@Draco8573 said:
@Dashrender yeah don't have the money. But my work is going to be throwing away some old pcs and server parts ill see if i can get some of that.
Check this out! $50 in DigitalOcean credit for students, along with a ton of other resources that will help you get started doing tech stuff.
Just finished configuring a ownCloud 8.2 fileserver on my XenServer test lab. I've been on Team Pydio for a while but I can't stop thinking about how much easier it's going to be for people besides myself to use ownCloud's interface.
@Draco8573 said:
@scottalanmiller I understand that I will be 25, but the thing is while I want to learn and want to get better. And you are right schools are a little behind the time. And while I can figure things out my brain doesn't work like the rest of yalls. I don't learn like everyone else. Sometimes I just have to have things explained to me a certain way or it just goes right over my head and if I was all by myself I would probably be lost. For example I had a calc class where the professor was decent but I just wasn't understanding what he was saying so i went through like 8 professors that put their lectures on youtube till I found one that made sense to me. I have a pretty bad strain of ADD, because of it i have very bad short term memory and so like I said it helps when I am able to walk up to someone and ask questions.
That makes sense - do you have any examples of learning methods/styles that have worked particularly well for you when learning other topics? There are a wide variety of online courses and classes out there for online IT learning, so if you have the motivation you should be able to find one that works for you. The best part: they're all cheaper than college!
@Draco8573 said:
@WingCreative so my question to you is how much of the IT world did you know going into school? were you slightly above the average user? or did you get out into the world land an IT job and then learn all the stuff or did you teach yourself while in school for psych?
I have always been a technically minded guy - the main way my friends and I hung out in high school was through LAN parties, which meant I already had some network troubleshooting experience by the time I graduated 
I was interested in making my career something else because I associated IT help with people saying, "Hey by the way, while you're here can you fix this for free?" I always thought I could probably make it work if needed, and after a few fruitless interviews for other on-campus employment I picked up a help desk job without too much trouble.
You're going to want to figure out what college teaches well that will help you the most in IT, because IT can't really be taught well in a college setting.
With that said, in my opinion, if you're interacting with people for your job, taking psychology classes can help you interact with them more effectively.
This is especially true for IT: if you do any help desk stuff, you're going to be dealing with frustrated, anxious people who don't understand why they can't do the thing they need/want to do. You'll be asking these people questions about what led to the problem that they don't understand. Learning how to empathize and relieve this anxiety in the moment helps convert defensive users into helpful users. Learning how to frame questions so you avoid guiding users toward a certain response helps you get accurate answers to technical questions. This is all stuff I learned from my psych major, and it has already helped me support users countless times. So think about taking some psych classes!
Sincerely,
A guy who went to college thinking he wanted to go into counseling, noped outta that career track, and ended up in IT incredibly grateful for his psychology degree.
My Most Valuable Psych Classes:
First thing is you're going to want to set up an ISO share so you can start launching VMs. I set up a CIFS share so that I can just put ISOs into a folder on my workstation and have XenCenter automatically be able to mount them.
Assuming you're sticking with a single host and storage pool, that's pretty much all you need to start launching and configuring VMs.
I think IPFire has an ARM version, but IDS doesn't seem to work.
I've looked into Pi + pfSense before and the general consensus is it won't work and there are no plans to make it work. Here's one of the pfSense forum admins quoting Ian Malcom in the thread about running pfSense on a Pi...
This $299 router from the pfSense store seems to have slightly stronger hardware and comes with pfSense preinstalled.
@MattSpeller said:
Going to have to rehash password policies with this staff member
As someone who's had to explain logging on to a local user account for domain-joined laptops all too often... I've found that telling people to use .\$username instead of $computername\$username can be a bit easier to remember and might help in preventing them from having to write down the login info!
I specialize in WordPress development as part of my side business because it is a pretty good mix of usability and flexibility for most people's needs. The community is also extremely prolific in terms of themes, plugins, and tutorials... It's a safe bet that someone already had whatever issues you might end up having, and wrote about how they fixed it.
The only caveat is that, since it's so popular, there are a TON of automated attacks out there that will try to target your site. Luckily, 99.9% of the attacks are extremely low effort, to the point where installing a free security plugin will cause most of these bots to give up and move on to easier targets... or just get automatically permabanned. But you don't want your admin account to be named "admin" either way. I once had this plugin, which shows a live log of failed login attempts, on one of my sites and it was actually pretty fun to watch.
You don't want to have your blog at WordPress.com - go self-hosted if you want to use WordPress. WordPress.com runs a feature-locked version of WordPress that feels like playing a Free to Play videogame or something - I think you can "unlock" custom CSS for $30 or something ludicrous like that. That alone would be unfortunate but understandable... sadly, many popular and useful plugins simply won't work on WordPress.com either. I once had to work with it for a client and it was just infuriating.
Regarding Ghost, it's the up-and-comer that was released in late 2013 or so. I believe it runs on Node.js, whereas WordPress is built with PHP. It seems like it would be a good fit for those that only need a CMS-style interface for their blog pages, or for those where the blog itself is the most complex part of their site. I don't know too much about it, but I do know the people that use it seem to really like it!
Blogging as a form of self-promotion requires more ongoing effort than most people realize at first. With that said, depending on how much time and effort you're willing to put into it, you can use a blog as part of a content marketing strategy to establish yourself as an authority within your realm of expertise.
Ideally you can launch your blog with at least 2-3 pages of posts already written up - about 10-15 posts overall. This gives the people discovering your blog when it first launches plenty of material to dive into and decide if they want to subscribe to updates. It also gives you a taste of writing more than one blog post on a single topic, so you can find out if it's something you want to do before you start doing it publically.
Email marketing and blogging go hand in hand in content marketing strategy - you start building a list of people that like what you have to say, and let them know when you've posted something new so they don't forget about you forever. This is a major part of converting readers to leads - If you're careful and do it responsibly, you can send the occasional promotion and/or notice of new services offered to this list. Everyone that gets the message appreciates your expertise enough to get updates on what you say, so they are some of the people most likely to act when you say you can take care of a problem they have.
The trick is writing about your realm of expertise in a way that your target market is likely to come across and appreciate it. I've found some really great configuration tips and nuggets of wisdom on tiny blogs over the years through Google - but if I'm looking up tutorials on how to configure something myself, I'm not super likely to convert into a client.
Yoast is a great resource on some basic SEO and content marketing stuff... and if you end up blogging on WordPress, Yoast SEO is the gold standard for SEO optimization plugins. On a relevant sidenote, the previous sentence is exactly what effective content marketing can do for you!
@dafyre said:
@WingCreative Tomato Soup, Tomato Paste. Boiled Tomato, steamed tomato, fried tomato. Tomato Sandwiches, Tomato on Hamburgers, Tomato on Pizza,, Baked Tomato topped with sour cream and cheese, Tomato in a blanket... Stewed Tomatoes, Diced tomatoes... Tomatoes on Rye, Tomatoes on Wheat. Tomatoes in your eye... Tomato Juice...
Am I missing anything?
Yes, you missed posting all of that when we had all of the bushels of tomatoes!!! 
Most of the time we ended up slicing them up with a bit of sea salt and balsamic vinegar on top for a side dish to make our meals seem slightly healthier. Caprese sandwiches are our jam so overall it worked out pretty well.
Never tried baking them though! Might have to get that a shot.
@scottalanmiller said:
Dominica is whipping up fried rice here. We have to cook at home a lot because we get so much produce delivered every morning!
This summer we had a ton of people that had very productive gardens and wanted to give us free produce. It was awesome, but after the nth bushel of tomatoes we had to really brainstorm on what we could do to use them all.
I actually just picked up one of these travel mugs to try and switch over to tea for most of the time.
@gjacobse said:
@coliver said:
@RojoLoco said:
@Joy said:
Drinking coffee now
Send me one too, please!
I don't even drink coffee... but I could really use one right about now.
LOL that is funny,...
I don't ,...err,.. DIDN'T until I started working for NTG,.. always drank Mountain Dew... Now look at me,.. have a cup of coffee AND Mountain Dew..
I blame @jenuinecase .....
That sounds all too familiar... I never drank coffee until I got an office job, when the idea of free caffeine at 8am became irresistable.
Now I drink coffee by day and mountain dew when I get home/at lunch...
My favorite story-based games:
Those are the only ones I've played, which I really need to change!
In my opinion, Telltale set the bar high for the "Branching Story Adventure" genre (??) and Square Enix has recently raised it with Life is Strange. My favorite change by Square-Enix is the removal of the "click here quickly or something bad will happen!"-style quick time events that occasionally felt out of place for me in the Telltale games.
@dafyre said:
@WingCreative said:
Finished season 1 of True Detective last night, I guess it's fitting that I have my IT Detective hat on today trying to figure out why a NAS has started powering itself off midway through the same robocopy job I've been running on it for about a year now.
The butler did it!
The butler must have caused the internal fan on the NAS to fail so it overheats and powers itself off midway through any intense disk operation, like a big robocopy job... It's the perfect crime!
Finished season 1 of True Detective last night, I guess it's fitting that I have my IT Detective hat on today trying to figure out why a NAS has started powering itself off midway through the same robocopy job I've been running on it for about a year now.
If you like platformers and haven't played Ori and the Blind Forest yet, go run home and do that real quick.
@mlnews said:
Data is accessed via API. So you would need a tool for accessing it. This is enterprise cloud storage, not an SMB tool.
Cloudberry is a popular tool for this, and the pro version is pretty cheap for the functionality it provides.
Converted an ancient workstation we're decommissioning into a white noise machine, all I needed was a DBAN DVD!
