UVAgeek

Mission of Hope – Haiti

Dan — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 19:21:52 +0000

Recently I received a letter from a friend regarding a missions trip that he’ll be participating in late Spring of this year in Haiti. I have to say that I’m not too familiar with how things are in Haiti, however realizing that it’s a third world nation and that it was devastated two years ago during an earthquake that shook the foundation of so many there, leaving the country in poverty and chaos like it’s not ever seen, it grabbed my attention.

The group he’ll be going through is McLean Bible Church of the Tyson’s Corner area in Northern Virginia. It’s a “mega church” of sorts, but with deep convictions to help others and continually reach out – great folks there!

The organization itself that McLean is working through is a group known as “Mission of Hope – Haiti” - an organization following Jesus Christ, Mission of Hope exists to bring life transformation to every man, woman, and child in Haiti. We desire to serve the nation of Haiti, and see lives changed.

If you’re interested, consider supporting the Mission of Hope, or the group going through McLean Bible Church. If you want to support the McLean group, you can do so through online contributions, to support the specific group, select the “GI FLTY Haiti Team” – note that you won’t be bombarded with promotional materials or pinged with additional emails.

So bottom line, great cause – think about it, pray about it, consider it.

End of an Era…

Dan — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:37:58 +0000

After several years, it’s time to get rid of my trusty ole blue chair. It lived a good life. I paid $75 for it several years ago when a roommate was moving out. He himself had picked it up from an office liquidating all of it’s furniture during a move. After five years of wear and tear and pre-lovin’ so to speak, it was time to move on. It was an interesting celebration to move it outside this morning with the rest of the trash to be removed (hopefully) by our trusty AAA trash men. Godspeed chair, you served me well

Pulling the wool over your eyes…

Dan — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 03:33:28 +0000

I was going through my Google Reader feed this evening and came across an entry that made me giggle a little in that it would seem once again individuals are taking on a false sense of security by using a third party VPN system to “cloak” their web traffic.

In this case it’s a vendor with the name “Get Cloaked” for OS-X and iOS. Basically it’s a turn key solution that allows you to browse through their secure VPN software. While this may secure your web traffic and tunnel port 80/443 traffic to the web in terms of web sites, it still leaves other ports wide open for listening. Further on top of that, there’s nothing that states that they’re not recording all traffic that passes through their system – this was something that Google offered for a while as well – wireless VPN to keep your traffic encrypted but going through their pipe to their datacenter…

Your best bet is to connect to a secure network or a network that you know who the owner is. Further on top of that, securing your data using WPA2 and ensuring that for sites that you’re connecting to that require you to put personal information into are using 128bit SSL certificates to create an encrypted stream from the server to your browser. Alas, basic security still seems to boggle the minds of most.

If you’re really curious about reading more up on Get Cloak and don’t mind having the wool pulled over your eyes, check out Lifehacker’s review here or go directly to Getcloak.com

Legacy…

Dan — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 15:45:10 +0000

Leaving a legacy is the thing that I think so many people miss. Most folks think that you need money to leave a legacy so that folks will notice. I say that if your actions are such that of a servant leading others, then your legacy will be all the more true.

Remembering our Wounded Warriors

Dan — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 23:46:50 +0000

The other day I popped on Facebook and noticed in the stream of thoughts that are displayed something in Shannon Bray‘s postings that caught my eye. For those of you that don’t know Shannon, he’s a thoughtful guy that’s darn sharp in the SharePoint field. What he shared was something that definitely hit home for me – the Wounded Warrior Project.

While I won’t get into details of how it relates to me, I cannot stress enough how much we owe to our wounded warriors. The Wounded Warrior Project is definitely an organization that has well intentions and works to help those that have given so much for us as Americans in terms of our freedoms and liberties.

I urge you as Americans to do the right thing and support our Wounded Warriors through either the WWP financially or with your time through volunteering at one of the numerous events throughout the country. They have given on our behalf so selflessly, why is it that we find it so hard to give back something to them?

Take a moment and check out the WWP web site and consider how you can support…

The Wounded Warrior Project – http://www.woundedwarriorproject.org

Santa Gets Hacked…

Dan — Sun, 25 Dec 2011 02:18:51 +0000

Apparently it would seem that the CISO (Computer Information Security Officer) and his elves were lax on security at the North Pole… in as much, incriminating data on individuals around the world has been leaked. The ramifications seem to be pretty drastic. For more watch the video reporting expose below.

Getting in the spirit of things…

Dan — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 01:12:50 +0000

See the full gallery on Posterous

This afternoon I met up with my buddy Joel and introduced him to one of my favorites, Eggspectations. Definitely fun times to catch up on life from the past few months and exchange a few laughs. When we excited though I had to smile when I saw the car converted reindeer parked near Joel.

Mobile Telecommunications and Verizon Wireless Service Level Agreements

Dan — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:37:38 +0000

This morning in the Northern Virginia area, Verizon Wireless seems to have had a hiccup in their data networks that support their mobile devices. This is the third such hiccup to effect the 4G customer base this year – something that marketing is heavily pushing and early adopters are salivating over due to the speed and technology advances that are provided.

Information regarding outage: http://www.androidpolice.com/2011/12/21/verizon-suffering-another-outage-many-3g-and-4g-customers-left-without-data-services/

It really would be nice to know when the system will come to steady state for LTE and CDMA access to be restored. While I realize that Verizon is doing its best to provide service to millions of customers, I would also hope that Verizon would be willing to provide something like “status.vzw.com” that has either a blog with entries of what network outages may be occurring on a large scale or something like Google or Amazon Web Services dashboard that shows outages related to services with additional information below.

Is this too much to ask for a multi-billion dollar industry so that individuals that rely on mobile telecommunications are able to more adequately recommend or put faith into their provider?

Holiday Cheer…

Dan — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 16:39:59 +0000

If you’re in need of a little holiday cheer, and you miss Bill Watterson’s way of bringing it to us (like our figgy pudding), then look no further than the tribute to Calvin & Hobbes snowman show of horrors

Linkage – http://youtu.be/pq8iyhMFLYE?hd=1

Dark Roast has arrived…

Dan — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 04:12:17 +0000

Oh it’s on… that’s right ladies and gents (I know that there are six of you reading this ). French Roast from Starbucks for your Keurig machine (or mine ) is now available in your favorite supermarket, grocery store or Amazon. So what’s this mean? Well now you can brew your own drip coffee for half the coast that you would if you’re buying it in a local store. Sure you don’t get your Starbucks Gold card drink points, but you can put it in the cup of your choice and brew at your leisure.

So first impressions, it’s definitely decent and the barista even served it up in a snazzy mug instead of just a paper cup. How’s that for finesse?