Ben Wilson

I produced an iMovie presentation this weekend. I was actually fairly suprised at the simplicitty of doing what I wanted to do. *Most* things were in obvious places, and if they weren't, it didn't take too long to hunt and peck for it. Some of the featuers I really liked was the Audio Ducking. This is where you can have one audio track volume lower, while the other stays the same. Really nice if you're doing Voice Overlays onto Music backround. Another thing which was pretty nice was the ability to take a picture, and freeze it within the movie. Was nice to be able to comment at the end of a small clip., without having the need for some lame blank screen to look at.


Overall, I'd give the program a 9.5/10. Easy, and nice to use. A definate plus to owning a Mac.

Been playing this new game we bought last Thursday. Burnout Paradise is one of the coolest games I've played in a long time. I actually paid money for this one, and it's wicked cool. The basic premise is that you're controlling some raving lunatic car which speeds through the streets of Paradise City. As you compete in races, you upgrade your license and gain more cars in you 'Digital Junkyard'.

It's for the Xbox 360... which has become much cooler since I've hooked my computer up to it to watch movies and other media that I can stream off my computer downstairs. Izzy and I have been having a great time playing the new game, and watching movies on the system. We've (ok, I've) used the Xbox 360 more in the last week than I have in the last year.

If you're on Xbox live, my id is Benjammin47, feel free to give me a shout (and a race).

Well everyone at our house has been sick the last week except Anne. Don't know how she got so lucky. It's always weird how it's rather nice to be sick for the first day... bed rest, popsicles, and catch up on the DVR... but after the first day it's misery. Luckily I didn't get a sore throat at all this time like the kids, but I did get some major body aches... sort of unusual, hadn't had those before. Still a bit under the weather, but doing much better (If I could just get my faucet of a nose to stop dripping!).

I'm amazed at the delay in the amount of time it takes to get the Board meeting minutes and podcast posted to the website. I imagine this will change the more people use this service... I would think that most of the people who would like the information would want access to it on a timely basis... something I'll have to bring up with some folks... see if something can be done.

Who is there?

NOC stands for Network Operations Committee. It's basically a group of people (technicians) from the different ESU's around the state who meet and decide how to best spend 1% funds allocated to our group. Even though we are all doing different things at our locations, we somehow pull together and get things done.


The NOC group are sure a cool bunch of guys ranging from technically ignorant to the regurgitators of every acronym they've ever heard. Really, LPS gets a whole lot out of this group. Ok, that's not entirely true. I get the most out of this group, while other LPS people benefit from what I get out of it. Just this year alone, there has been 3 (nearly) weeklong trainings which were paid for through NOC funds. Typically these trainings range from $2500 - $4k. So that's a savings of ~$10k for LPS... or in my case, I actually get to attend some of these trainings, which would likely not be funded.

This year I'm the Chairperson of this group. That's been moderately ok... it was much better than expected actually. It's just a matter of herding cats, and aiming them at a goal. One of the objectives of being Chair is to line up trainings/events for the following year. It should be interesting to see how my negotiating skills are when we meet with the other affiliates.


Oh, and another thing... Food in Kearney is rockin... I think I gained like 10 lbs in 3 days. There's not much else to do here other than eat. Next time though I'm going to try and hit a hockey game.

Taking a NOC funded class this week to set up a standard SNORT IDS (Intrusion Detection System) server. One of the things which I've really learned the past 2 days is how to harden a linux distro. I had only a brief glimpse before of all the services installed by default. We installed a Helix disto of Linux, and it had just a ton of 'non-essential' services. I'm talking like 15-20 pages of services total. We took out nearly half which would not be used. Great exercise which I had not done before, and learned a lot from that.


We haven't actually installed SNORT on our boxes yet, but the install appears to be fairly straightforward. What SNORT does is monitor the network for specific user-defined anomolies. Imagine that you own a business which only sells CD's. You receive CD's every day from your supplier, and sell them to your customers. One day, one of your suppliers attempts to drop off an 8 track. You notice this right away, because you only sell/buy CD's. Congratulations, you're a SNORT IDS (in simple terms).

We receive/send packets on our network nearly every time we do something on our computers. They send packets when we're not looking (no cause for alarm). What the SNORT IDS solution will do for us is make sure the packets we're receiving/sending are not 'abnormal'. Typically, 'abnormal' packets are used for hacking systems, or running other things which you may/may not want on the network. The duty of SNORT is to observe the packets which run by it, and log the unusual things we specify on the box. This does not specifically do anything with the packets, other than report to the network admin that "Hey, something happened which you may want to look at". Compare this with an IPS (Intrusion Prevention System). In an IPS solution, the sensor would take an active approach to 'abnormal' packets. From my research, this can lead to issues. For the time being, we're going to use an IDS solution, and log all the 'weird' things.


It should be interesting next week when I put this box into our network to see what it comes up with.

Are belong to ME!