Since this is available to everyone, I felt that I should share. The following is a link to IBM’s voucher for free admittance to the expo floor of the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco, running from April 20th until April 24th.
Free Expo Pass – Be IBM’s Guest
You have to sign up before April 17th to redeem the freebie.
In addition to saving up for important things like a PS3, a new(er) car, and a new topcoat, I also have a few not-so-fun expenses to deal with this coming year. I have some debt to dig out of, some bills to pay, moving expenses, as well as tucking some money away for school and possibly getting some Lasik surgery if time allows for it. So, I’m budgeting and planning, putting money away while I’m spending my time doing that w**k stuff at my new job. Then, of course, there’s also the issue of fixing my lousy credit score. On the subject of money and saving, I thought I’d share some interesting links to stories I read today while waiting for my coffee to finish dripping.
A new security flaw in Vista’s kernel was discovered this week. This is the kind of thing that has made Vista very unpopular. However, while there are significant issues with the current version of Windows, the rest of the computing-world isn’t off the hook, either. A security issue involving OpenSSL on Debian and Ubuntu has been discovered which leaves a huge number of users open to attack. The full story is a much better read than I could give in a summary. It’s interesting, to say the least, that when security-issues of equal magnitude don’t get the same amount of press because of the stigma attached to one vendor over another.
Finally got myself one of those “job” type of things at this place. I’m currently supporting an internal Windows Server 2008 Active Directory network, along with a series of servers hosting everything from games to development environments. I’m working full-time and I’ve been promised that I can still take classes, creatively juggling my hours here and there for the mid-day sessions.
I’ll be working primarily with Windows Server 2008 on the internal network, along with Exchange 2007 and mostly XP/Vista clients. I’ll also be doing some extensive work with virtualization, using VMware’s ESX server to host Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and Windows Server 2008 virtual machines for an online game environment. We’ll be looking at lots of things in the upcoming year, such as getting new network equipment (Cisco) and upgrading our own internal IT servers, as well as playing with MySQL and PostgreSQL databases for various (nefarious) purposes. There’s going to be a lot of fun right off the bat, lots of work to do for an upcoming project, but that’s the nature of the beast.
Yay, I finally have a job! Crap, I have to go to work again. . .
