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#5148 – there aren't enough hours in the day

dammit, i thought that i was supposed to have more free time once i finished school. nowadays it seems that i go to work, come home, watch a little baseball on tv and read some of a book and then it’s time for bed.

i’ve got stuff from about 3 weeks ago that i want to talk about, but i don’t really have the time to anymore.

i’ve got lj entries i want to catch up on from 3 days ago that i want to take the time to read through, but i don’t seem to get a chance to.

i finally got my email inbox down to about 60 or so emails the other day, but i still have a lot of stuff to clear out or take action on.

when i was at the university of maryland football game a few weeks ago, i was thinking about the school and the campus itself and started to think “maybe i should apply to grad school”… but it didn’t help that one of my faculty advisors back at umbc had told me that i’m going to want to go to grad school, even if i didn’t think i wanted to yet.

also, one thing that i really wish that i did but never had the chance to do (damn work!!) was go to school / work overseas. if i had left my job then my tuition reimbursement would be wiped out, which is why i never did. but BUNAC says that if you’re a graduate, then you’re eligible after your final full-time semester (which my last semester was), as long as you’re set up by december 31 2008. if i’m doing a job search anyway, then why not? but there’s a lot of caveats regarding this and how i’d pay for certain things now and once i get back. there’s so many uncertanties that it’s not a practical idea, which really sucks since it’s something that i really wished that i could have done. 🙁

FUCK. life is hard!

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#5146 – feelin' good

just did my wii fit workout 🙂

submitted a statement to a local lawyer regarding the photo shenanigans as a free consultation; we’ll see what he says 🙂

going to go to bed early tonight so’s i can get a good night’s sleep (and not wake up right before i’m supposed to leave for work and have to skip my shower and be all groggy on my drive in). maybe i’ll watch a movie or read on my kindle since i’m not quite ready to fall asleep. we’ll see.

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#5145 – impromptu meme

Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes. Don’t fix your hair. Just take a picture. Post that picture with no editing. (Except maybe to get the image size down to something reasonable. Don’t go posting an eight megapixel image.) Include these instructions.

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#5144 – pgq

i found out the other day that UMUC has a job search system for students/graduates, so i tried checking on there for positions in the united states that need an information systems management degree. so WHY did i get this result for the university of wisconsin?

makes about twice as what i make now. sigh. maybe i should take up quilting. 😛

so in the news today i saw that sarah palin’s yahoo! email account was hacked, and folks are up in arms about her using a non-agency account for government business. i definitely agree about that — you should see how many emails we get at work from people in government agencies that try submitting requests for their federal accounts from free or semi-public email addresses like gmail.com, yahoo.com, comcast.net, aol.com, etc…. and then there are the agencies that have said “well yes, but we don’t have our own domain for our city / department / whatever”, but i don’t really think that’s much of an excuse: i mean, i pay for my domain names, what? $9.95 / month? get out of those free email services, people! sheesh!

in fact, i’m kind of surprised that because we’re doing all these account changes for federal agencies that we’re just using basic, unencrypted email. there’s definitely options out there (sheesh, even i have an x.509 certificate — if your email client supports it, you could import this certificate and then send me your certificate as well, or have me send you a signed email and you do the same, and then email communications between the two of us could then be encrypted. this method can also be used to just sign emails, so as long as you kept other people from using your computer, then the signed email would show that you were the one who sent the message to me, and i could be sure that it wasn’t forged and sent by someone from elsewhere. or you could import my pgp public key and provide your own public key as well…)

while i doubt that a lot of small-town organizations would have the impetus or the skillz to set up such a secure email system (or even the real desire to), i had been wondering even before yahoogate why something like this isn’t set up for us at work, if only to provide an extra level of protection for some of the sensitive agencies we support. (we have a list of users who are authorized for each agency, and we check any messages we receive against that list to see if the person who submitted the request is allowed to process changes on the specified account, hence why having a method to ensure that the person who submitted the request is really the person you think submitted the request.)

from my information security class we learned that your business tools and data are of no use if they’re locked down so tight that nobody can get to them, not even you, so i can understand why there are reasons things aren’t done the way i’d like them to be.

my biggest complaint about my nifty codes and such? nobody else seems to have any, so all i can do is tell folks the email i sent really did come from me. what fun is a secret decoder ring if nobody else has one to play with too?

this makes me pretty curious — how many folks on my friends list actually use encryption for communications, and if so, what system(s) do you use?