Anthony Reinke

Archive for the ‘work’ Category

My Top 5 Strengths
Arranger
Adaptability
Strategic
Achiever
Futuristic

Arranger:
People strong in the Arranger theme can organize, but they also have a flexibility that complements this ability. They like to figure out how all of the pieces and resources can be arranged for maximum productivity.

Adaptability:
People strong in the Adaptability theme prefer to “go with the flow.” They tend to be “now” people who take things as they come and discover the future one day at a time.

Strategic:
People strong in the Strategic theme create alternative ways to proceed. Faced with any given scenario, they can quickly spot the relevant patterns and issues.

Achiever:
People strong in the Achiever theme have a great deal of stamina and work hard. They take great satisfaction from being busy and productive.

Futuristic:
People strong in the Futuristic theme are inspired by the future and what could be. They inspire others with their visions of the future.

I have begun building my own dashboards in Splunk.  Once I have the custom views built, I will post them up here.  So far everything I have been working on is with a system’s administrator in mind because that is what I have been doing for the past 12 years (wow, thats a long time).  Currently I am building a view for searching failed logins and the source of lockouts.  They tie in to one another.  Our technicians want to be more involved in the systems administration and hopefully this will help them respond quicker to our customers.  Everything comes from Splunk being installed on all our domain controllers.  From there we get all the logs in to our central logging system (Splunk).  Due to the amount of data we are pushing now everyday, we might have to build a backup environment just for our Splunk data.  How awesome is this!

Humm, geek doesn’t generally make you think of a guy in shape.  I grew being an athlete, but not so much anymore.  I have played soccer, was on swim team, basketball, baseball, football (midget, high school, indoor, and flag), wrestling, and track and field (200 meter, 200×4 relay, shot-put, and discus).  Of course I did weight lifting, but I really got in to lifting after high school.  I did a program call “How to increase your bench press by 50 pounds” by Muscle Media.  I ended up putting 60 pounds on my bench in 14 workouts!  At this time I was lifting 4 or 5 times a week while taking protein and creatine.  At this time I was also playing indoor full contact football.

That was then, and this is now.  Now I sit at a desk and work remotely on server all around the world.  My drive is around an hour each way.  This puts me back in Lincoln around 6pm.  That is enough time to get home at around 6:15pm, make sure my kid is in his Tae Kwon Do uniform, and then to head out at 6:40pm to get to class by 7pm.  That lasts till 8pm.  Get home around 8:15pm and put the kids to bed.  Around 8:30pm I am finally eating dinner.  9pm rolls around and normally I am finally able to kick back.

I have tried to go to a gym in Lincoln around this time but the place was packed at the times I wanted to go.  So now what?  I got a Wii and I found a game called My Fitness Coach.  This is less of a game and more of a customizable workout dvd.  It has you enter a lot of data about yourself (height, weight, age, arm size, chest size, hips, etc.).  You then have to go through some tests such as sitting heart rate and active heart rate and how many of different exercises you can do (sit ups, push ups, squats, etc).  After you set up all this, it helps to build a custom workout program for you.

I am combining this with a site call Daily Burn.  This lets you track you food intake and calorie burns.  My goal is losing 35 pounds and being able to easily run a mile.  We will see how it goes.

It is that time again for me. On-call at where I work means little sleep and a lot of work. The first wasn’t too bad. I stayed busy during the day. I left for home (around an hour drive) and didn’t even make it out of town and had to turn around. Worked till 7:30pm and then headed home. Got paged when I was about 15 minutes from my house. Got home and fired up the laptop. I was on that call until 2am. Went to bed and woke up at 5:45am like I normally do. Off to work at 6:50am. Work today has been constant. The bad part is that this is a holiday weekend so there will be no level 1 support fielding the easy calls. This also means that I will get every page this weekend. Could be worse, could be a lot worse.

There is something about on call that is fun. All day long you have that level of anticipation of when the next page is coming. Then when you get the page what is the issue. You got pressure to get it fixed fast as the company could be loosing money by the minute. That rush can be awesome. The lack of family time and sleep is not any fun, but that is the price of the job.

I am finding in my daily work that everyone talks about and wants the least privilege security model until want access to something. We can redesign a network share and say that only groups are allowed and that we are not to allow user access to directly to have access and within a month of going live there is a handful of user accounts listed. What I also find funny is how people react when you ask why? Why do you need this access? You would think I am asking them to justify why they exist. My goal is to be able to document and justify why I have granted access to something (share, server, etc.) and they get offended. Using the model of least privilege help to protect everyone and the company.