There is a saying in IT, "The only secure computer is one unloaded, unplugged and locked in a closet." More or less a true statement, but with computers everywhere at the workplace and home, it is not a very realistic approach. Plus I would be out of work, and who would want to see me on a street corner begging for money, right? I would make a pitiful vagrant. Really.

Why do I mention this? Well, the issue of computer security came up when I recently helped a friend fine tune a paper for one of her graduate classes. The paper was on the misuse of company resources, in relations to IT and HR departments; and, as just about everything does, it got me thinking (I really need a short vacation from doing that).

In the Information Services industry, security and misuse prevention go hand and hand, or rather, are two sides of the same coin (where do these sayings come from anyway?). The practice of keeping an Internet-connected-network secure from outside threats falls in the same arena as keeping users from going to inappropriate websites. Preventing illegal software, or even spyware, from being loaded by an employee on a company computer is in line with keeping time-wasting games off the computers (solitaire anyone?). The same with phone services, email and any number of other IT sub sects. If you are hitting one side of the issue, odds are you are hitting the other. And hopefully, in this day and age, you are taking information security very seriously.

My friend had covered most of this in her paper when I first proof read it for her. She also went into the discussion of monitoring and surveillance of employees versus privacy issues. Basically, the arguments of big brother at work against “this is a private email to my sister that is very important” (blah blah blah). If you have ever heard an argument for employees' rights at work regarding technology resources, or perhaps even argued for them, you can disregard what you have heard or said. In the United States, Germany, and many other countries around the world you don't have those rights for privacy when it comes to company resources. Big brother can, and probably does, watch you. He reads your email. He tracks your phone calls. He knows what fetish porn sites you are into. And, to protect the company that both you and he work for, he should be able to do all of that.

But he shouldn't have to do so much of it. That is what I brought to the table with this paper. The point of view of increased training and awareness, and it is something that helps everyone out more than any other action (or inaction). I am not the first, and won’t be the last to say this but, proper training and awareness of employees regarding acceptable use is a must have for any company. Further, proper training and awareness on basic security risks should also be a must have. Two sides of the same coin.

Had I finished my paper on Six Sigma (procrastination really is an art form), I would probably be inclined to dig up statistics and facts on what I am saying. Instead I will go with the common sense approach. If you, as an employee, knew that not only could (and likely would) your emails sent to or from work be read by someone in IT, but also your manager and supervisor, wouldn't you be less inclined to use it for personal messages? What if you knew that your manager would be reading those little flirtatious chat messages you have been sending to that cute girl in accounting? Would you really be looking at that new teddy from Victoria's Secret during your lunch hour if some guy in IT and your supervisor knew you bought it?

For the other side of this coin there is just one phrase that rings home on why training and awareness of security issues is important for employees. "I didn't know." It’s been heard a million times, and a lot of the time they really didn't know. Instead, imagine if they did know about scam/phishing emails, the damage malicious software could do, social engineering attacks, why giving ANYONE (even IT members) your password is bad, the dangers of loading software from the Internet, or even just the dangers of browsing to the wrong website. Users would suddenly become your number one security defense, instead of a security breach waiting to happen.

Give it some thought when your budgeting rolls around this year. Instead of, or at least in addition to, looking at that multi-thousand dollar device or piece of software to track everything under the sun on your network (until that buffer overflow attack compromises it), look at setting up a proper *ongoing* employee training regime for your company. Or just unplug the computers and lock them away in the closet.

I have never been one to celebrate holidays, whether it is Christmas, or Valentine's Day, or Easter, or Birthdays (including my own); to me, these days of the year are just that, another day of the year. I have been this way from an early age, just prior to hitting my teen years. There was no tragedy, religious experience or dramatic event that turned me off to these "special days", but rather a conscious decision on my own part.

The only holiday I have always enjoyed is Thanksgiving, as it is one of the few excuses my family has had to travel across the country, or down the road, and spend time with one another. And it is one of the few that has not, as of yet (knock on wood), been completely bastardized into a Hallmark buying frenzy. Even in that, I do not see myself as celebrating the Thanksgiving holiday, but rather enjoying the reunion with family and friends. A distinction perhaps only to myself.

For me the holidays are generally a charade. A day or two a year that people celebrate the birth of a friend, the love for another, the joy of their religious beliefs, or any of a number of other things. I, we, should not have to be told to purchase a gift for a friend or a loved one simply because of the calendar date. We should not have to be reminded to remember our deity. For if these things only occur because they are marked upon a calendar, do they really matter?

To me, everyday should be a celebration of those things. Being a Christian (Pastafarian really), I try to enjoy the Christmas spirit year round, much to the annoyance of those who know me. Between January and November of each year, you will be hard pressed to find a day that I am not singing Christmas songs aloud and at random. Come December, in proper spirit, I switch to Easter songs. If I see a gift that someone I care about might like and I can afford, I buy it and give it as a gift. Now. Not when their birthday or another holiday rolls around. Perhaps I am just odd. Alright, I am just odd, but in this case I don't see my behavior as strange, only as doing what I see as right.

The major exception to all my bah-humbugness is my daughter. With her, and for her, I celebrate all of the holidays. Each and every year she is my valentine. On Christmas I try to provide a few gifts for her to unwrap and enjoy. The same for each holiday she has chosen to celebrate, but I still never lose sight of the everyday. Each day she has been and will be in my life is the most precious gift of all. And I cherish all of these days.

We might not get to spend the time together that we would if she lived with me, and we might not do all the things that others would expect of a weekend parent, but we do get the most out of our time; even if it is time spent apart from each other. She is my daughter and being a part of her life is the most important and wonderful thing I will ever do in my own life.

Despite the ups and downs, the gray hairs she has given me, and the many nights of worry; I have always been proud of the girl she has been and the woman she is growing up to be. And so I truly hope she enjoys this 17th birthday and 18th year of her life as much as I will continue to cherish each day that I have been blessed with her as a daughter.

Happy Birthday Phaide. You might be getting older, but you will always be my little girl.

I've been working off and on again with the You Design It hoverbot project, well, actually projects. As a result of some private feedback I had received from a few people, I decided to create two separate hovering style robots for the project. The original design I had come up with will be the one used to detail most steps of the tutorial. It is a basic hovercraft, only more sci-fi in design. The second robot tutorial will be released completely separately upon completion (instead of in stages), but if you happen to see images in any tutorials not related to the initial hoverbot, this is where they are from.

Speaking of tutorials, I started one on mold building for plastic/rubber custom pieces. I have also added a link in the title bar (pssst, up there^) leading directly into the tutorials section. As I write up more I will continue to categorize each and add it to its section. I am currently waiting for my member page account for the Society of Robots website. Once I have my account information I will be duplicating any tutorials over there in an effort to help create an as complete as possible repository on all things robotic.

In other unrelated news, I am still working on my final term paper on Six Sigma for my Operations Management course. I have finished reading all my reference sources and pieced together note cards full of information I am hoping to use for the paper. One way or another, I imagine I will be completing the paper within the week. Depending on how happy I am with the finished product, I will likely ask my instructor for permission to post the paper here for all to read and enjoy. Alright, it is Six Sigma, so there will likely not be much to enjoy, but it should still be an interesting read given the oddity that is my mind.

Some years ago a friend had explained an observation of his on a person’s wealth and the car they drive. I had heard different points of view from people through out my life on cars and what they say about the people who drive them, ranging from a persons love for a classic car, to the status symbol a car can hold. While all the differing viewpoints people held over what another person drove, or didn't drive, never really concerned me much; what this particular friend shared I found to be both insightful and to hold quite true for most things, not just automobiles.

Persons of middle class, in the realm of economics, will generally drive a mid-priced car because it is what they can afford while providing some measure of reliability. In today's market that would equate to a Honda or Toyota I imagine. People who are new to money, or have had it "given to them", opt for higher end luxury cars or sports cars and the like. It is a status symbol, a means of showing what they have. The truly wealthy, the top 1 or 2%, those who have money and to who it is just a fact of life, tend to drive a mid-priced car; because they understand that a car just needs to be reliable and get them from point A to point B. Of course there are always exceptions to the rules.

In the years since that conversation I have begun seeing many aspects of people with the same underlying principle. What I like to term "Engineer or Artist". I do not use either title in their typical sense, but rather as a level of something, whether it is ability, intelligence, knowledge, strength, or anything else. Mathematics is a good example of these levels. Solve 17 = X^2 + 1. The average person (average in the arena of algebra) might take a few moments and spout out X=4 as the answer, using formulas and specifications remembered from years past. The engineer would write out the complete proof to show how the equation becomes X=4. The artist would answer, just as the average person, that X=4, because the answer has no need to be proven, they just know it is correct beyond any doubt.

When it comes to people as an example of this, I can think of no better measure than the difference between Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Edison was an engineer. Everything he did could be reproduced from his writings and drawing because he was very precise in his work. Tesla was an artist, decades later and we are still having a hard time understanding the work he did and the ideas he came up with. Even though we can not understand all that he did, there is no denying his brilliance in the field of electricity and wave forms.

Another example would be to go back to cars. If you asked an average person with no training or skill on the subject to draw you a car, you would likely get exactly what you expected. Perhaps a side view of the typical sedan car shape showing two wheels and a few side windows. Maybe a dog hanging its head out the window if the drawer was feeling overly ambitious. Ask an engineer in the field of auto-design to draw you a car and they will immediately sit at the drafting table with mechanical pencil, ruler, compass and spare sheet of paper for figuring out calculations on. After many hours they will return to you a meticulously crafted image of an automobile to exact scale, meeting whatever design specifications they had in their head, completely aerodynamic in nature, and likely easily reproducible from the ground up. Now ask an automobile artist, that person on the level of the Carroll Shelby's of the world, and on a napkin using a felt tip pen they will sketch out the future of automobiles. And it will take an army of engineers to figure out how to build it without that artist's help, but it will astound the world.

The difference between the three levels can be seen in all aspects of human ability and endeavor, and has a pattern of simple, complex, simple: the average person has only a normal understanding or ability in a given task and sees the easy solution, the engineer has received training or education on the subject and will find you the solution and the reason why, the artist has progressed beyond what training and education could supply either through natural ability or some other means and just knows the solution. For an artist something just clicks. It just is the way it is and they understand it all without having to rationalize it, or do the measurements, or even think about it.

Aside from providing a little insight into how I see things (and an excuse to break away from attempting to write a term paper on Six Sigma), my point is that for all things in life there are those who are average, those who are engineers, and those who are artists. The thing that makes each of us one or the other is deciding where our path lies; for in each person there is a field, a topic, a job, a dream that will just click with us. Something that we can see so clearly that it defies explanation. It is up to each of us to choose whether to ignore a field and stay average, train and be educated in a field to become an engineer, or to instead select the field that has selected us and in turn become an artist.

I have a total of two courses and two CLEPs remaining for my degree. The CLEPs I really don't take into consideration, only because they are entry level courses that are a byproduct of having changed majors; Precalculus and Intro to Business Law. If it were not for the CLEP exams it would be frustrating to have to take each as a class, so thank the universe (FSM) for small favors. So basically, two courses remaining.

Although I have not checked to be certain, I believe the next graduation for my college takes place in June, which would mean I need all credits into the school sometime in early May. Both of the remaining classes I am taking with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as part of their independent study program. These are self paced upper level courses, which is a very good thing for me provided I can force myself to work on the class. The bad thing being I need to allot time for credit transfer.

To that end I had given myself a set schedule of four weeks per class, the first of which (Operations Management) I began at the beginning of March and have unfortunately fallen a little behind schedule. One week behind to be exact. Five weeks for a 3 credit hour course would not be bad still, except it throws my entire time table off schedule (remember the graduation above?). So I have been working overtime in an attempt to get back on schedule.

And that has not been going well with the distraction of the You Design It project. Fortunately for me, the cosmos loves me and has ensured that the parts I need to progress further with the hoverbot will be at least another week in arriving. If I push myself just enough I should be able to complete everything on time (and under budget), and that is exactly what I will be doing for approximately the next week. So please excuse the lack of entries as I continue to be Missing In Academia.

I spent the majority of my time this past weekend divided between cutting and gluing straws, and completing the first section of my Operations Management course. There were a few other tasks thrown in throughout my two days of rest, which ultimately resulted in a very productive weekend. A lot was accomplished that needed to get accomplished.

I also made time to relax, which, laced with the recently absorbed chapters on service management from my textbook, brought about some reflection on the IT service industry. More to the point, the role of management within the IT field, and in particular the roles I have played throughout my career. In the forefront of this is a short coming of mine (and most in the field) that I have been endeavoring for some time to overcome.

Information Technologies is a very behind the scenes service field; it is something that is rarely noticed save for when a system stops working. If the people performing the work within an IT department do their jobs correctly and efficiently most of their fellow employees will never even know they are there. I have always related the IT field to the people in the nuclear missile silos; you know they exist and you pay them well to be there, but you almost never see them and hope you never have to use them in an emergency.

Although the wording might be different, this is the general view most senior managers have for the IT departments within their companies; and it can lead to problems. If you work in the industry, you know there is far more going on behind the scenes than simple break fix. Technology initiatives created and put into place by IT service personnel save thousand and millions of dollars for a company each and every year. A good department will pay for itself in savings through these cost and time saving projects, a great department can save a company more with the right projects than all other cost cutting strategies implemented by a company combined.

Throughout my career I have been part of many major cost cutting projects within various organizations; from team projects implementing new technology, to developing simple applications that can automatically manipulate data, to upgrading existing processes and procedures that make them more efficient. And I never was bothered when during each company meeting an administrative assistant would get an award for saving the company $1000 by purchasing pens in bulk, while the IT department was ignored after saving $50,000 through one of its latest projects. It is what was expected of us.

Then I became a manager and suddenly it bothered me. I am not sure if my perspectives had changed with taking on more responsibility or if it was something else entirely, but my people deserved better than that. They deserved the recognition they had earned, to be seen as the valuable employees they were, the people who earned the salaries they were given and, further, deserved raises, not the first thrown up onto the chopping blocks when it was time for layoffs. Only, that is the way of the Information Technology field. Or at least how it was.

Times have changed for many corporations. Smart executives who have learned to leverage technology to the benefit of the company are bringing with them an understanding of the departments that previously went unnoticed. These companies are still far from the norm, but their numbers are growing and the reason is something I should have learned a long time ago: Marketing.

Savvy IT leaders have not only learned to leverage the resources of their departments, but have also made a concerted effort to promote those resources to others within the organization. These leaders make certain that every project, every cost saving endeavor, and every time cutting process is heard about by every employee within the company, not just senior management. It is something we should have been doing all along, because in the end it is all about perception.

Unfortunately for most of us in the IT arena, myself included, marketing is something we have never been very good at, or at least never saw a reason for. It is, however, a skill I have been working to hone, and will continue to work at. After all, I spent the majority of my time this past weekend divided between creating the base propulsion structure for an autonomous mobile robot, and enhancing my managerial skill-set through further study and education.

Voting is up for the method of flight our robot will be using and will remain open until Friday evening. For the record, Animalistic should technically be termed Ornithopter. Compared to the other methods listed, ornithopter is a word far less common in a person’s vocabulary and I did not want to accidentally skew the voting because people did not know what a choice was off the top of their head. Thus, I went with Animalistic, it seems suiting enough.

In other related news, my brain is abuzz with ideas for each of the methods of flight. Despite my desire to work on other things over the weekend (studying for my college exams), some part of my brain keeps interjecting ideas into the forefront. Not one to let my conscious brain be overruled by another section, I pushed the thoughts to the back of my mind and returned to studying. For all of thirty seconds. And then I began searching the Internet for information, parts and supplies that I would need to accomplish whichever method of flight wins the voting.

Despite my need to finish my Operations Management course, it seems I will be studying aerodynamics this week. Damn brain. Anyway, happy voting.

It would seem that we will be building us a flying robot. Of course there are several forms that flight could take in this context, so we will have to jump right back into another poll to figure out where we will go from here. Seeing as I have not managed to complete an antigravity device as of the time of this entry, I can think of five possible flight systems that our robot could use. One of these systems I will not be including in the upcoming poll, however, but I will explain more on that below.

Fixed Wing - your a-typical airplane style of flight. Forward propulsion is provided through propeller or jet engine structure, with lift coming from wing design (airflow over/under the wings pulls the object into the air; the forward momentum provides this airflow). This is the method of flight that I will not undertake, as high speeds are generally required to provide the robot a means of getting off the ground, which would require sensory devices that are out of the price range for any hobbyist (remember, the finished design should be relatively easy for a hobbyist to duplicate). This style of flight also has limited applications that fall into surveillance and weapon delivery, neither of which really pertain to a hobby level robot (there are better ways to annoy cats).

Rotor - think "helicopter" and you have the basic concept of rotor produced flight. Fast spinning blades provide downward airflow and thus lift for the vehicle. Steering can be accomplished a variety of differing ways from tilting the primary rotor, to using additional rotors, to modified flaps. A robot utilizing rotor-produced flight has the potential for a good development platform.

Hover - floating on a cushion of air would be the best description for this method of flight. While in the strictest sense, hovering might not qualify as a method of flight, for our purposes it will do as the physical robot is not in contact with the ground below. A hovering robot could make an excellent development platform.

Hot Air - No, not your boss. Using lighter than air gases or heated air (heat rises) in a "balloon" provide the lift, while directionality is produced through propeller and flap combinations. Great for taking sensor readings as a result of the general slow movement, but limited task capabilities.

Animalistic - a.k.a. Icarus flapping his wings. Wing design combined with the upward and downward folding (most creatures' wings fold on the down stroke) motion provides both lift and directionality for this style of robot. Weight becomes very critical in this undertaking, thus limiting the robot to specific tasks as opposed to a development platform, but it would be interesting.

Those are the choices that come to mind for methods of robotic flight. If there is a method not listed that you think should be there, please post a comment. Otherwise, voting will open up Monday, March 10, 2008. Have an uplifting weekend.

All things in moderation. A pretty good slogan to live by; the only problem, determining what the correct level that qualifies as "moderate" is. Extremists tend to hate moderation, whether it is the political arena, sports fanaticism, consumption, or anything else. For example, people opposed to alcohol consumption generally refuse to acknowledge that a person who consumes one (and only one) alcoholic beverage per day lives a longer, healthier life. It is a stress reliever; and I am sorry to all the health nuts, physicians and medical journals who are trying to sell you something with their skewed statistics, but stress is the number one contributing factor of illness in the world, and the second leading cause of death (dying being number one, topping the charts at 100% of all deaths).

Skewed stats aside, I tend to do pretty well with moderation. I understand that the moderate quantity of hemlock is zero ("It's all natural, so you know its good for you." yea, right), while quantities of breathable air should be pretty high (too high is hyperventilating, which again becomes bad). The one thing I have a problem with is cigarette smoking. My name is Andrew Maxim and I am addicted to cigarettes, and yes I see the irony of following "breathable air" with "cigarettes".

Like most smokers, I really can not pin down the reason I first started smoking. Peer pressure, being young and stupid, the quick buzz that you get (up until the point that you are hooked). Who knows? I even retired from smoking a couple years back (retired as opposed to quitting, because no one likes a quitter), and could not tell you why I started back up a year later. What I can tell you is what I missed while I was in retirement.

There was a newspaper article I had read online some years back that discussed the social group of smokers, and the writer was dead on. I searched the Internet for the original article to share it, but unfortunately did not have any luck. So I will have to paraphrase. Basically, the article discussed how the group, collectively known as "smokers", was one of the only social groups worldwide that transcended all other biases, stereotypes, genders, races, religions, political affiliations, et al. It is one of the only groups you can walk up into, without knowing a single person, and have the feeling that you belong.

On my recent trip overseas, I spent four hours in the Miami airport smoking area chatting it up with two people I had nothing in common with besides smoking. Try that with another social group. It is also one of the most generous of social groups, in relations to the commonality that brings them together. Walk up to 10 people in a bar and ask them to give you a drink, unless they are attracted to you and hoping to score, you are not getting that drink. Walk up to a smoker and "bum a smoke", and you just made a friend.

That is what I missed when I had retired last time, and is what I will miss when I retire (quitters never win, and winners never quit) this time around. It is something I know I need to do, and something I know I am able to accomplish. Whoa onto the people around me for the first four days or so as I bring my cigarette smoking down to the moderate level of none, but it is time. Wish me (and those around me) luck.