My Opinion On The Olympics

  I have watched the Olympics for as long as I can remember and I have come to the following conclusion:  Get rid of all judged sports.  This includes all gymnastics, diving, ice skating, synchronized swimming, freestyle skiing and the like.  I see no reason why medals should be awarded based on someone else’s judgement.  I have seen and have been disappointed numerous amount of times by error, inexperience, etc.  How can there be a full point differential in judging?  Obviously, there are problems with the system(s).  There should be no more than a .5 differential in the scoring.  As long as there are human judges, all scores will be suspect.  I hope in the future there will be a couple of computers set up at different angles which can analyze using computer modeling that can pick up the subtleties of each movement and accurately and unbiasedly score the event.  

Which sports do I like in the Olympics?  Any sport that is timed-based and/or point-based.  There is no ambiguity in time or points.  Who ever scores more or finishes first wins.  Those results are not determined by a third party (with very rare exceptions where the referee actually makes a poor call that decides a result).  They are definitive.

McAfee Secure Content Management and Verisign Certificates

Maybe someone out there is using the McAfee SCM appliance for TLS communications using Verisign Certificates.  What has your experience been?  We currently have McAfee Support and Development trying to make it work.  They have mentioned that they do not support certificate chaining.  Has anyone gotten TLS to work on their SCM box?

Edit: OK, the process went something like this:  Use OpenSSL to generate a private RSA key.  Then using OpenSSL again, generate the CSR.  Merge the private key with the CSR using WordPad or linux command cat.  Go to Versign (or Thawte…) and get their CA (and in some cases their intermediate CA) and import it to McAfee SCM.  Import the certificate in PEM format.  Apply All Changes…  To make matters more interesting, they pointed us to Cisco’s directions on how to do use OpenSSL.  Sigh.  Hoping it will work…

Edit:  Well, apparently we  have a certificate type mismatch with one of our certificates.  We created the certs using the same private key and started running into issues on one box.  Looks like we are going to have to go back to Verisign to have a certificate reissued.

Been Real Busy

I have been really busy in the last year.  I am now the sole U.S. administrator of Lotus Notes, RIM Blackberry Enterprise Server, IronPort, PGP Universal Server, McAfee Secure Content Manager, to name a few.  I will try and post more once I get certain projects now going on out of the way.

American / United Airlines

We are in the 21st century and we are in planes manufactured in the latter half of the 20th century. I have been using American recently, but I suspect that the same goes with United Airlines as well. A cross country trip in a 757. I was disappointed in the technology offered by the airline. My trip from San Diego to Denver on Frontier offered more technology with the exception of the single class cabin and a pay for view DirecTV. I wasn’t about to pay 5 dollars for less than 2 hours of viewing. There was a time that American and United were the power horses of the airline industry. Hopefully, with the introduction of the new Airbus airplane recently, we will get some new offerings of some technology.

Blacks on TV victimized

My wife pointed out the other day that there seem to be some major characters on some popular shows being victimized recently. CSI:NY Dr. Sheldon Hawkes being accused of murder, Criminal Minds’ Derek Morgan and the Unit’s Hector Williams. This may be all coincidence, but all these shows occurred pretty close to each other – within about a week or two. Just a strange observance.

Miami International Airport

For the last couple of years, I have taken my annual vacation down to St. Croix flying through MIA.  When I first started going down to the Caribbean, I used to fly through San Juan, Puerto Rico.  My wife does not like going on small airplanes so we changed to the Miami flight.  One year when we were snowed out, we rebooked and had to spend the night in San Juan.  We made the mistake of staying at the San Juan Airport Hotel.  It looked like a cheap motel and the rooms were not really clean. We chose it since we had an early morning flight out. Miami is better to stay in, however, why is it that American Airlines is spread across 5 terminals?  We came in at the A Concorse and had to fly out of the E Concourse.  It is a 20 minute walk with some moving walk ways.  I am surprised that there is no transportation between concorses.  Last year, we were late coming in and had to run between B and D in order to get to our connection which took us 10 minutes of running with me carrying 2 heavy carry-ons and a shoulder bag while my family ran ahead to catch the flight.  Dallas Fort-Worth has the best airport with their monorail that goes between the terminals.  Denver is pretty good with their system.  Is there any sort of transportation scheduled for between terminals in MIA?

Vacation! St. Croix, U.S.V.I.

I have not written in awhile and am currently on vacation in St. Croix. We have been coming down to St. Croix for 13 or so years now every Christmas and staying at a resort called The Buccaneer. It is a family friendly resort with golf, tennis and beach activities. I will try and explain the resort as best as I can:

Question: Aeros MX-850 Remote Control and two TiVos. How do you program both TiVos?

8/24/2006: I am waiting for my friend to become available, so there may not be any news on this for a bit. Also waiting for the new DirecTV HD DVR to come out which seems to have started in LA and is coming soon.

Ferrari 308 GTS

I went by a friends house to borrow his truck for this weekend so we can pick up a 12 foot table from by step-brothers house. I had heard he had bought off ebay a Ferrari 308 GTS with 4,200 miles on it for a little over $25K. Next thing I know, the keys are in my hand and I am driving the car around his neighborhood. The clutch was very stiff. I barely fit in it as I am 6′ 4″ and my leg was jammed between the steering wheel and the stick when it was in reverse. Admittably, I was a little timid driving it, but did manage to get it into 4th. Couldn’t get it to 5th. When we got back to his house, he took over and showed me how to drive it. Several tire treads left and doing double the speed limit on residential roads later, I said if I was going to die, I was going to die happy. Man, what a ride.

Welcome

I have decided to start a blog to discuss some things in general, give some tutorials which can be grouped together by categories, and talk about some of my passions and experiences. As I mentioned in the About Zeff Wheelock…, I am a Lotus (IBM) Domino Administrator/Developer and a Blackberry Administrator. My favorite computer is the Macintosh, I love to sail, play golf and tennis am a amateur radio operator (ham) with call sign KB1KVA. I plan on creating some how-tos on most of the the subjects, mostly computer related. If I come across something, I just may post it here. I will try and answer any questions you may have to the best of my knowledge.