చివరి వేసవి, నేను రిఫ్రిజిరేటర్ కోసం ఒక "జైలు నేరుగా" జాబితాను తయారుచేసి.  #1 జాబితాలో లారెన్స్ డోనెల్ ఉంది (సరికాని జోస్యములు కోసం), కానీ ఆ విధంగా ఈ బ్లాగ్ యొక్క పరిధిని దాటి వార్తలు :)  నేడు, నేను జాబితాకు సిస్కో యొక్క VPN క్లయింట్ జోడించడం వెబ్, మరియు ఒక ముక్కు ద్వారా పరిధిని వార్తలు.

ఖాతాదారులకు అనేక సంవత్సరాల క్రితం సమూహం వారి సైట్ రిమోట్ యాక్సెస్ ఎనేబుల్ సిస్కో VPN ఉపయోగిస్తారు.  దానికి, నేను ఈ ఖాతాదారులకు ప్రతి వర్చ్యువల్ PC లు రూపొందించినవారు మరియు ఆ సిస్కో ఇన్స్టాల్? ఎందుకు?  మీరు కూడా స్థానిక నెట్వర్క్ ప్రింటర్లు బ్రౌజ్ కనుక సిస్కో మీ యంత్రం అప్ లాక్ ఎందుకంటే, స్కైప్ వంటి ఒంటరిగా ప్రమాదకరమైన టూల్స్ వీలు, ప్రసారకుడి మరియు "~" కీ.  కాని,  మీరు ఒక VM పై ఇన్స్టాల్ ఉంటే, మీ VM లాక్ కానీ మీ హోస్ట్ ఉంది. 

నేను ఒక సిస్కో VPN క్లయింట్ ఉపయోగించడానికి కలిగి ఎందుకంటే నేను ఈ రోజు ఆ కీర్తి రోజుల గుర్తు చేస్తున్నాను * మళ్ళీ * మరియు నాకు లాక్ మరియు నేను ఒక నిమిషం లో దానిని ఉపయోగించడానికి.  నేను కాకుండా సిస్కో VPN క్లయింట్ జైలు ఉండాలి అర్హురాలని ఎంతవరకు బ్లాగ్ కంటే ఉపయోగించడానికి ఇష్టం ...

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నా బ్లాగ్ సబ్స్క్రయిబ్.

వద్ద ట్విట్టర్ లో నన్ను అనుసరించండి http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

SharePoint ఉత్తమం.

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నా బ్లాగ్ సబ్స్క్రయిబ్.

వద్ద ట్విట్టర్ లో నన్ను అనుసరించండి http://www.twitter.com/pagalvin

మేము ఉత్తర న్యూజెర్సీ గాల్విన్ యొక్క రాజకీయ వ్యంగ్య TV యొక్క పెద్ద అభిమానిస్తారు. కార్యక్రమం, ది డైలీ షో hosted by Jon Stewart. I don’t like to get political in my blogging, కాబట్టి అన్ని నేను చేస్తాను ఆ అని లేకుండా ది డైలీ షో, నేను బాగా శాశ్వతంగా కోల్పోవచ్చు లేదా గురించి అర్ధంలో హాస్యం అన్ని 12/12/2000.

మేము ప్రారంభ గత వారం డెక్ మీద ఒక భోజనం కలిగి ఉన్నాయి మరియు నా పది సంవత్సరాల కుమారుడు ఒక ఇటీవల ఎపిసోడ్ వస్తుంది చూపించు. నేను వ్యాఖ్యానించారు, "Jon Stewart knows that he మంచి నాకు ఆనందం కాదు or there will be terrible consequences for Jon Stewart."

నా కుమారుడు ఒక నిమిషం కోసం దాని గురించి ఆలోచించడం మరియు చెప్పారు: "Dad, ప్రధమ: He doesn’t even know you."

నేను ఒక సంఖ్య రెండు కోసం నిరీక్షిస్తూ, కానీ అతను తగినంత మరియు ఒక బీట్ ముళ్లు లేకుండా తదుపరి విషయం లో మార్చబడింది నిర్ణయించుకుంది.

ఇది నేను జోకులు కొన్ని రకాల చాలా ఎక్కువ మైలేజ్ అవుట్ అని ఉపయోగపడేది, but he’s getting too used to me or too mature or both. I need to adjust somehow.

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నా బ్లాగ్ సబ్స్క్రయిబ్.

ఒక చిన్న మూడు సంవత్సరాల క్రితం, నా భార్య నేను ఒక వేసవి సూచించే నా కుమారుడు సైన్ అప్, The Midland Park Players. This is a drama group that spends about three or four weeks preparing for a play and then showing it to the parents, friends and relatives. It’s always been done very well.

ప్రతి ఒక్కరూ యొక్క పిల్లల ఇలా ఉంటే నాకు తెలీదు, but my son is extremely reluctant to try new things. Knowing this, we signed him up for the program. We’ve found that it’s best to alert him to these kinds of things early and often. ఈ విధంగా, తన సహజ అయిష్టత అధిగమించడానికి క్రమంలో, మేము ప్రారంభ చెప్పాడు మరియు ఫన్ వంటి ధ్వని చేయడానికి మా ఉత్తమ చేసింది, మొదలైనవి. Even with a multi-month advertising campaign, he still wasn’t convinced. We forced him to do, అయితే, మరియు తరచుగా కేసు, he had a great time.

సమయానికి రెండో సంవత్సరం చుట్టూ గాయమైంది, he had once again convinced himself that he didn’t want to participate. కాని, మేము అతనికి సైన్ అప్ మరియు సున్నా-రోజు చేసింది, I dropped him off one morning at the high school where they practice. When I went to pick him up after lunch, అతను చాలా సంతోషిస్తున్నాము ఉంది, అన్ని నవ్వి ప్రకటించింది, "The play is the వెల్వెటీన్లను రాబిట్ and I want to be the Rabbit". He had spent literally months carrying on (కొన్నిసార్లు hysterically) అతను పార్క్ ప్లేయర్లు ఎటువంటి కోరుకోలేదు ఎలా మొదటి రోజు తరువాత, he wants to be the lead role in the play. We’ve seen this pattern before.

(మా ఆశ్చర్యం చాలా, అతను రాబిట్ పాత్ర వచ్చాం మరియు అతను ఆశ్చర్యం.)

Fast forward a few years. He’s been in Park Players three times now, so he’s something of a veteran. This summer (2008), Players starts up again. సగటు సమయం లో, అతను చివరికి మాకు అతను ఒప్పించింది లో నిజంగా doesn’t want to play soccer and he never liked basketball. That left him with no extra-curricular activities for late Winter / early Spring. A client with whom I was working mentioned that his daughter was in a program called Stage Right. Stage right is a slightly more expensive version of Park Players and it’s not in my town, but adjacent to it. Perfect.

The thing to know about that town is that it’s practically another country in terms of wealth. It has a high-frequency train right to Wall Street and NYC in general. It’s just a wealthy place. One of the on-going family discussion themes is whether we should have moved to that town instead of where we live now. It’s a bigger town, దాని పాఠశాలలు పిల్లలు కోసం మరింత కార్యక్రమాలను అందిస్తున్నాయి, మొదలైనవి. My wife grew up in that town and her parents live there, so we are "hooked in" despite not living there. I personally grew up in different circumstances in Massachusetts, so I don’t have a lot to say about this during family dinner conversation. This isn’t to say that we aren’t very happy where we live. We just know that that town is a level above our town economically.

Stage Right’s next program started too soon for us to launch our normal advertising campaign to overcome my son’s reluctance. This is when he came up with one my personal favorite arguments against doing something: "Friday nights are ప్రధాన సంఖ్య నిద్ర ఓవర్లలో రాత్రులు!" Stage Right was going to interfere with his weekend socials.

రోజు వస్తుంది, మేము అతను అక్కడ తీసుకుని మరియు అతని నుండి డ్రాప్ మరియు మిగిలిన ప్రతిదీ, కేవలం సజీవంగా అనే తన సహజ ప్రేమ తీసుకున్నారు మరియు అతను అది ఒక మంచి సమయం కలిగి చేయబడింది.

ఈ గత వారాంతంలో నా భార్య అతనికి మాట్లాడటం మరియు మొదటిసారి జరిగినది, I think he’s tailoring his discussions very precisely for his audience. She had asked him how Stage Right compares to Midland Park Players. He tells her that "In Park Players, we have teenagers that help us out. There aren’t any in in Stage Right. In Park Players, teenagers make all props. In Stage Right, we have to bring our own props. We have to do everything. And then he twists the knife: "I thought this was supposed to be a rich town."

ఈ సంవత్సరాల, I never really thought that he was hearing or understanding anything as it related to the "rich town". అయితే, ఆయన హాజరవుతారు.

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నా బ్లాగ్ సబ్స్క్రయిబ్.

నేను ఇటీవల నా సోదరుడు కోసం అర్హత కొనుగోలు (యధావిధిగా) and we ended up talking about funny things that we did at our respective colleges. At my alma mater, లఫఎట్టే కాలేజ్, the academic support IT department had a very inclusive way about it. We were given a LOT of rope and I took advantage of that at times.

Two my favorite memories relate to my good friend, Gabe. He had made the terrible mistake of telling people his freshman year that "I’m a freshman, but I have Sophomore standing" due to the various advanced placement classes he had taken, మొదలైనవి. Many of us were similarly situated but we didn’t talk about it so much. His senior year, when we introduced him to people, we’d say "This is Gabe. He’s a Senior, but he has Sophomore standing".

The college had some Sun workstation/servers running X-Window. They had gigantic monitors and the engineers used them for CAD and other boring engineer stuff. We CS people used them to learn programming and, కోర్సు యొక్క, to play games.

We didn’t like the computer-helpless engineers to much so one of our favorite things to do would be to telnet to the box they were on and run X-eye on them. This would pop up a pair of eyes that followed the mouse around on the screen. You could pop up even more and have literally a dozen or more of the X-eye applications running. Try not to laugh out loud when a hapless engineer is trying to close X-eye after X-eye and muttering under his breath about it 🙂

We also played X-trek on those boxes. ఇలా చేయాలంటే, you had to download the source, get various dependencies wherever you could find them and build it. I wasn’t a sophisticated C programmer, but I could read header files. I was looking through these and found directives like "#DEFINE MAX_TORPEDO_DISTANCE 10". I played around with that increase range and power for phases and torpedoes, re-built it and then destroyed Gabe the next time we played.

Gabe was also a huge fan of a TV show called Blake’s 7. I had never seen it, but that didn’t prevent me from insisting that Dr. Who is the superior show. The arguments would get heated at times 🙂

ఒక రోజు, it occurred to me that I could probably guess his UNIX password. I sat down next to him one day and announced in a loud tone, "I’m going to guess your password right now, Gabe." "Yeah, సరియైన" was his answer. I then logged in, entered his user id, turned to face him, typed and said out loud, "I wonder if it’s B-L-A-K-E-7" ? Touch typing has never paid off as handsomely as it did that day.

తదుపరి వారం (or soon): More computer room antics from college.

Do you have any to share? Leave a comment or email me and I’ll publish them here.

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నా బ్లాగ్ సబ్స్క్రయిబ్.

ఒక పేరెంట్ గా, somewhere along the line I discovered the "When I was a little boy" trick.

నా కుమారుడు, సమయంలో బహుశా నాలుగు లేదా ఐదు, ఒక బెలూన్ ప్లే మరియు బుడగలు తో ప్లే చాలా కొద్దిగా అబ్బాయిలు మాదిరిగానే జరిగినది, he popped it. He was very upset. The world had come to an end. I said to him, "when I was little boy, నేను ఒక బెలూన్ కలిగి మరియు అది చివరికి popped మరియు, I got a new balloon." It seemed to help him cope with his loss and led to a fun talk about what it was like when I was a little boy.

That worked well as a consolation technique and I used it a several times over the next period of time. I did get into trouble once when his Monster Rancher 3 creature died. I talked about how my dog, యువరాజు, had died in a car accident. ఈ సమయం, తన స్పందన, "Now I feel bad about two things!" I shied away from using the "when I was a little boy" ఆ తర్వాత ఓదార్పు కోసం టెక్నిక్.

చనిపోయిన కుక్క సంఘటన ముందు, అయితే, I had also started to use the technique to convince him to do chores. "When I was a little boy, I had to go out and get the newspaper", "clean my room", "get Mommy her coffee cup", మొదలైనవి.

ఈ చాలా కాసేపు అందంగా విజయవంతమైంది, but he started to increasingly rebel against the tyranny of my childhood. One event, ముఖ్యంగా, marked the end. I told him to bring the garbage cans from curb back to the garage. He argued and I responded, "When I was a little boy, I had to take the garbage back to the garage." He responded, "Oh yeah! Well when you were a little boy, ఆ తెలివితక్కువదని ఉంది!".

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నా బ్లాగ్ సబ్స్క్రయిబ్.

తిరిగి చుట్టూ 1998, the company I worked for at the time received some funding to create a new e-commerce product. We had the full gamut of business requirements to meet. It had to be fast, తుది వినియోగదారుల కోసం సులభం, సొగసైన, బహుళ భాష, మొదలైనవి. Sad to say, I probably haven’t had as an ambitious set of work to accomplish since those heady days.

This effort pre-dated Microsoft.NET. Plain vanilla ASP was still somewhat new (or least very unfamiliar to my company). "Brick and mortar" companies were doomed. Doomed! This is to say that it was pioneering work. Not Hadron Collider pioneering work, but for us in our little world, it was pioneering work.

We were crazy busy. We were doing mini POC’s almost every day, figuring out how to maintain state in an inherently stateless medium, figuring out multi-language issues, row-level security. We even had create a vocabulary to define basic terms (నేను రాష్ట్ర నిరంతర ప్రాధాన్యం కానీ కొన్ని కారణాల కోసం, the awkward "statefull" రోజు గెలిచింది).

మేము విస్తీర్ణంలో పిచ్చిగా ప్రవహిస్తూ ఈ ఉత్పత్తి కనిపెట్టి కావడంతో, the marketing and sales people were out there trying to sell it. Somehow, they managed to sell it to our nightmare scenario. Even though we were designing and implementing an enterprise solution, we really didn’t expect the first customer to use every last feature we built into the product day zero. This customer needed multi-language, a radically different user interface from the "standard" system but with the same business logic. Multi-language was especially hard in this case, మేము ఎల్లప్పుడూ స్పానిష్ లేదా ఫ్రెంచ్ పై దృష్టి ఎందుకంటే, కానీ ఈ సందర్భంలో, it was Chinese (which is a double-byte character set and required special handling given the technology we used).

Fast forward a few months and I’m on a Northwest airlines flight to Beijing. I’ve been so busy preparing for this trip that I have almost no idea what it’s like to go there. I had read a book once about how an American had been in China for several years and had learned the language. One day he was walking the city and asked some people for directions. The conversation went something this:

• American: "Could you tell me how to get to [XX] street?"
• Chinese: "Sorry, we don’t speak English".
• American: "Oh, well I speak Mandarin." and he asked them again in Chinese, but more clearly (as best he could).
• Chinese: Very politely, "Sorry, we don’t speak English".

The conversation went on like that for bit and the American gave up in frustration. As he was leaving them he overheard one man speaking to the other, "I could have sworn he was asking for directions to [XX] street."

I had picked up a few bits and pieces of other China-related quasi-information and "helpful advice":

• A Korean co-worked told me that the I needed to be careful of the Chinese because "they would try to get me drunk and take advantage of you" in the sense of pressuring me into bad business decisions.
• We were not allowed to drive cars (there was some confusion as to whether this was a custom, a legal requirement or just the client’s rule).
• There were special rules for going through customs.
• We were not allowed to use American money for anything.
• You’re not supposed to leave tips. It’s insulting if you do.

చివరకు, I had relatively fresh memories the Tiananmen massacre. When I was at college, I remember seeing real-time Usenet postings as the world looked on in horror.

In short, I was very nervous. I wasn’t just normal-nervous in the sense that I was delivering a solution that was orders of magnitude more complicated than anything I had ever done before. I was also worried about accidentally breaking a rule that could get me in trouble.

I’m on this 14 hour flight and though it was business class, 14 hours is a damned long time. There are only so many ways to entertain yourself by reading, watching movies or playing with the magnetized cutlery. Even a really good book is hard to read for several hours straight.

తుదకు, I started to read the packaging material on a piece of software I was hand-carrying with me to the client, Netscape’s web server. I’m reading the hardware/software requirements, the marketing blurbs, looking at the pretty picture and suddenly, I zero in on the giant "NOT FOR EXPORT" warning, something about 128 bit encryption. I stuffed the box back into my carry bag, warning face-down (as if that would have helped) and tried to keep visions of Midnight Express out of my head.

Looking back on it now, I should have been worried, అన్ని వద్ద ఉంటే, when I left the U.S., not when I was entering China 🙂 Nothing untoward happened and I still consider that to be the best and most memorable business trip I’ve had the pleasure of making.

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నా బ్లాగ్ సబ్స్క్రయిబ్!

One of the many joys I take in being the parent of a ten year old boy is finding new ways to make him laugh or think a little differently about questions and things in the world. I’ve used these techniques over the years:

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తన ప్రశ్నలకు Misconstrue:

దీని: అది ఏమి రోజు?

తండ్రి: బుధవారం ఒకరోజు ముందు.

S: లేదు, నెల ఏ రోజు ఇది?

D: ఓహ్, ఇది 4 Jan తర్వాత రోజుల 25.

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అతనికి చక్కిలిగింత మరియు అతను నవ్వుతూ స్టాప్ల ఉన్నప్పుడు మీరు ఆపడానికి ఉంటాం అతనికి చెప్పండి.

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TV గది మెట్లపై వెళ్ళి ప్రకటించిన, "It’s good to be the daddy." అప్పుడు, మంచం మీద వెచ్చని స్థానంలో పొందుటకు మరియు మంచి ఏదో ఛానెల్ మార్చడానికి అతనికి తీయటానికి, Scifi ఛానల్ వంటి.

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Read stories out loud. Insert ridiculous sentences in the middle of the story. My favorite is to add "killing him instantly" when the main characters encounters some minor trouble. ఉదాహరణకు, "the knife slipped in his hand, తన చూపుడు వేలు కటింగ్, తక్షణమే అతనిని చంపి." Nothing quite gets your son out of a complacent and passive listening mode as the main character being killed instantly.

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Read stories incorrectly. Read sentences backward. The best part of this is that the first couple of times I did this, my son thought he was helping me out by pointing out that I wasn’t reading the words in the right order. The down side is that he really doesn’t want me to read to him any more.

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Go to Burger King for lunch. My son would eat BK morning, night and day if we let him. When going, అతనికి చెప్పండి, "I know you hate going there, but we simply have no choice." When he tries to explain that he loves BK, talk over him and say things like "We don’t have time to argue about it! We’re going and I don’t want to have a discussion!"

(ఈ నా అభిమాన బోర్గ్ హాస్యాస్పదంగా నాకు గుర్తుచేస్తుంది: "Borger King: We do it our way. Your way is irrelevant." hahaha!)

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పేజీకి ఒక పుస్తకం తెరువు 9 మరియు చెప్పటానికి, "hmm, that’s an odd page".

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Fill the world with arch enemies. "We’re going to run quick over toe 7-11, arch-enemy of 11-7".

"Your aunt lives in Ringwood, Squarewood పట్టణానికి వంపు శత్రువు."

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మేము న్యూ జెర్సీ నుండి Massachusetts అనేక సార్లు ఒక సంవత్సరం పెరుగుతుంది మరియు ఇది తరచుగా పడుతుంది 5 hours door to door. As we arrive home and pull into the driveway say, "oh, నేను మర్చిపోయాను, మేము హోం డిపో కు శీఘ్ర డాష్ చేయడానికి అవసరం."

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ఒక TV కార్యక్రమం లో ఒక హింసాత్మక ఎపిసోడ్ వీక్షిస్తున్నప్పుడు (హీరోస్ వంటి), మీ కుమారుడు చెప్పండి, "some times, పని వద్ద, I need to destroy my enemies by burning them alive using the powers of my mind. I don’t like doing it, కానీ మీరు ఏమి చూడాలి ఏమి చూడాలి."

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చెడు భయానక చలనచిత్రాలు చూడటం ఉన్నప్పుడు (see "It’s good to be the Daddy" పై), ascribe improbable motives to the evil character. ఉదాహరణ కోసం, tell your son that the reason Jason is so angry is because he wants some cake and they won’t let him have any.

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Explain phone numbers incorrectly. Instead of telling your son to dial "201-111-2222", tell him it’s "2-011-1-12222".

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మీరు ఏమి మాయలు ఉపయోగించగలను?

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