Google uses only the most advanced mathematical algorithms in creating its Buttered Steaks. Only a TasteRank(tm) of 8 or higher gets delivered store shelves. They are now experimenting with a new high speed to the delivery system to the home. Sign up through an RFI Today!
My friend Coleman is on the staff of the Jamie Oliver reality show being shot in Huntington. He just called me to tell me they are looking for at least 20 extras to be dressed as chef’s dancing in the background of this segment they are doing. Details are sketchy but they must be available for rehearsal 5:30 today and Tomorrow, and be available for the shoot 10am to 2pm wednesday. If your interested and can commit. Contact filmdeviant@gmail.com within the next hour or so.
Today WV is celebrating its 146th Birthday which the state celebrates it officially as WV Day. Last year Jason Keeling started, with his A better West Virginia Website, a challenge to to get other blogger’s involved in defining obstacles that hinder WV’s growth. This year he has extended that challenge yet again.
I think one of the problems that holds WV back is that we dwell too much in the present and the past and not enough in the future. I don’t mean WV’s diverse and historic culture but instead its inability to move into new realms of broadband and transportation infrastructures as well as economic development.
For broadband, we need to not only expand to rural areas, but we also need to look at ways of increasing bandwidth capacity statewide. A lot of cities try to offer free Internet to its constituents but end up having difficulties maintaining that kind of infrastructure on their own. Instead I think cities could provide incentives for broadband companies that meet a certain baseline of requirements. For example, imagine if a city would wave franchise fees and possibly provide subsidies if a broadband company met its requirement of having a free tier of Internet to anyone in the the company’s territory. They could even set minimum speed and and service quality requirements. This would allow WV cities to compete on the basis of broadband availability. Imagine how much a small business would save in WV by doing business with free broadband.
Transportation is another factor. Country Roads might take you home, but how long does it take you to get there and will they bring business to WV? The construction and expansion of roads in WV I see today are to meet the needs of Today’s traffic, and by the time they finished being built they’ll already be inadequate. We need to start investing in construction that will make are roads sufficient for 20-30 years out. Not only that we need to start investing in transportation projects that decrease the reliance on those roads. Projects such as light and high speed rail systems to link our cities and their resources together. And create real jobs in the process.
For economic development, we need stop depending on our few natural resources to bring jobs and income to the state. We need real and sustainable jobs that will last long after those resources are exhausted. I think one major way of doing this is to create methods of encouraging small business to move or start in WV. Far too long has WV tried to woo large businesses to come into the state with far too little success. The Toyota plant is one example of such a success but at the same time other business have pulled out. We need to come to the realization that WV isn’t ready for big business to come here yet. All large businesses started somewhere, small. Wouldn’t it be wiser for WV to invest in a multitude of small businesses and help grow those businesses in to large ones? To give it a gardening analogy, you can transplant a single plant but that’s all you have is the one plant to depend on or you can plant a bunch of seeds and soon have a whole garden of plants.
For months I have been toying around with the idea of setting up a web site to help promote twitter in WV. Many communities have sprung up on twitter fostering things such as tweetups like we have here in Charleston. I wanted to create a site that allowed other twitters in their area to follow.
I purchased a domain sometime back but until Sunday night I had not done anything with it. In a little under a week I managed to pull the initial site together from scratch. The hardest part was working around twitters API which was designed more for clients and not for the site. All told I probably spent less then 24 hours total programming the entire thing and creates the logo and design only yesterday.
This current site is just the beginning. Very soon I plan to start working on a method of scheduling/promoting tweetups from the site as well as features. Check it out: www.wvtweets.com.
If you have a twitter account that you’d like to have add to the site, just message or DM me (McNeely) and I’ll add you to the bot. If the bot (wvtweets) is already following you and you’re not showing up it is either because you have set your tweets as protected or you don’t have a valid location set, "Charleston, WV" and "Charleston West Virgina" are both valid examples as they have both city and state set. A lot of Smaller locales have not been added yet and I plan to add a generic category for users with statewide locations.
When starting my last job I needed to get an adequate inventory of equipment on the network including IP, machine name, service tag, name of the user as well as the software installed. I could have spent my spare time running around to each machine running something like Belarc Advisor and writing the rest down. Even on a network of around 30 computers and other peripherals this could be and inadequate use of my time. I started to search around for inventory software that could at least do what Belarc does but run at login and dump to a network share. I even looked at a few solutions such as newt but they proved to be too costly. I finally managed to happen on to Spiceworks.
Spiceworks is a network admin’s swiss army knife. This windows based app takes inventory of your network equipment as well as PC software and hardware. It also handles network and Exchange monitoring, license and asset tracking as well as vendor tracking. It even includes a built in helpdesk and trouble ticketing portal and is integrated with their own support community. It runs as a system tray app or can run as a system service on either a workstation or a server , I recommend the latter. The best part? Its FREE! All of this is accessed through clean a web based interface that is AD Supported. If your organization prefers it can have the AD’s removed for a fee.
To get is information the software uses a combination of WMI, SNMP and in some cases SSH. In an Active Directory environment, turning on WMI (and RPC) is a simple matter of modifying group policy settings. All the information is gathered at specified time intervals remotely and doesn’t require any software to be executed on individual machines.
The software also has customizable reports that can provide a lot of essential information like which PCs have anti-virus installed properly and which ones don’t. In our environment when I wanted to see which Dell servers and workstations had service contracts ready to expire, I was able to create a report with a list of computer names and Dell service tags captured from a scan and export it to a CSV that was easily imported into their customers site.
I have just briefly touched on the power of this software. I recommend an administrator running a network of any size to at least download and evaluate this software. Download it today: http://www.spiceworks.com/
So apparently I’m a “Slightly Dorky Nerd King”. I’m wondering if the dork meter is a little too high and the literature meter a little too low……..Eh, maybe not.
Sometimes its good to be king. 
Some may wonder about the meaning of my blog title “The Inner Sanctum”. I actually took the name from an Old Time Radio (OTR) show I used to listen to. Late one night when I was in middle school I began to flip the A.M. stations. Most A.M. Stations are required to power down their transmitters at night except for a few station that around before the rule was put into place. Because of this one could catch radio stations from hundreds of mile away. This particular night I stumbled on to WGN Radio out of Chicago airing the show “When Radio Was”.
“When Radio Was” is a show produced a company called Radio Spirits Inc. Each show highlights several episodes from OTR shows. In a single sitting you could here episode from such shows as “The Saint”, “The Lone Ranger”, “The Green Hornet”, “The Shadow”, “Jack Benny”,”Burns and Allen”, “The Twilight Zone”, “Boston Blackie” and many others from “The Golden Age” of radio.
Radio’s “Golden Age” generally took place between the 1930′s and the early 1950′s. This was a time before the television, when actors had nothing more then their voice and sound effects and the listener had little more then their imagination. As television creeped into homes a lot of these shows began to transition to the screen.
“The Lone Ranger” and “The Twilight Zone” are probably two of the more obvious transitions but others, such as “The Green Hornet” which debuted Bruce Lee as Kato and “The Saint” with Roger Moore.
With the recent holidays one might have seen a prime reference to and OTR. Fans of “A Christmas Story” will probably remember the character Ralphie listening to “Little Orphan Annie” and deciphering with his decoder ring, “Drink More Ovaltine”.
These shows are fun to listen to and with Internet media, such as podcasting, you can now listen to a lot of these shows online. Most of the shows are now out of copyright and in the public domain and are widely available online. From time to time I may post a specific article about a specific show recommendation to listen to.
I have been debating setting my personal blog back up for some time. It just so happens the week I decide to go ahead and do it a shiny new version of wordpress comes out. This version of wordpress sports a new interface for the backend. The most two noticeable changes are the dashboard and menus.
The dashboard is now able to be organized with drag and drop style windows. It also now come with a “QuickPress” Windows to start churning out posts immediately. Another window shows general information about how many posts. comments etc. In the Upper right hand corner there is a small gray tab labeled “Screen Options” that allows you to select windows that you want hidden.
The menus have undergone a complete transformation. The tab bar has been replaced with a collapsable sidebar which feels more intuitive. Gone are “Write” and “Manage” as they have been replaced with simpler items based on what you want to work with suchs as “Posts” or “Pages”. When the toolbar is expanded, actions (Add, Edit, etc) appear as a subitem after you have clicked the main item. When the toolbar is collapsed, subitems appear as a popup menu. The menus as a whole have been organized so that somone new to wordpess can learn to navigate pretty quickly.
The interface as a whole is very polished with a few small pet peeves that I can live with. The Drag and Drop ability has been enabled on screens through the interface including the post screen. There is a new plugin browser feature that allows you to search for new plugins and immediately install them provided you have ftp access to wordpress directory. SCP/SFTP (Uploading via SSH) is not supported at this time.
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