Fun with numbers in NC

NC is a pretty awesome state. I pity the fool who lives in any other state. Actually, it's more of a "deepest sympathies" feeling. If you're feeling down too, you can always move here if you like, I promise. Coolest state in the union since 21st Nov 1789.

Here's some awesome things you can do and the ages you can do them at in NC*:

8:

• Stay at home alone!

The word "oppression" is really funny

Everyone's done it. I'm doing it right now with the word "cool" in my head and on the phone. Saying a word over and over until it lacks meaning in every context you use it. Suddenly "I'm going to the store." gets the same response from me as "Some girl just fell off the runway on America's next top model!"

Protip: I really like going to the store, but I really REALLY like it when a girl with freckles basically rolls across the top of the water in a giant hamster ball. At that moment, I knew I wanted a giant hamster ball and a pool, so that one day I could be that awesome. And I said "cool." What is wrong with me?

The same thing that's wrong with everyone who speaks english. Each of us is creating our own individual vision of newspeak. I try to mentally count each word I use one day each month. I get distracted halfway through the first meeting of the day and end up with things like "synergize", "leverage" and "skillset." Then I die a little on the inside.

McAfee Endpoint Encryption for PC

McAfee EEPC is a product for encrypting the entire drive of a laptop or desktop computer running a relatively recent edition of Windows. We have about 2000 seat licenses for it, along with McAfee's Device Control/DLP offering, and their Endpoint Encryption for Files and Folders(EEFF) items. I was expecting the deployment to be as straightforward and simple as all of the other products we've rolled out, but I've got to say we've had only a 50% survival rate on the 12 machines it's been installed on in testing.

I have to say, my confidence in McAfee's products has been shaken, but their account team has done a lot to make it up to us. Will post later about how that goes. Gonna try to post more frequently.

Forgot to mention

Senator Burr responded to the note I wrote him on october 8th of 2009. He said he was concerned about the government interfering with private contracts and amending contract law. I can see his point, but it still strikes me that allowing an organization that is fully funded by the United States to deny it's employees legal protection is a bit off. The United States is a country of laws, and no private contract should be allowed to contravene those laws. All of this IMHO.

Wrote a letter to one of my state's senators.

This is a copy of an email I just submitted to Senator Aaron Burr, (R, NC)

Dear Senator Burr, I would like to know where you stand on rape and sexual harassment at work. My understanding from your recent vote against an amendment proposed by Sen. Al Franken to the defense appropriations bill (http://www.opencongress.org/roll_call/show/6179), which sought to limit funding to government contractors who use mandatory arbitration clauses to prevent employees from taking action in the case of rape or assault, is that you as a person and a United States senator fully support and condone the crime of rape and the covering up thereof. I for one am happy to live in a state where the most established and influential person representing us to the nation supports rape. All those family values we've had to deal with for so long were so restrictive, i'm glad that you're taking such a progressive stance on allowing rape in the workplace. Normally i'd expect a liberal to be the one voting pro-rape, it's refreshing to see a good christian like yourself standing up for the little guys, the government paid contractors who violently and shamefully abuse their female employees.

Yours, Logan Williams

Open question to Google and all DLP vendors

Earlier today, I was in my divisional assistant director's office with my boss discussing NC public records law as it relates to email, web usage, documents and etc... As you may or may not know, I work for a local government, and the proportional chunk of our budget that we spend to retain public records is non-trivial and mandatory.

Even so, we face many challenges. The challenge i'm hoping someone at google can address for me today relates to classification of documents and integration with 3rd party solutions.

Some background:

Even though a large portion of what we do is public records, a non-trivial portion of it is by no means public records, and in fact we have a legal obligation to protect some of the data from being accessed outside of whatever use it is intended for. Personnel records are considered proprietary, as is information we have concerning direct deposit for employees, etc... Things that a lot of lawsuits would be filed over should they fall into the wrong hands.

The problem for us is that unmanaged document sprawl has both public records and private information scattered across terabytes of storage in a forest of directories, complicating our compliance efforts to no end. Also, not everything that is not private information needs to be retained per public records law, and so can be deleted to lower storage costs once the information is no longer relevant. Imagine signup sheets for 10+ years of employee birthday parties, directories misused for music storage, pictures of someone's kid, etc...

We would also like to explore the possibility of DLP to protect what needs protecting at some point in the future, as part of a larger and ongoing risk management and security management process.

I proposed automating the classification process with a sort of google appliance, or the appliance of a search competitor (dont know much in the document management space), and once we have a handle on that, using that appliance to provide data classification for a DLP solution down the road. In my mind, I can see the perfect solution to all those challenges on one box, but I want to check in with google and the internet to see if it's possible, been done, or being done.

My iPhone isnt good for everything, i guess...

So, today as I was chilling out in the boonies with my family (grandfather's birthday was a few days ago), I thought to myself "Hey, the safari browser on my iPhone is based on the one i'm using on my mac, I wonder how compliant it is." Being an IT professional, compliance is important to me. If something just isn't compliant, my coworker in web development will spaz out and then get paid to have a hissy fit, while they interrupt the task of infrastructural engineering. It's really quite interesting.

Anyways, I had already been in the internet because I was checking out latitude for the iPhone which I have to say wasn't as cool as I'd hoped. Mostly because I have no friends for it set up. Maybe I just don't have any friends... Also, it's a web app. What the fuck? The default mapping application on the iPhone IS google maps, and apple wants latitude to be a web app? I'm just gonna write this off as a decision made in steve's absence and let it go.

Being in the boonies with my grandparents, of course I am using my iPhone as a wireless modem to post this. Despite that, it still performs pretty adequately as far as pulling pages for two devices at once.

Here are my Acid results: