The Desert of the Real

I was reading through this months Pentacostel Evangel this morning, and ran across an article entitled Tongues: The necessary evidence. It’s not available online, yet just about any local AOG church should have it. It’s not worth the effort though. The article boils down to this: Acts 10 & 11 demonstrate that tongues are the necessary evidence of the filling of the Holy Spirit.

Well, the AoG church I attend, thankfully, does not promote this unscriptural doctrine. The downside of attending an AoG church with more scriptural grounding is that sometimes you forget that the denomination as a whole does still hold to such things. I wrote a rough draft response to this article this afternoon, and then went to check out their submission guidelines. There’s no way they’ll ever publish this. ;-) Not that I would expect them to. It would be unreasonable to expect them to use their magazine to provide a forum for views that disagree with theirs. This is the soft of thing that has to be handled in other ways.

So, I decided to post my response online instead. If you’re curious about my thoughts on the issue, take a look. I welcome your comments.

Yay, the new Active Directory servers arrived on Friday. The first batch of 10. Of course, that means now I have to actually free up time time to build and configure them. :-( On the upside, I just have to get one really, as then I can auto-install all the others.

And, I finally ordered my wife a new computer. It was painful, because the same parts I’d speced out for her in february now cost $50.00 more combined. It is worth it though. She’s needed a new one for years, and moreso now than ever, between homeschooling, scrapbooking, and her photography work she desprately needs something more than an old Pentium based machine. It’s gonna be a nice one too. I can’t wait to see how happy she’s going to be compared to the misery she’s endured with the current one. ;-)

You know, the problem with this blog, is that some of the most interesting stuff you might read from my life is work related. Sadly, tracking who I work for would be all too easy, and certainly would be easy for my company to figure out that this is me. ;-) So, since much of what I would write about doesn’t exactly reflect positively on my company, there’s all kinds of interesting things I can’t share. Some of it I couldn’t share even if I worked for a company that tolerated dissent.

I hate em. They can have great value, but frankly, I just can’t abide trusting someone else to do what I can do better, and faster, myself.

Case in point. I’ve now wasted four hours waiting on what turned out to be a long chain of people to get involved so I can get someone to stick a freaking monitor on a box and read the screen to me, and then hit about 6 keys. SLA? What SLA?

Tomorrow, I order a console server. Something I should’ve done when they made the decision to host these boxes with them. Stupid me, ignoring my instincts and taking them at their word about the quality of service.

Update: Yay. 2am, we’re finally back up. We started at oh…9:30. And why didn’t it come up? Not entirely sure yet on the new updates, the old stuff wouldn’t come up either though, because the guy who built it (again managed service) neglected to add a few crucial routes to the startup files.

This is the same guy that assured me he’d not install all the useless crap. That he’d comply with the list of things I wanted done on install. That he /never/ did default linux installs. What do I get when he finishes and hands the box over to me? You guessed it, a default linux install.

I don’t know why I wonder why people don’t listen to me. I don’t even listen to myself, and I know how often I’m right.

My one word review: Sad.

They had 2 systems tracks going on. 200 and 300, the latter obviously being for supposedly more advanced security professionals. Yet as I sat in there, way too many admitted to reading email as Administrator on their servers. And again to not having complex passwords. More than that, after doing so, nobody came to cart them away. They weren’t escorted out, abused, humiliated or shot.
How many more were in there, but at least had the good sense to be ashamed of it and didn’t raise their hands? I really don’t know, but it raises the number which only makes things worse.

It’s been a long time since I’ve gone to a microsoft event, and this event reminded me of why. When you usually travel in USENIX and SANS security circles, going to these events is usually a waste of time. It was a stark reminder though that a large number of so-called administrators really don’t have a clue. More fuel for my dislike of certification mills, churning out large numbers of unqualified people and dumping them in the industry.

At least the one speaker (kai?) was entertaining. He seemed to be pretty well informed as well, though because of his audience (the 200 track) he didn’t really get very deep into things. Yet, it wasn’t a total loss, I got a few laughs out of his presentation. I like the guy. He works for Microsoft, yet has the integrity to not pretend that it doesn’t have its flaws. It’s refreshing and gives you the opportunity to hear real information about their products, not marketing hype. It also speaks well of MS (as few things do these days) that they would allow him to speak so freely. Many companies would not.