Recently in Personal 01 Category

Gotta love hosting.

More bad news: apparently I did something to piss off INFOSEC's client on the last gig I had with them. I've actually been blacklisted by that department. The guys at INFOSEC aren't mad: this is a strange person running that group at their client. She's Peter Principalled and is running scared.

The scary thing is that I was counting on getting some room to maneuver from these short-term contracts with INFOSEC. Yeah, I know that this is not what I want to do with my life, and that's probably the point. I want something different. It's not that IT Security consulting -- or anything IT-related -- is stupid, or lacks creativity or is inherently bad. It just doesn't play to my strengths. Unfortunately, after years of working in these dead-end jobs that pay a pretty good amount of money, I don't have a lead on how to move out of it.

I've been putting off using Dreamweaver for about four years. This gave me an excuse to pull out Ultradev suite and see what the old versions of Dreamweaver and Fireworks could do. I think it came out OK for a demo tape.

It took me way too long to figure out that I was missing a small file for the popups. I haven't actually done much with HTML since about the time MS Internet Exploder came out. I started out as a web master when the big browser war was between UI's Mosaic and Cornell's Cello. Those were the days. None of this visual appearance for us. Nope, just good, plain Republican pages. I wrote an entire catalog site in late 1994 entirely in pico. I hadn't learned how to use vi yet. (I know, I know: I wasn't a Computer Sciences major, and I avoided the psych classes that made me give up my precious DOS -- and yes, I was using Compaq DOS 2.x back then. I also used IBM's when I could score it. Ah, that wonderful dual floppy, green screen, less than 640kB systems. I remember when I got access to a PC XT! An XT! It had a hard drive! Since then, I've tried to forget all that I've ever known about computers with such amazing success that I'm an IT security consultant.

- manasclerk

It's amazing how hard it is to get good information about how to anchor something to a plaster wall. The Natural Handyman's site (does he not sound like some sort of carpenter who works naked?) had a great article on what to use where and when. I was using molly bolts for my heavy stuff, but I used toggles instead, along with a really good art hook, based on his advice.

-manasclerk

I think that it has been tabled indefinitely. Which means that I will never make any money off of it. Time to move on. I'm thinking of asking DH to assist me if I can grab some work from this startup. I wouldn't mind being paid a bit for financial writing again. And DH used to be a marketing director for a finance company, albeit not quite in these guys' league.

So, I was going to just name this post "J & D" to refer to J, who has the distinct honor of being the first guy that I ever best manned for, and D, who has the distinct honor of being the first guy I ever ushered for. But J married a D (different full name, same initial) and I didn't want any confusion. Aren't you glad I cleared that up?

L's going off to a Writers' Group with a previous winner of the National Book Award (really) so I thought I would take half a mo' and clear up what seems to be a confusion about this client contract.

1. It is not a contract with my usual employer, who always, always gets these things right. We're subbing to INFOSEC for goodwill.


2. The guy who sold the contract is a great guy, but he worked in Strategy Consulting and not IT Consulting. He's never done an security risk assessment and he's never had to deliver an IT product while consulting, although he used to work in IT a few years ago as an internal.


3. That being said, he never gave the client a good idea of what we needed to do the job, things like network diagrams, application specifications, access to administrators, etc.


4. So he asked me to put this together and send it to the client.


5. The client freaked and put us off for at least two weeks.


6. I've been putting off other work because I had this lined up and it was going to be a few grand.

I have been able to review Flawless Consulting Fieldbook & Companion: A Guide To Understanding Your Expertise. I am once again drawn into the fray with it and I'll put up some of my ideas.

-- manasclerk