The Screaming Viking

I have bitched and moaned on here constantly over the past couple years about my perceived “need” of a bigger bike.  While I was living in Fargo, the 650 was decent to get around town.  It ran good, sounded and performed well and was easy to toss around in traffic.  Last summer out here I rode the bike in to work a few times and it sucked.  Given the size of the bike…and my size, any head wind at all pretty much shuts it down.  With a fair head wind I can maybe get 80 out of her.  That seems like it should be enough, but the problem is with a top end of only 80, if you are cruising down the highway, getting from 70 to 80 takes a few seconds…and then being able to do only 80 you don’t pass very quickly.  Also, the bike isn’t a very comfortable ride for more than 45 min or so.  Granted my ample ass doesn’t help things, but one of the big deals for me is how the wind hits my legs.  As I’m sitting there normally, the wind will constantly push my legs off of the gas tank.  With this going on I have a couple of options, I can let the wind push my legs apart until they naturally stop…which isn’t comfortable, or I can hold my legs against the tank…which will eventually lead to some pretty significant muscle fatigue depending on the length of the trip.

I had looked around a bit and found a really nice looking bike at umotors.  It was an ’02 1700 roadstar, pretty well setup…within my price range.  Since it was after hours, I emailed them.  To my disappointment the bike was sold.  The wife and I were making a trip to minot for a dr. appointment, and on our way back I decided to check out a few dealerships.  The first ones didn’t have much for used inventory.  At the last stop, purehonda, we found a 2007 1300 v star with 17k on it.  The bike had quite a few of the niceties that I was looking for, hard bags, high windshield and floorboards.  It looked sharp and seemed to have lived a fairly easy life.  I decided to explore financing options for the bike. Read the rest of this entry »

I haven’t had much time to type up any blogs outside of the coaching updates from time to time.  Between work, coaching and some time at home I find that I am really quite busy lately.  There were a lot of changes implemented over the summer and that caused the shake down period to be a bit longer than in previous years.  After things have been hammered out a bit, I’m back down into regular maintenance.    For as busy as the summer was, I am satisfied with the way the majority of things are running.  There is some stuff that is going to have to be updated…but that is going to cost a bit of money that I’m sure the school is not able to spend at the moment.  I have around 80 emacs that need to be replaced.  At 1200 per, that adds up pretty fast.  We’ll just have to work with what we have.

One of the opportunities for me in moving up here is a little bit of consulting type work for some of the small businesses in the area.  Yesterday I had my first “interview” with a small business.  When I say small I am referring to the number of employees they have…I do not know what volume of business they do.  It’s possible they are bursting at the seams with clients, which is great for them and me.  I worked at a company a few years ago that was struggling (workforce) and it wasn’t a good feeling.  I also don’t think interview is the right word.  It’s more of a meeting where they can decide if my service is right for them and I can also see if their environment is going to be right for my services.  We discussed their needs/wants, I compared that to my work experience and abilities and it looks like a pretty good fit.  I left the meeting feeling pretty good that we would come to an agreement and this morning I received an email that confirmed that sentiment.  To finalize the deal we’ll need to work out the numbers and work through some transition time.  I’m not going to be posting the company name and/or what they do.  I don’t think it’s good practice to be talking about various companies on a blog site and certainly not without their permission. Read the rest of this entry »

As I was working through the Ruckus wireless, I discovered something didn’t work quite the way I thought it would.  The dynamic-PSK didn’t take the users past the web sign on screen automatically.  Apparently that will keep coming up after a certain amount of time…tbh, I would love someone to explain exactly what the dynamic-psk does.  I’m going to need to read up on some docs.  The bottom line was the way I had been attacking the problem was not going to allow the users to sign on once and then be on for a year without having to re-authenticate.  I decided I needed to go with the 802.1x authentication mechanism with WPA2 encryption.  This is where my problems started to get pretty big…

I had mentioned before that this setup has a “zero-IT” option…this thing works very slick.  I had envisioned handing out the laptops to instructors during an in-service this fall and walk them through setting up their boxes.  You login to the registration screen, download an app…run it and you’re good to go.  This worked very well for the old setup I thought I was going to use…but not so well for this new config… Read the rest of this entry »

Disclaimer:  I’m by no means and expert on ruckus or networking in general…in fact general knowledge of networking protocols and topology is the biggest weakness in my technical background.  Having said that…below talks a bit about my experience and should be taken as the words of a guy still learning.

One of the my initial priorities at the school was setting up an “enterprise quality” wireless solution.  The previous guy had ordered laptops for all the teachers and with the consumer class wireless they were running it was a pain to have the users even try to get a wireless connection.  Each access point (AP) would be broadcasting a different wireless network…it was a bit of a mess.  I will say though that it was cheap, quick and got the job done.  I wanted to replace this asap…ideally, I wanted the wireless installed before the user’s had laptops (which is the way it worked out due to another issue that I will go in to later).  Part of the reason for that was to head off the questions and complaints about getting a weak signal and the other part was so I didn’t have to setup the machines for the wireless that was there, then go back and touch every machine again for the new install. Read the rest of this entry »