It’s amusing in a way. For years I’ve been sounding off on how any well run IT shop is not a profit center for a company. It doesn’t have to be a major drain on the resources, but IT is not a place to make money unless you sell IT services, but then your own IT is still a cost center.

A good IT shop will reduce your cost of doing business, but it does take investment in the function. You can only get by for so long on ancient equipment and used parts. The infrastructure has to be refreshed occasionally or you run the risk of having something critical fail and not only is it no longer made, the parts do not even exist any more. If you have a critical service or provide one to an external customer, you should be providing some level of high availability. The ten year old server in the corner that has been serving email without complaint is eventually going to blow a disk if not something else. It happens.

Wow, I’m on vacation. No exotic destination this time, unless you consider the flights of fancy from reading lots of sci-fi, fantasy and more tech books and journals than I’d care to think about.

Time to get my house in order as they say. I have about 3 years worth of neglected projects sitting around and I’m overwhelmed with the possibilities - where to start? I have 15 issues of Make: to inspire me, 2 microcontroller prototyping systems, VoIP servers, web servers, specialized computers, steampunk, etc. The list goes on and on (and on…) so I can’t even identify a beginning. I may be forced to admit defeat and start with a less lofty goal and maybe just gut the techcollection (yes, new word) I have and start with gear that’s newer than five years old.

Well, I don’t know about everybody else, but I had a good time, at least after I made it inside.

We had a good meal, several amusing conversations, notable example keywords and phrases would be: Palindrome, Penny Lane and “dislocated my leg”.

For Bruce: I do hope he’s OK and that was some manner of overreaction to something equally odd but less disasterous.

On to my little offering for the interested who followed my sporadic phone calls and emails:

The Internet Journal has an article on this at:

http://www.intranetjournal.com/articles/200811/ij_11_24_08a.html

It would appear to want Microsoft to lose it’s position at the top of the Office Suite chart. I’m not sure about it yet, but I have decided to download it and try it out. After all, if it performs as advertised, then it’s usable on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. To make it even more interesting, it uses Open Document Format by default and while it can’t handle the Office 2007 extensions yet, that will be a plugin at some point.

We had a number of odd discussions, one of which referred to password policies. I promised to provide a list of links that contain general password policy guidelines. Here are several:

• http://riit.smeal.psu.edu/privacy-and-security-policies/pwdpolicy.pdf
• http://www.psc.edu/general/policies/passwords/
• http://policies.lakeheadu.ca/policy.php?pid=168
• http://www2.slac.stanford.edu/computing/security/password/passwordpolicy.htm
• http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/tivihelp/v2r1/index.jsp?topic=/com.ibm.itame.doc_6.0/rev/am60_cmdref194.htm
• http://www.pueblo.us/documents/Policies/PasswordPolicy0106.pdf
• http://www.securitydocs.com/pdf/3410.PDF
• http://www.usm.edu/infosec/pw-policy.php

I suspect that if you look through these, you will find that there is a common core of items that make the most sense.

I was to also provide a link to that video I showed. The location is: http://www.toolsfortheclassroom.com/