Posts

Well this has certainly been a long time coming. It seems that Benefitfocus has finally gone public and the share price is skyrocketing. To my friends still there, I would like to say congratulations. Though I’m not sure why. Unless you are getting stock options, it doesn’t really mean all that much from a compensation standpoint. It does of course mean that your company has now begun the long infamous transition from a stable independent entity to a marionette whose strings are randomly tugged by hordes of idiotic investors. ...

Within the last 24 hours, we have learned that NSA has successfully circumvented the most popular forms of encryption in use on the Internet today. This revelation not only undermines the career of people like myself, who essentially work exclusively with web facing technologies within our applications and solutions, but it also undermines the future of the American public. How does this undermine the future of the American Public? Well that’s simple. It’s undermining the future of the industry in which I work. The Information Technology industry is one of the few industries in America that is experiencing upward mobility nowadays. If you undermine that industry, you unavoidably undermine the future of this country. Moreover, the technology that the NSA has undermined is relied upon by every other industry on the planet. You may not personally care about SSL encryption, but it is one of the few things that stand between your purchase on Amazon and somebody being able to snatch your credit card information out of thin air. If that doesn’t strike you as a problem, then perhaps it’s time for you to switch over to something that is more your speed. ...

As anybody who has read my resume knows, I used to work at a company called Benefitfocus. At some point I decided to move on. Now if you spend some time looking at Benefitfocus’ website you will probably come away quizzically as according to the culture page there, I would be a great fit as an employee. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. Don’t get me wrong. Working at BF was a great experience. One that I would not hesitate to do over again if I had a time machine. However this was primarily because of the people I worked in close proximity with, not the company we worked for. Of course the company has to receive some credit for that. Somehow they managed to attract all of this talent. On the flip side, keeping the talent there is becoming a more prominent issue with each passing month and year. It is an issue that BF seems reluctant to take on. ...

Well for what it’s worth here is my own personal Windows 8 experience. I finally took the time to install Windows 8 on my System76 panp9 (Core I7, HD4000, Ivy Bridge) laptop. I have an MS Action Pack subscription so I’ve had access to the RTM bits for awhile, but just couldn’t be bothered until now. I installed Windows 8 (after using Clonezilla to backup my Arch Linux install of course). ...

For those of you not familiar with my resume, let me sum it up for you: I’ve been designing, developing, deploying and supporting software for 13 years. I’ve seen my fair share of failures but on the flip side, I’ve also seen more than my fair share of successes. I’d say when it comes right down to it, developing great software isn’t really that difficult. Above all else it has been my experience that the primary requirement one must fulfill in order to develop great software is that you have to care. Now that may sound stupid. Hell it probably sounds pompous and arrogant depending upon your perspective. But over the course of my career I have worked with all kinds of people. A few of those people truly cared about what it is they were doing while most of them showed up for eight hours a day in order to collect their paycheck. ...

Subject: In regards to your “Computer Hacking” story To whom it does concern, To start I would like to say: I’ve been a fan of PBS for years and for the most part I appreciate the dedication and the impartiality of the PBS News Hour staff. In addition I make my living working in IT and have a sizable level of experience in regards to Computer Security. However on a less congratulatory note, I just finished watching your “Computer Hacking” discussion that was broadcast on the PBS Nightly News on 2011/06/01 @ 6 PM EST and I was appalled. I’ve seen very few pieces on the “Nightly News” that I would characterize as lacking and/or shoddy. However this discussion was appalling in the unchallenged slant that was presented. ...

So apparently there is an election where I live in Greer today. And I don’t care. However when the father of one of the candidates came stumping through my neighborhood this weekend and handed me a brochure advertising his daughter’s candidacy, I couldn’t help but be struck by the level of nonsense it contained. For instance his daughters political party membership, views on important topics and stances and on issues relevant to Greer as a community were not included in this pamphlet. However it did mention the church she was a member of, the fact that she was a small business owner along with where she went to high school. Apparently fixing that pothole that I hit every morning crossing Highway 29 via Arlington is not a platform issue. Which is a shame because without a commitment on that particular issue, I’ll be forced to ignore the election as a whole. ...

Wow. So today I finally signed up with DirectTV and their HD DVR service. Little did I know that my biggest source of drama here would be with TiVo. Back in Jan of 2009, I had canceled TiVo after my original 2 year commitment was up and tried out the Cable company’s DVR option. After about a month of suffering, we decided to move back to our low def TiVo (having already tried the TiVo HD and found that neither TiVo nor our cable company could/would get the CableCARD solution to work). Well apparently when I signed up for TiVo’s special reduced rate of $12.95, they nailed me with a yearly commitment. Or so they say. My original documentation and emails on the matter indicate no such commitment. I do keep all of these things on hand for future reference. ...

Well, the day has finally come. Or it came a few days ago. Well technically it came on July 13th, but wasn’t announced until this Wednesday July 22nd. Windows 7 is done! And not only that, but the untouched RTM build straight from Microsoft is floating around out there in the wild. I can’t wait to get my keys via my Action Pack subscription next month. Though until then I’ve installed it with no key. ...

Hmmmm… it’s been awhile hasn’t it? Well not only am I posting something to the site, I’ve also uploaded a slightly improved build of it along with adding a new default theme into the mix. I’ve been toying with the idea of a decent all black theme for awhile now and finally got around to throwing together something that works. Of course I’d be lying if I said that I came up with it all by myself. But hey, I never claimed to be a graphic artist, did I? Oh and the application has now been moved to the .NET 3.5 framework and consequently is being compiled/developed with Visual Studio 2008. ...