sorry blog....so neglected.

sorry blog....so neglected.
Just been so busy lately. Summer's here, expect late nights and lots of free time.

Much has gone on...

Well where do I begin? Let's see, last I think I said nothing much has been going on. Well, I lied. No wait, I didn't lie, I just didn't think about updating this blog while things are going on. We took the plunge and bought a condo. First things first, i hate the idea of condos because its kind of like you're renting but you "own" it. Whatever, we got one that we thought was a pretty good price and had enough space for all of our crap. We got rid of a lot of crap too which is good. I'm embracing the idea of "less is more". Less things to drag around with you and more freedom. Kind of like thinking that you own your stuff and your stuff doesn't own you. I sold all of my Cd's and got some movies that i've always enjoyed watching. We got rid of old furniture and just the act of getting rid of things was liberating. Sure, we sold it pretty cheap but it was worth it to just get rid of the stuff.

Now to the condo. We as a young couple are liked by pretty much everyone. I guess I should consider myself a yuppie? maybe...being young and a professional. I guess i'm not really all that young anymore but whatever, we've moved into a 'target area'. What does that mean? Well it means that the city of chicago is trying to clean up a particular area and they'll give you some incentives to move there. Now, linda and I have lived in some rough neighborhoods before but never really a "black" neighborhood. It took some getting used to but the neighbors on our block seem pretty nice and the street is rather quiet. I mean it still is Chicago so you're going to have more people around in a particular area. We have the cars that look and drive like crap but you sure know that their stereo is probably the most expensive thing on the car. You got tons of kids playing in a field and riding their bikes. It's kind of different but I think we're getting used to it. Getting used to how things are and just trying to be comfortable. Sometimes I sit back and think to myself "Do I really live here?". The neighborhood isn't the greatest but it is far from the worst. I mean c'mon, we've got a Starbucks and a Walgreens and a hell of a lot of new construction going up. I hope things clean up quick and the neighborhood turns. East Garfield Park seems like the place to be since it was pretty close to downtown. Hopefully we'll get bid for the olympics and things will tighten up quick. I say I don't enjoy the idea of a condo, but it does beat renting for the simple fact that you're investing your money. Not just throwing it away every month. True you have that freedom of just up and leaving, but I'm not going anywhere and I enjoy taking care of my own place and fixing things myself. I've got a couple projects ahead of me that i'm looking forward to doing. One of them being to take care of my budding home theater project and the other to start up on learning more things about computers. I'm on the last year of my "plan" so I gotta pick things up. Hopefully things will go well and I'll complete some of the things I set out to do. I'd be happy if I got one of those things done in the next 6 months. I just need some motivation.

Anyways, it's late.
--steak.

Not really too much going on...

Title really sums it up. There isn't much going on except for work and the same old stuff. I've been trying to keep busy with projects I give myself and when i'm not doing that I'm usually watching TV. Though, I am trying to exercise more by taking walks and watching what I eat. It's kinda tough when you know things have to change but you're so unmotivated to do so...

Ah well, I'm not really into posting today, but figured I'd get something up.
ttyl.

--steak.

hey, how ya doin?

Well, things are going...
Not bad really, could be worse I suppose. We've been doing well and trying to get things sorted. Linda's been doing her thing and getting more clients, hopefully things will take off once the real estate season goes into full swing. I hope they do, I sure do miss some of the luxuries we had before. Ah well, they'll be back again in due time. But as far as the housing market goes, we're not in a good spot.

We have 2 choices:
A) Get a small condo that is old and outdated and really just needs cosmetic fixups.
B) Buy a good sized house in the middle of the hood that requires a lot of work.

I'm all for trying new things and having new experiences, but living in an area where you feel unsafe is not something I care to revisit. And honestly, unless your condo is very unique and worth the hassle what's the point? I'm an old fashioned kinda dood, I like having my own cut of the land, doing my own house work and yard work and not sharing any walls and not putting up with any condo association bullshit. So our only real choice is to just keep the status quo and try to save up some more money to get a better place next year. Kinda goes back to my last post where I was thinking about what to do from here. I think that gambling with what money we do have saved up is a bad idea. We'd like to stay in chicago because we like the city and it's many amenities, but I do miss hanging out with my friends and being just a few minutes away instead of an hour. Though it's kind of fuckd up that your friends wont drive an hour to hang out with you... I understand the predicament but it still doesnt make it alright. We have some friends in Romeoville and pondered moving there, but the commute on 55 would kill me. We put in some offers on a couple of houses and one thing or another they all fell through which I think is a blessing in disguise. We did some checks on teh traffic from Romeoville to Chicago and damn, an hour plus at 7A. I dont start work until 9A and ill be damned if I spend more than 2 hours in a car total. The deals falling through kind of saved us from ourselves which I think is for the better. We also went as far as to have a home inspection on one of hte houses here in Chicago, but again the inspection turned up not very good and the house required more work than we had money for and again, probably for the better. Ah well, i guess i should stop watching these home improvement shows. On to better things...

Meanwhile I've been diving deeper and deeper into the open source abyss. My buddy Justin and I attended NetSecure07 (computer security conference) at IIT which included some student projects that were pretty cool. One of the projects was right along the lines of one of the projects I wanted to do which was moving the wireless access point to my network on the outside of my firewall and having it authenticate with a server. Typically a wireless access point is the weakest point of your network, regardless of how secure and tight the rest of your network is. If you are using WEP or WPA (non-AES) encryption for your wifi security it's still not as secure as it could be. We all know that WEP can be cracked in 2 minutes and WPA has other security holes that make it useless as well. WPA2 is about the best you can do...for now. The security conference had some pretty interesting speakers from local companies as well as a guy from IEEE. Sure he was pretty dull, but he had some valid points and that is what kept my interest. He advised using a radius server and SSL certificates to encrypt all the links between the WAP and the wnic. Anyways, one of the student projects was setting up a WAP as a hotspot and then having it communicate with a captive portal and then having that captive portal forward authentication requests to a RADIUS server. What this setup also does is allow you to track who's logged on and where they've gone and how long they've been doing whatever. What I like best about the whole solution is that they used open source software for all of their components. The one I am most interested in is the DD-WRT opensource firmware for certain types of commercial routers. If I can get my hands on a couple of these I can really expand the wireless range of our WAP and ultimately make it very secure and easy to log onto. I've also installed Ubuntu fulltime on my laptop, been playing with Linux more and more and getting very comfortable with some of the functionality. Though I have a long ways to go just yet, I like having this kind of flexibility with the OS, not to mention the price is awesome.

Ah, so many projects and so little time. I have a few things I'd like to take care of within the next year to try to improve my worth in the IT job market. Time will tell.

thanks for reading.
-steak

posting...

So things are pretty crazy right now. I'm not sure what to do... Do I take these past few months as a sign of things to come? or do I simply cast it aside and try to play the card at hand? It's like that point in a game where things were pretty even up to a point. Then due to some event no matter how big or small, turns the tides. It could be a mouse farting, a fumble, an errant pass, a split second where concentration is broken and everything you worked so hard for unravels...

Or these things happen and then you are stronger because of it? These cliche's are all over the place, everywhere you turn, every person's wise advice has some sort of basis on a cliche. Good or bad, whatever. I think they hold some weight and some truth somewhere simply because it's human nature to fuck things up and then regret it for years to come.

You'll know when you come to that point, I think we're there. Time to see if we choose wisely.
good luck.

-steak.

yep...still kicking.

Yeh, i'm still living.
ttyl.

Round 02: ding! ding!

Hey everyone. It's week two and things are looking up. Linda's feeling way better about herself and is making some progress, picking up some clients, applying for jobbie jobs. While I am desperately trying to curb buying food from my favorite cafe and trying to eat at home more and trying to eat better in general. I'm looking into getting some exercise equipment and trying to do some more work. Gyms by me aren't very close and i'd rather not spend the money atm. I looked into some fitness video games and didn't really find any, though i did find a few for the PS2 that looked promising, but again, I'll see how this elliptical works out and we'll go from there.

Just kinda taking a break from some work. It's kind of refreshing, I haven't done this type of thing in a while and it feels pretty good. Though it reminds me of a bad period in my life where i was doing anything and everything to make money (no, i didn't start ho'ing). I've been working on my brother in law's website for his little side business as a hypnotherapist. The site looks ok so far, but I want to have him look at it and see what he likes/doesn't like. It should work out though, he's kinda easy to please and eager to get things setup. What i enjoy most about this time at the computer is the amount of time I have to listen to music. I miss loading up a few albums and just listening. Most of the time when I do get a chance to listen to music at work or whatever is while I am driving or reading through our firewall log files. Though, I must admit my web design skillz are pretty mediocre now and I've gotta get some books on some new things. People are doing things so cleanly and so easily that tables are kinda cumbersome now a days. Ah well, nothing's easy eh?

I'm going to have to start up looking for a new hosting company for my domain if Linda decides to do this business thing. Plus I can host a few other people's websites and actually manage it for them. This might prove to be a decent amount of money coming in. Time will tell, hopefully things will pickup and we'll be back on track again.

take it easy,
t0ny