessary to fight terrorism and similar bad guys.  Seems to me then, that the solution would be kind of simple.  An evidence rule that gave people immunity from anything not specifically relevant to the prosecution of terrorism in the form of throwing out the evidence, would go a long way to mitigate the damage that could be done by rule benders.  Providing EASY to retrieve records for anyone not currently the target of a terrorism investigation would be another.  Creating a ‘paper trail’ of anyone that looked at a person’s information is not hard and not difficult. Granted that doing anything with govt software is infinitely more difficult than it needs to be, implementing such tracking wouldn’t be cheap.  But that line of argument is essentially advocating the rewarding of incompetence.  And even considering the additional expense, there’s certainly at least one or two unnecessary govt programs we could cut to pay for it. (Defunding NPR for instance would work for me). 

If this sort of stuff is really needed for a specific case to prevent some huge atrocity, fair enough. But some fed using this stuff to hassle some guy banging his ex-girlfriend should never be allowed to happen.  I don’t see how anyone can say such a scenario is unlikely.  So if it did happen, the victim should be able to know about it and sue the hell (and have the person fired, not put on some BS administrative leave) out of the person.  

Another possible remedy would be to allow cell phone proivders to offer “opt out” service. (One might argue that this would be extortion, but I don’t see it any different than paying extra for an unlisted telephone #). I missed the official memo when all cell phones became tracking beacons, but it’s something that could be done without.  So say, for $10.00.00 extra a month, T-Mobile (the best cell phone company on Earth) could offer “Secure” service that meant you couldn’t be tracked.  I know all sorts of people, concerned for my safety should I ever find myself stranded a ditch , would have a fit over such a service, but I’m an adult and I’m willing to live with that risk.  After all, I’ve yet to lose a family member or friend (or even know of someone who has) b/c they weren’t able to be tracked by their cell phone.  But I have come across people who’ve gotten on the bad side of a cop (for matters completely unrelated to the law) and been seriously harassed as a result of it.

We’re not able to stop technology from eroding our privacy and even if we were, we wouldn’t want to.  Moreover, this trend isn’t going anywhere but up.  So the solution seems to be minimizing the incentives for abuses.    To Quote Mr Luna – “Governments hide secrets from their citizens, why shouldn’t citizens be able to hide secrets from governments?”

[tags]Digital Privacy, Sprint, Invasion of Privacy, Snooping[/tags]

In my The Kids are Alright post, I used the example of Jackie Seal to illustrate a perfect example of how smart today’s kids are (and you gotta love her choice of wall paper which I’m sure she did herself), all the while getting  a really unfair rap.  In fact, for every clueless apathetic teenager I run into, I usually run into several more that are sharp, savvy and motivated.  Even looking at my 10 year old daughter… I love to goof on her about how terrible the cartoons she watches are compared to my day, I love to goof on Hannah Montana and I love to goof on her about Webkins… but I bet she reads more in any given week than me and my friends read in 3 months (and yes, I was a book worm at 10.  I didn’t become a partying degenerate until I was 14).  At that age, I was pestering my mom to take me to Dadeland Mall so I could get some new video games (at 10, I had just graduated from using an Atari 2600 to playing grown up games on my Atari 800 – with a bitchin tape drive).  She has strong political opinions, has a good command of current events and is always interested in learning about what’s ever on the news.  She’s a very smart and motivated girl and so are her friends. 

But everyone thinks their own kids are smart and motivated (mine really is though   ). There are times, particularly when I’m being cynical, that I look at the comments on YouTube (especially ones revolving Hip-Hop Beefs) and think the end of the world is around the corner.  I think back to when I read the Bell Curve and ignoring the racial aspects, think, Yikes, the whole Cognitive Elite scenario is coming true.  But the truth is, I know quite a few very well educated people (with post-graduate degrees in real subject matters) who would be hard pressed to hop on a computer, let alone register for YouTube and start casting snarky insults. 

My /b/eloved 4Chan is often cited as a horrific place where young gremlins and malcontented idiots hang out.  The average /b/tard is typically portrayed to be little more than Beavis or Butthead, but with a computer.  Every loudmouth that get schooled on the net loves to throw out the whole “fat loser who lives in his mom’s basement and plays video games all day” cliche’ – which is often resulting from a bad case of projection)  Yet these same young ‘morons’ have pulled off countless internet hoaxes, have pulled off some impressive hacks, are the creators of tons of famous web sites and are responsible for just about every well-known meme on the net. [If you want to talk about idiotic douchebags on the Internet – I present Exhibit E).  Most people have no idea who M00t is, but he’s ostensibly one of the most accomplished internet entrepreneurs the internet has known.  Ask Sarah Palin if she thinks the average /b/ tard is stupid. I’m sure some phony like O’Reilly has a lot to say about them too (when he’s not out trying to score some a55 while his pregnant wife sits at home alone, insists he’s innocent and then settles with a demand that nothing is discussed).  Ask the victims of owners of db.singles.org (and don’t dismiss them just b/c only losers resort to online dating sites) how stupid OldFags, NewFags and every other form of /b/tard behind Operation Jesus was (Ooops, i forgot, 4chan was definitely not /b/hind Operation Jesus, it was Ebaum’s world).  And honestly, could stupid people have spawned something as utterly awesome as this:

I’m sure some that fancy themselves mature and moral will take issue with my accolades for /b/ denizens or M00t and I’m sure English language Pedants (few things are lamer than trying to defend an idiotic argument by nitpicking typos on a web forum.  A Ph.D dissertation – ok, I’m with you.  An affidavit?  Sure.  But a freaking newsgroup or web forum? Pulleeeezzz) will take issue with my characterization of YouTube beef comments as a sign of intelligence.  If 4Chan was full of idiots, no one would care about it.  If 4Chan was full of morons, the same people wouldn’t be able to take issue with the morality of people all about the LULZ.  And I bet most of the kids who post comments on YouTube are headed for college and can write and spell properly if need be.  At the same time, I doubt many of their critics didn’t even know what Lolspeak was until they heard about it on the news.  And the same folks couldn’t write in Lolspeak even with a freaking Urban Dictionary Translation bot  helping them out.

Far from dumb, far from clueless, today’s kids are quite cool in my opinion.  They’re sharp, talented and ambitious too.  People my age and older will trash their taste in music (Yes, I myself am guilty at times, but at least I admit that I’m wrong for it). But their elders did the same thing about that ‘awful’ Rock-N-Roll.  Pretentious Phony Douchebags Some people got offended by Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction (according to Dave Oliva – aspiring L.A.P.D. officer and frequent guest on the Phil Hendrie Show, Janet Jackson is actually a man. And we know that Steve Bosell of Corona, California was definitely hurt by it) and went on and on about how society has lost all sense of morality.  But the same stuff was being said 50 years ago.   Many in my age group love to criticize how bad cartoons of today are (yep, I’m guilty there too) and talk about how much better they were 30 years ago.  But I remember hearing the same exact complaints all the time when I was a kid watching cartoons.  Same thing with TV (admittedly TV hasn’t been around long enough to have several generations comment on it). When I was a kid, I always heard how MASH was truly funny and intelligent (except that it pretty much blew)  Shows of today just aren’t as funny – in fact many need laugh tracks.  There were plenty of laugh tracks back when I was a kid.  Sanford and Son, WKRP,  Soap, The Jeffersons etc were very funny.  But Seinfeld, The Office, Friends etc are equally funny in their own right.  And I’d love to hear some GenXer or older try to say that we didn’t have as sucky, if not worse sucky shows back in our day.

To sum things up, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the kids of today aren’t just alright. They are darned cool.  Each generation, kids tend to get cooler and cooler and parents get dorkier and dorkier (I mean, making kids wear freaking helmets for bicycles with training wheels only rivaled in lameness by the fetish most parents have with child seats).  Each generation bitches about laments the same stuff – music sucks, kids are lazy, have no morals, don’t appreciate anything, don’t respect their elders etc.  If that was true, then the unbiased, objective consummate professional Norah O’Donnell would have schooled Jackie Seal instead of Jackie Seal schooling her.  If kids were 1/2 as rude as they are made out to be –Jackie would have told current a**hole of the week Ms. O’Donnell to blow it out her ass to go pound sand.  Instead, she politely responded to the ambush (what does it say about your argument when you have to ambush a kid to try to make your point… and then star in EPIC FAIL Part 1 in the process). I can tell you this much – even though I think it’s a sign of good manners to respect one’s elders, I wouldn’t have looked down on Jackie a bit if she would have told Norah O’Donnell off – even if that included getting all sorts of gangsta on her.  If she pointed out what a freaking dork this a-hole is – I wouldn’t fault her for it either (Let’s attack a kid and pretend to be setting the Record straight b/c of Glenn Beck’s distortions)  The fact she handled O’Donnell with such composure and grace is testimony to her upbringing and class.

Who really cares if you like the kid’s politics or not?  I mean, when a kid gets a lot of press, one side of partisans talks about how great the kid is while the other side trashes them. If parents put the kids out there as a poster-child, then go after the parents, but attacking the kids is just whack.  Both sides do it (although from my POV, seems the left is a little quicker to get ugly and always gets nastier) and both sides acted shocked and amazed when the other side does it.  Then again, hypocrisy has never been, and will never be, in short supply in Washington D.C. Roubaxl  Bill Ryan is the worst piece of garbage in the world, next to my ex-wife Kim Ryan, formerly Kim  Finleyson. Those two pieces of garbage are made for each other

The point here though is that it’s great to see a high schooler at a political gathering of her own free will (and it’s true, I don’t know for a fact that she’s there on her own will, but it looks like she was and I’ve seen nothing to make me believe otherwise – if such evidence presents itself, I’ll certainly correct myself).  We constantly talk about how apathetic the electorate is.  Pejorative references to Joe Sixpack abound.  Both sides criticize the other side’s voters as stupid and uneducated.  But when we see shining examples of behavior both sides claim they want to see, the opposing side rips the person to shreds (and let’s be honest – both sides constantly blabber about ‘it doesn’t matter which side you vote for, just make sure you get involved and vote’.  And as long as you agree with them, they practice what they preach).  I for one am quite glad to see younger folks getting involved in the electoral process (not just b/c the trend seems to be that younger folks tend to be more Libertarian these days – as opposed to Socialist in my days and previous generations – come to think of it, what more proof is there that today’s kids are SMARTER than previous generations?) Andrexa Roubaxl

[tags]Jackie Seal, Norah O’Donnell, Bill O’Reilly, 4Chan, Pedobear, Lulz, Operation Jesus, db.singles.org, singles.org, Phil Hendrie, Dave Oliva, Steve Bosell of Corona California, Bill Ryan, William Ryan,  Janet Jackson, Wardrobe Malfunction, WKRP, Seinfeld, Sanford and Son, moot, m00t, FAIL, The Bell Curve, Cognitive Elite[/tags]

I was going through my new logs and boy, what a gold mine.  If I was a little more paranoid, I’d think someone was out to get me.  All along I figured, if someone would be out to get me, it’d be some unstable nutcase like Charles.  As lovable as I am, i have managed to make 3 enemies in my life – well, so I thought. Little did I know that I would have some serious people who were out to get me.  Although maybe I’m not who they think I am. See below:

Get it?  Ever see the X-Files? remember the cigarette smoking man?  Remember the people out to get him?  Remember what happened to him in the movie?  Remember why Art Bell quit CoastToCoastam ?  Well, now I know what it feels like – you see, ‘they’ are after me now too.  So to all of the New World Order, Trilateralist, CFR one world govt types – all I can say is this… Ryan is a really common Irish surname. In fact it’s one of the most common.  William is very common too. I mean, in college there were 4 different William Ryan’s.  I’m the 4th William G in my family.  So guys, you don’t have to suffer through reading my blog – I’m not the one trying to out you – I’m not anyone to worry about.  Whew!  Now that I have that resolved…

I’m thinking it might be really funny to start posting stuff from the Stats mod. You know, like Search engine terms people searched on to get to my blog.  Anyone familiar with blogging knows quite well how interesting such stuff is – and all I can say is there are some very sick puppies out there.  When I get home tonight, I’ll try to clean some of the results up and post them – they’re great for a laugh.

Did a quick inventory trying to plan out some networking issues – I decided to lock down the network. To do that, I needed to first do an accurate inventory of everything in the house that connects to the internet.

• Notebooks | Netbooks – 7 total
•      Windows XP Pro – 2
•      Windows XP Media Center – 2
•      Windows Vista – 2
•      Windows 7 – 1
• Desktops – 3 Total
•      Windows XP Pro – 3
• Servers – 1
•      Windows Home Server – 1
• Routers | Switches – 3
•      Wireless N – 1
•      Wireless G – 1
•      Gigabyte Switch – 1
• Video Game Systems – 2
•      XBox 360 – 1
•      Wii – 1
• VOIP Adapter – 1
• Misc Devices – 3
•      Wireless Printer – 1
•      Zune HD – 1
•      Tablet PC – 1

Doing a nice clean inventory (Mrs. Ryan dear, I can make LISTS TOO – W00T!!!!!!) sure puts things in perspective.  B/c when I look at the networking area – All I see is some glowing neon and a bunch of cables that look like they’re trying to strangle the dogs or anything that comes near them.

(Great, I just heard the Router complaining about me again Having to serve a secondary router is already difficult enough, but how do you as a primary router deal with pressures that are unnecessarily created by secondary devices, obnoxious humans and doom spreading canines who don’t understand that Cisco/Linksys/Netgear != Dog Toy, that wants to destroy your available bandwidth, and will continue to do so until one way or another they break you? (When we just had the Netgear Router everything was fine – but once the Linksys moved in – it’s been nothing but headaches, whining and a whole lotta butthurt)

I’ve been having a  ton of problems recently with dropped connections. There’s a wall separating the kitchen and living room (where the routers are located) so using the microwave usually causes some problems.  But things are much bigger than just this.  The Netbook drops the connection constantly  and is the one usually located closest to the routers.  If I am on it for an hour – it will drop at least once.  Kim’s Mrs. Ryan’s media center and work notebook seem to be the most robust and seldom drop irrespective of where they are.  There’s a desktop that connected over BPL and whenever that was used, we’d have immediate problems with other computers.  The problem was in part that the assigned IP Address would often be one already in use – so that was easy to correct.

Frustrated (b/c I can’t download anything new like Office 10 without a trillion attempts), I decided to fix it this evening.   Brilliant idea on my part.

No matter how hard I try, no matter what I buy to help alleviate the problem, my network cables gain self-awareness and decide that all carbon based life forms inhabiting our house need destroyed.  I’d like to be a man about it and blame my wife but no one would believe that.  But we use velcro wraps, plastic ties, a special octopus power strip and UPS that has fasteners to hold each incoming power chord.  Even with all of this, it looks like I hosted a beer funnel and Graphix Bong contest at my house before attempting to install everything. Then I realized something really disturbing – I have this complete mayhem of a situation and every one of our computers (as well as the video game systems) are wireless. I can only imagine what kind of clusterf*** would be in place if we were wired.

Anyway, I changed things around a bit though and basically had the configuration go from the modem to the switch where I plugged in each of the routers and BPL Adapter.  I plugged the Tablet directly into the N Router and did the same for the VOIP Adapter.  Since the Home Server is sitting next to the routers and I couldn’t possibly make things any more convoluted, I decided to plug the Windows Home Server box directly into the switch.

I turned on several of the computers and hit the internet on each of the ones I turned on.  I’ve been sitting here for about 2 hours and all is good.  Sure, it’s not *really* long enough to say for sure that I fixed the problem, but I fixed the problem. If I get 45 minutes of net time on the Netbook without dropping a connection I’m shocked. It’s been two hours.  And each time I used the power line networking – I always had problems with the other computers.  I fixed it temporarily by assigning an IP address but I undid that for the test – just to see if things were really fixed.  So far, so good.

Then I thought about it and maybe I shouldn’t be so happy yet.  You see, earlier tonight I upgraded the Netbook to Windows 7.  It’s like I stuck another 2GBs of RAM in it and fixed everything else that was wrong with it (it’s a high end Netbook so should have decent performance but froze all the time, had driver problems constantly and just overall worked like crap – all of that went Bye Bye 1 second after Windows 7 Showed up.

Either way – I should know soon what’s driving what but first thing tomorrow – all the Vista machines are going to be Windows 7 machines and unless my wife and daughter say otherwise, the XP machines are going to Windows 7 as well.  The wife and daughter both want Santa to bring them new laptops and Santa  couldn’t possibly say “No” to such charming gals.  Hopefully Santa has gotten with the program and is ensuring Windows 7 is running on any laptops he’s delivering

[tags] Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows Vista, Bill Ryan, William Ryan  [/tags]

Some days you just want to laugh. Other days you just want to cry. And some days, you just sit there with your jaw agape, amazed at things you just saw/heard. Today is too good of a day for me to fret, but if it wasn’t, well, read the subject line

I’ve had the pleasure of working on several certification exams for Microsoft. I’ve co-authored several training kits, written questions and participated in a ton of planning/development sessions.  As such, I really have a lot of respect for what Microsoft has done to make certification truly valuable. (I actually got to work on the development of the first set of Simulator based exams for the MCTS Sql Server competency for example.) Technical certifications have gotten a lot better recently.  But it wasn’t that long ago though, that if you had a MCSE, it was often better to keep it to yourself.  Why?

Hundreds of braindump sites cropped up offering people an opportunity to cheat their asses off on certification exams. There were countless “Get your MCSE in a week” type courses which charged a lot of money typically, but let you get certified in no time.  And those ads used claims like “The Average MCSE makes $70,000.00 a year upon earning certification – GUARANTEED PLACEMENT TO ALL SUCCESSFUL Candidates”.  Education money was loose back then so people were willing to take out 10k in debt to get certified and change their lives. 

There were several problems.  These courses focused exclusively on how to pass the exams (with rare exceptions), not actually teaching you anything.  The human brain, no matter how smart you are, can only absorb so much in a week’s time.  So to go from knowing little to nothing about networking to being a entry level professional is going to take more than a week.  The market was flooded with people who could talk a good game, but couldn’t do much else.  And few things are more pathetic than someone handling a network crash, unable to fix the problem saying “It’s got to be the software – I’m A MCSE so I know what I’m doing”

If you’ve been doing something for a while and you know your stuff, certification is a great way to add some icing to the cake.  If you are unemployed though, or in a job you hate, and think certification is going to open some magic door for you – expect to be disappointed. And if you are able to lie your way into a position, prepare to be hated.

It’s probably mainly b/c the economy has taken a little hit that I’ve seen this resurgence again (after all, the MCSE boom happened shortly after 9/11) with the PMP exam (Project Management Professional).

The major problem is that a fair amount of organizations strongly favor Project Managers with the PMP Certification.  This has skewed the market in a way that I think is horrible. 

In the old days, results were the main thing that got you hired as a Project Manager.  Now, many very qualified people take the back seat to less qualified people just b/c of the certification.  Admittedly it’s usually really backward companies or state govts that believe so strongly in simplistic measures like this. But it doesn’t take a lot for a bad Project Manager to make a lot of people miserable.

This bias created a perverse incentive for exactly the wrong types of people. Such people are inclined to lie to get into PM positions. In many cases it’ll be small lies that ‘technically aren’t a lie’ but are by any real standard.  (I always hated the “It’s not really a lie because _____ “ line of crap – if you have to explain why it’s not ‘really’ a lie – it’s a lie)

Think about it.  If you were inexperienced in terms of Project Management but worked as the Manager of BillyBob’s Video, it would be really hard to pass yourself off as a real project manager. If you had great organizational and people skills, you might be able to pull it off even though you had no project management experience.   But if you can get someone to lie for you about your role, you can sit for the exam and get the certification.  Many queries of job search engines will auto-filter out PM’s that don’t have the PMP so our guy here will come back as a valid candidate while other truly qualified/experienced PMs who don’t have the cert will be ignored.  Our guy has already lied to get the cert in the first place, so he’ll probably be able to spin a good yarn and eventually get hired.

Shortly after that, he’ll start talking the talk. He’ll learn to “Baffle them with Bulls*it instead of dazzling them with brilliance”. He’ll be shifting paradigms in no time. You’ll be converted from a Senior Consultant to a Resource so fast your head will spin. And once he learns to call people resource, it’ll be all over. It’s a virus and it gets worse very fast, like ebola.  At first you’ll just be a “Resource”.  Within a week you’ll be a Technical or Non-Technical Resource. Then a Local or Remote Resource. Then a Billable or Non-Billable Resource. Then, the terminal phase hits.  At this point, he’ll be utterly incapable of every calling anyone an employee/consultant etc again. Even if it’s used 30 times in a paragraph, he’ll never ever miss an opportunity to use the word resource and conjugate the living hell out of it.  Imagine talking this way at home?  “Honey, can you assign the 4-legged non-technical resources to pee outside instead of on my shoes?”  Calling your wife a resource would sound uber stupid – well, calling your coworker a resource sounds just as stupid.  Just b/c a lot of other people are doing it doesn’t make it any less idiotic.

So my issue isn’t so much with the PMP certification – for qualified people I think it’s a great idea. What I have a problem with is companies and agencies that blindly look for it and phonies who use it to get work they aren’t qualified for. 

I can say this unequivocally.  I’ve known a ton of PMPS.  Only 2 of them were good project managers and they almost never mentioned the fact they had the cert.  I’ve known several complete a-holes or incompetents who’s only desire in life was to be able to boss other people around who got the PMP. Across the board they fudged what they did and got a sympathetic friend to vouch for them. And each one paraded it once they passed.  The thing is, when I talk to others about this, I hear the same thing.  I honestly can’t think of a single person I’ve heard argue with my point.  But ask around, you’ll quickly hear about a “Mall Parking Lot Security Manager” turned PMP who’s making someone’s life miserable as we speak. It’s no surprise to me that the two most rotten, incompetent, nasty and vile people I’ve ever worked with, ran to the PMP so fast Jesse Owens would have been roadkill had he been in front of them.

So how can people pull this off?  If it’s so easy to fake, why do agencies take it seriously?  For one thing, it’s usually b/c those agencies have incompetent people themselves.  They tend to be very politically correct and yearn for objective criteria for hiring decisions and that’s one objective criteria.

There’s an experience requirement to take the PMP which is the first thing that becomes laughable. The requirement stipulates that you were a project manager for a very precise amount of time. Specifically:

A bachelor’s degree and 4,500 hours of PM experience in the five process groups, OR, a secondary school diploma and 7,500 hours of PM experience in the five process groups.

And here’s the portion that defines the process groups:

This advanced certification is for project management professionals with extensive experience. The qualifications and testing are rigorous, making this a widely respected certification. The PMP experience and exam requirements focus on five process groups: Initiating, Planning, Executing, Controlling, & Closing.

Is there anything ambiguous there?  Not that I can see.  But a friend who teaches the certification training was telling me about many of the candidates. He gets a whole lot of people who’ve managed fast food restaurants, clothing stores or video rental stores.  He gets even more people who’s had some form of “Manager” or “Senior” in their name but had nothing to do with Project Management as defined above.  All these people need is someone willing to lie for them vouch for their credentials and viola’ , they’re on their way to being a PMP.  If my friend’s experience isn’t typical and I’m wrong – I’m all ears.  Send me stories about great PMPs that you know. I’ll be fair and publish them.  While I’m at it, I’ll open it up both ways, let’s see how that turns out? (I’ll post everything uncensored – if there’s something illegal or offensive, I’ll redact the violating portion – this will leave the overall scores in tact)

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that many people who manage stores or whatever are qualified to be project managers even though they never did it in an official capacity, but that’s not really the point. If you have to fudge/lie/mislead/obfuscate/distort etc to sit for the exam, that’s an admission on your part that you don’t meet the requirements.  IF that’s the case, go hold yourself out as a PM, get a job doing it and 4,500 hours from now, take the exam.  Otherwise though – you’re being a fraud. And that’s a big problem.  Many people in this situation are precisely the people you’d never want to be a Project Manager.  Many have terrible people skills.  Many can’t get ahead based on their own talent and work but can’t take not having power over others. So they want nothing more than a shortcut to get into management.  The #1 rule I’ve learned in this regard is “NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER GIVE POWER TO PEOPLE WHO WANT IT. NEVER!”

Think about it for a second – I mean, just b/c someone lies to sit for the exam doesn’t necessarily mean they are liars in general, but in most cases that’s what you’re going to find.  Have you ever worked with a dishonest project manager?  Other than an incompetent Project Manager, I can think of nothing worse for a project.  Running a project or anything else is a lot of work and a lot of hassle. In most cases, the hassle far outweighs the expected rewards.  Unless the rewards are hefty, who would want the hassle?  People who like to boss other folks around for one.  People who need to feel important for another. See a pattern here?  Anyone in that group sound like someone you want to answer to?

Which brings up the next issue – working for an incompetent PM.  This takes several forms. Incompetence can be a Project Manager who’s a kiss ass.  It can be a project manager who’s a finger pointer (probably the worst of the bunch – one who’s always saying “It’s not my fault and trying to blame someone else”). It can be someone who doesn’t take responsibility for their screw ups. It can be someone who isn’t technical working in a software company or someone who doesn’t understand medicine managing a medical project. It can be someone who NEEDS to be everyone’s friend. It can be someone who’s a bully. It can be someone who’s disorganized or lazy.  Or worst of all, someone who thinks they sound cool when they refer to employees as Resources.  “I’ll assign a Non-Billable Technical Local Resources to your project” when “Yes, dear, I’ll make sure Junior takes out the garbage” would suffice. 

Abraham Lincoln is quoted as saying “Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man’s character, give him power.”  This is probably one of the most astute observations of human character that I have ever heard.  It’s so write it’s frightening. 

Certification Monkeys exist everywhere. For every incompetent PM that hides behind his/her PMP, there’s an incompetent developer or network engineer hiding behind their certs too.  This problem doesn’t happen as much with other certifications (Think the Bar Exam or CPA Exam – far from perfect but usually indicative of at least some level of core competency).  When companies rely on certification as the main way to determine competency, it’s a recipe for disaster.  That just excludes a lot of people who think certification is BS and encourages con-artists to ‘just get that piece of paper’.  This problem was rampant with the MCSE not too long ago and seems to be rampant with the PMP now.  We all know some Network engineer who could never fix anything but could always ‘utilize’ important sounding acronyms and jargon.  The difference is, there was almost always another engineer or supervisor that could actually fix the problem so you could work around them.  Project Managers typically are a one man show so other than going above them, there’s not much you can do (other than land a job as a Senior Architect and then talk down to such people   )

You’ll find the definition says "Chris Tacke and everyone else at OpenNetCF”.  I consider myself a pretty creative guy and am more than willing to step out of the traditional bounds of doing things when they don’t fit my needs.  If a tool doesn’t work, I’m more than willing to toss it out and either build my own or find something else that does work… Most of the time anyway.

Unit tests are an interesting issue.  People are often complete dumbasses really passionate about it one way or the other.  There are many (typically developers who hate writing code and love the thought of having Manager on their business cards) who completely disavow the utility of unit testing. Advocates on the other hand usually evolve into zealots and can’t imagine coding without unit tests.  Personally, I had a little trouble getting my head around unit testing at first (well, using mocks specifically) but quickly became a true believer (although I don’t get all butthurt get bothered if I see someone else writing code without having written the test for it first).  At first I pretty much stuck to only unit testing stuff I got paid for.  Then little by little, I started doing it in personal projects.  The CuckooBot, StripperBot and the bot who’s name can not be used in public would never have been the successes they were had I not made such liberal use of unit testing.  Actually that’s not totally true – I should say I started doing it for most of my personal projects.  Because when I’m doing Smart Device Programming – I avoid it like the plague.

Why?  I’ll let someone a lot smarter and much more eloquent than myself answer that.

And while your reading up on things, I encourage you to take a look at Project Resistance and the IoC Framework as well. 

Chris links to it in his post but I’d like to draw attention to it as well.  This is the official solution to the problem according to Microsoft.  I realize everyone is very busy with important stuff like Silverlight and Windows Mobile 7, but if you’re going to publish a solution that inadequate, it’s probably better to just publish nothing at all. To me, this would be like a car company finding out Model X had a problem that kept it from starting up when it got below X degrees or above Y degrees and offering the following solution:

1. Wake up 20 minutes earlier than you normally do on work days.
2. Get dressed and eat breakfast 20 minutes earlier as well
3. Put on some comfortable shoes and walk to work

I understand it’s very easy to be a critic and no one on the Windows Mobile team is dumb, lazy, apathetic or uncaring (they are all exactly the opposite), especially when it comes to things that inconvenience end users.  But the proposed solution is so bad you have to wonder if it wasn’t just ‘thrown out there” so someone could check it off of a TODO list or something

David Kopel of Volokh Conspiracy fame writes the following:

Monday’s New York Times has an interesting article about the forthcoming English edition of Emmanuel Faye’s book Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935.  In brief, Faye argues that Heidegger’s pro-Nazi views were not incidental, but were at the core of his life’s work. Accordingly, suggests Faye, libraries should remove Heidegger books from the “Philosophy” section, and place them in the “History of Nazism” section. From what I know of Heidegger (he’s discussed in my forthcoming book Aiming for Liberty) his intellectual influence on the 20th century was highly pernicious. Heidegger, like Hitler, wrote books addressing the question of what it means to be a “German,” and came to similar conclusions. Both writers were verbose; Heidegger was superior in the fabrication of elaborate philosophical constructs, while inferior to his hero is writing comphrensibly. Given Heidegger’s own dedication to Hitlerism, it seems that Heidegger himself might have considered it appropriate for his books to be shelved next to Mein Kampf.

I spent two semesters, a college year, studying Being and Time.  Even though it was a taught by a very interesting and cool professor, there’s no way to make this crap material interesting.  I often suspected that Marty put down a bottle of vodka and packed about 4 bongs full of purple Kush before writing anything in Being and Time – I can’t honestly imagine how you could be as incoherent as he was without some serious substance abuse.  So I used to put down 4 bongs full of purple kush before class so I could follow along – just kidding.  Purple Kush wasn’t around back when I went to college although I did hear rumors of really strong hydro.  But I digress.

I”m torn on this. Nazis suck and it was insult to injury that not only did I have to spend a year studying someone this boring, but I had to study a Nazi this boring too.  Free tickets to Inglourious Basterds would have been pretty cool at the end of the semester though.  So I’m glad to see that he’s not being celebrated like he was back when I was in school (god I’m getting old). On the other hand, I went through it – so out of sheer pettiness I want every other snot nosed college philosophy major to have to suffer through it too.  Nahh, he’s getting what he deserves albeit late, this is definitely a good thing.

When I was in grad school, I had to do a paper on a treatise called On the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B.  In a sentence, the premise is that we get what we reward. If we expect what we reward, we’ll be happy, if we don’t, we’ll be disappointed.  John Tierny has a great example of this called Science or Garbage? 

I spent most of my younger years in private school and didn’t head to public school until high school.  While my experience was positive, I say that mainly for social reasons.  The overall education was decent enough but one big difference was the amount of time on BS courses.  In private school we didn’t have Study Halls. We didn’t have regular pep rallies. We didn’t have D.A.R.E and we didn’t have any other feel good program.

The D.A.R.E. rallies were the biggest jokes there were.  At the risk of outing any old friends, suffice to say there was a contingent who thought it was cool to puff a few J’s before heading to the D.A.R.E rallies. One year, the head of S.A.D.D. was busted for  a DUI (which was a real accomplishment in that part of the country). We had a domestic violence seminar that has held by this lady who was the most bitter and angry person I ever met. She went so far as to say that tickling your girlfriend or joking around with her was domestic violence. (It wasn’t the case in reverse she was quick to point out).  I don’t know how many hours all this crap took but it was a good bit of time when you added it all up.

People can argue whether or not these programs have merit all day. Everything I’ve read indicates D.A.R.E is an absymal failure and usually resulted in people pointing out all the BS they fed us.  For instance, they said that if teenage boys smoked pot, they’d develop breasts.  There were probably 100 examples to the contrary sitting in the audience so it didn’t fool anyone.  But intentions don’t matter.  Results do.  If all that time was spent in Science or Math, it’s hard to argue we wouldn’t have been better off. If you are going to have sex, drink and drive, do drugs or whatever else, a big meeting in the auditorium isn’t going to make a damn bit of difference either way.  I’d go so far as to say the same holds for sex education. I hear all the arguments about how kids won’t get this information at home in many cases and that results in teenage pregnancy and STDs. I knew some real dumb asses in my life, but I’ve never met one who got pregnant or got someone pregnant and didn’t know how it happened.  I don’t have a gripe with sex ed for moral reasons, my only gripe is that it’s a waste of time.

If our schools were doing sooo well in math and science that we were the envy of the world, I could see how we might be able to afford wasting time with stuff like this. Anyone want to argue that’s the case? As long as we’re behind, this sort of crap needs to go out the window – or there should at least be an exemption for kids that would rather learn something worthwhile than learn this stuff. Otherwise, we’re engaging in a textbook case of rewarding A while hoping for B.

[tags] D.A.R.E, Sex Ed, Earth Day, Teen Pregnancy[/tags]