Andrew Hale: IT Talk & Other Topics

Autonomous vehicles are the future. There’s really no stopping the progress of technology from moving forward. Before I dive into the topic, I’d like to straighten out some confusion around the terms. An autonomous vehicle isn’t the same as a self-driving vehicle. The two terms sound the same but an autonomous vehicle can navigate and transport goods and/or people with no input from a human driver or operator. A self-driving vehicle is one where parts of the driving experience are automated but still requires input from a human operator. A fully autonomous car isn’t available for public consumption, though companies such as Google and Uber have made headlines for testing prototypes. Meanwhile, vehicles available for the public have had some automated features and the advances in those features have happened very quickly. For example, Ford now offers adaptive cruise control (which allows the car to adjust its speed if it comes too close to another car in front of it), blind spot monitor...

If you're a computer guy (or gal), you probably already know what a Solid State Drive (aka, an SSD) is and the main thing most people who know about them only know that they're faster because they use memory chips rather than spinning platters in traditional HDDs. Have you ever wondered how they really work though? If you're not a computer guy (or gal), then lets bring you up to speed (pun intended) with why people are ditching spinning disks for SSDs.

Hard Disk Drives (aka HDDs) have been around for quite sometime. If I had to guess, I'd say that the main demographic of my blog already knows roughly how a HDD works but for those who don't, that's OK. Computer parts are a commodity. It's easier to replace than it is to repair, so why does anyone need to understand how spinning disks work? If you're working with storage (IE, administering a SAN), it pays to understand how they work. Lets dive in.

My employer and I recently parted ways and I'm more relieved than anything. I'd made mistakes accepting that job and I'd made mistakes in how I handled the culture shock of that job, so I thought I'd take a bit to explain what I took away from the situation.

I'm not a penny pincher or a tight-wad. However, I, like many others, do enjoy saving money. My wife and I had started getting serious about our budgeting last year (with great results) so we've been looking for ways to trim some of our bills some more to maximize savings.

When I started my new job in December, they had an abysmal hostname policy. It's in the process of being changed for the better thanks to a new IT Manager. The entire point of a hostname is to make a computer more identifiable to humans. How do computers identify each other? IP Addresses. Why? Humans aren't good at remembering numbers. We like names, so we give things names to be more easily identifiable. DO THE SAME THING TO YOUR SERVERS. 

I started a new job so I haven't been writing as much as I'd like to. They also block anything with a google sign-in so I can't write while at work anymore. My new job is working for a state healthcare organization. Since I'm new, I'm spending a lot of my time with observing and trying to understand why things are done the way that they are. Without going into specifics on the environment here, some parts are really well thought out and others are like stepping into a time machine. There's lots to do (I easily found years worth of work my first week), so I'll have a lot to write about in the coming months. From implementing a DR solution with VMware Site Recovery Manager to setting up PRTG Network Monitor from scratch (because somehow there's virtually no monitoring going on), I'll write as much as I can about it when the time comes.