Hey everyone!

I wanted to let you know about the return of our STEM Innovation Grant, where we award upwards of $7,500 to STEM-focused youth programs. These programs are essential to developing interest and skills that are needed to pursue a career in a STEM-related field.

This is the brainchild of our very own @SamieWalters, so show her some love.

If you know of any youth programs that could benefit from this grant, please don't hesitate to pass this along.

Our past awardees include a bioscience education program that allows for amazing hands-on learning, a program designed to get middle and high school aged girls interested in STEM (including an awesome hackathon), and a program that takes 4th and 5th graders sailing to teach them about oceanic ecology and environmental effects.

You can check out all of our past awardees.

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@RojoLoco said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Looks like SW is dead in the water... again.

I just noticed that myself, doing maintenance.

Seems like an inopportune time to do maintenance.

Don't be silly, everyone loves maintenance in the middle of the day.

@Grey said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@ChrisL said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@ChrisL said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@ChrisL said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@ChrisL said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Figuring out where the GF and I want to backpack to this weekend at Joshua Tree. Got a new pack and new sleeping back, temps in low 40's at night and I'm excited to try it out.

What pack? I have a Red Rock Outdoor Assault Pack (not for tactical but for modular reasons).

If you find yourself this way.. you should hit the Gorge

I got the Kelty Coyote 80 from REI. We usually only do one night, wouldn't consider anything more than two nights, so I didn't need anything too intensive. We opted for a square double sleeping bag because neither of us enjoy feeling like a butterfly about to emerge from a cocoon, so it fits nicely into this pack, and she carries the tent/sleeping pads.

https://www.rei.com/product/895717/kelty-coyote-80-pack

Thats the kind of pack I'm looking into right now. I don't understand why people want camo stuff for hiking!! I want to be SEEN! More than that, I want to be able to put my stuff down and be able to still see it from 2 meters away.

It's a great pack. And yes, I want to be seen in the off-chance I get lost somehow.

Where I hike I'm also worried about other hunters. Leading cause of death in the forests here is being mistaken for a moose/deer

Oh god. So many memories of hunter safety videos are flooding back.

Stop wearing the goofy reindeer hats!

But it keeps my ears warm...

@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@ChrisL said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@ChrisL said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@ChrisL said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Figuring out where the GF and I want to backpack to this weekend at Joshua Tree. Got a new pack and new sleeping back, temps in low 40's at night and I'm excited to try it out.

What pack? I have a Red Rock Outdoor Assault Pack (not for tactical but for modular reasons).

If you find yourself this way.. you should hit the Gorge

I got the Kelty Coyote 80 from REI. We usually only do one night, wouldn't consider anything more than two nights, so I didn't need anything too intensive. We opted for a square double sleeping bag because neither of us enjoy feeling like a butterfly about to emerge from a cocoon, so it fits nicely into this pack, and she carries the tent/sleeping pads.

https://www.rei.com/product/895717/kelty-coyote-80-pack

Thats the kind of pack I'm looking into right now. I don't understand why people want camo stuff for hiking!! I want to be SEEN! More than that, I want to be able to put my stuff down and be able to still see it from 2 meters away.

It's a great pack. And yes, I want to be seen in the off-chance I get lost somehow.

Where I hike I'm also worried about other hunters. Leading cause of death in the forests here is being mistaken for a moose/deer

Oh god. So many memories of hunter safety videos are flooding back.

@MattSpeller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@ChrisL said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@ChrisL said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Figuring out where the GF and I want to backpack to this weekend at Joshua Tree. Got a new pack and new sleeping back, temps in low 40's at night and I'm excited to try it out.

What pack? I have a Red Rock Outdoor Assault Pack (not for tactical but for modular reasons).

If you find yourself this way.. you should hit the Gorge

I got the Kelty Coyote 80 from REI. We usually only do one night, wouldn't consider anything more than two nights, so I didn't need anything too intensive. We opted for a square double sleeping bag because neither of us enjoy feeling like a butterfly about to emerge from a cocoon, so it fits nicely into this pack, and she carries the tent/sleeping pads.

https://www.rei.com/product/895717/kelty-coyote-80-pack

Thats the kind of pack I'm looking into right now. I don't understand why people want camo stuff for hiking!! I want to be SEEN! More than that, I want to be able to put my stuff down and be able to still see it from 2 meters away.

It's a great pack. And yes, I want to be seen in the off-chance I get lost somehow.

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@art_of_shred said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

I'm reading up a bit about indoor plant growing on a global scale.

Specifically PlantLab and Plant Paradise

It's really awesome technology.

Somebody's growin' weed...

Ah no, I can't stand the stuff.

That's why you lie down when you smoke

@mlnews said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@travisdh1 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@DustinB3403 said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

I'm reading up a bit about indoor plant growing on a global scale.

Specifically PlantLab and Plant Paradise

It's really awesome technology.

<angrily throws bottle of Mountain Dew>

This - This is what I was basically working on / towards about twelve years ago... I so wished I had had the support then to make it happen. I knew then - in 2004(ish) to do this,.. I was working at one of the Automobile Manufactures here in KY, and wanted to take an old wasted space (Wal-Mart building, etc) and turn it into an indoor farm...

Back then I knew (fairly certain) I could have picked up grants and such left and right as the goal was to go nearly 100% green... Collect water, use solar heat, power, wind power Geo-thermal, bio-gas - full gambit... and grow everything,.. and seafood.... as seafood is a $4BILLION import....

But I didn't have the support (still don't) or the encouragement (still don't) or the belief it would work.... And now it's all over the place. Aqua / Hydroponics, Vertical Farming and such.. ...

You can always start at the small scale and work up.

I used to grow hydroponic basil in the tub.

Yeah, "basil"...

@gjacobse said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@ChrisL said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Figuring out where the GF and I want to backpack to this weekend at Joshua Tree. Got a new pack and new sleeping back, temps in low 40's at night and I'm excited to try it out.

What pack? I have a Red Rock Outdoor Assault Pack (not for tactical but for modular reasons).

If you find yourself this way.. you should hit the Gorge

I got the Kelty Coyote 80 from REI. We usually only do one night, wouldn't consider anything more than two nights, so I didn't need anything too intensive. We opted for a square double sleeping bag because neither of us enjoy feeling like a butterfly about to emerge from a cocoon, so it fits nicely into this pack, and she carries the tent/sleeping pads.

https://www.rei.com/product/895717/kelty-coyote-80-pack

Figuring out where the GF and I want to backpack to this weekend at Joshua Tree. Got a new pack and new sleeping back, temps in low 40's at night and I'm excited to try it out.

@travisdh1 said in Considering Colocation - What to watch for:

@scottalanmiller said in Considering Colocation - What to watch for:

@jt1001001 said in Considering Colocation - What to watch for:

Having just completed our move a couple pointers:

1. Diagram your ideal layout, even if its a "stick Figure" drawing have some sort of guide
2. LENGTH OF POWERCABLES: Our power cables were WAY WAY WAY too long requiring us to do a lot of routing and rerouting, which in turn caused the back of the rack to be somewhat blocked which limits airflow. We are going to be purchasing short (2 and 3ft) lengths and redoing all the power.
3. LENGTH OF NETWORK CABLES: 6ft were too short in some cases, and 10FT were too long. We had to use more cable management which ends up wasting 2U of space. If you can, use some string and a tape measure on your existing racks to get an idea of how much length you'll need.

Doesn't the DC handle all this for you? We've never provided cables of any sort or had access to look at the gear. Never mattered to us what length cables they chose to use or what the racking order was.

It might depend on the setup inside the DC and/or how much space you're using. It doesn't make much sense for someone with 4u of space to go through all the security steps to get inside, where as a half or full rack could easily be secured separately making physical access less of a security risk for other clients.

A lot goes into it, especially with compliancy--HIPAA/PCI/etc--but typically, we issue keycards to those with half-rack and more (if they want them), but they do need to inform us 24 hours in advance if they plan on coming in.

@PenguinWrangler said in The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure:

@scottalanmiller we are looking at off loading our document management system. I work at a law firm and we create 3000 to 5000 documents a day easy. Talking to one vendor that is cloud based and they quoted us that we need 3 Mbps connection for 250 people.

I think my parents still have their old dial-up modem laying around if you'd wanna use that instead

@coliver said in The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure:

@PenguinWrangler said in The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure:

@JaredBusch I think over the next 5 to 10 years as the cost of a 1Gbps connection comes down and the availability of 1Gbps increases, speed of access will be less of a concern.

I'm not so sure. As speed and access go up so do file size and quantity. I think we're going to get to the point where we have to ask if it makes sense to have fat clients sitting on a desk, instead of zero/thin clients calling back to a desktop pool somewhere.

I saw today that Google has a new algorithm that reduces JPEG file size by 35 percent. Would there be a practical implementation for something like that in the IT/data world that would effectively reduce file size? We're moving at a blistering pace in terms of shrinking the size of nearly everything.

@scottalanmiller said in The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure:

@ChrisL said in The High Cost of On Premises Infrastructure:

I mean, short of a Mission Impossible-style rappelling from the ceiling kinda thing, it'd be awfully tough for Average Joe Hacker to waltz into a data center and plug a malicious USB in. Key cards, cameras, security guards, etc. are all something they'd have to pass through to get to the hardware.

My favorite, absolute favorite, thing is MANTRAPS.

Not to mention that they would have to get in, then identify how to get to the right customer's equipment, then figure out which of that equipment was the one that they were there to target. It is layer after layer of complexity to do this kind of attack - any kind of physical attack in this sort of environment. Just getting in the door, which you could potentially do with a tank, isn't enough. You still have to find the target. I've been in many a datacenter and figuring out which server is which is pretty hard in the sea of machines. They all look about the same.

Sure if you've been in there loads of times, know exactly where it is, know exactly what you are looking for it is one thing. But this requires more and more nearly impossible situations.

Whether it is colocation or even corporate datacenters, I have almost never had access to get to the equipment personally - and I'm normally the senior-most technical person overseeing those systems. It's not like you could grab any casual IT person and have them identify equipment for you.

Exactly. It'd be an Ocean's Eleven style heist just to get to the server and it'd have to be AN INSIDE JOB DUN DUN DUNNNNNN

I mean, short of a Mission Impossible-style rappelling from the ceiling kinda thing, it'd be awfully tough for Average Joe Hacker to waltz into a data center and plug a malicious USB in. Key cards, cameras, security guards, etc. are all something they'd have to pass through to get to the hardware.

My favorite, absolute favorite, thing is MANTRAPS.

Saw a cool post on reddit today...this guy wired his house with ethernet and documented the whole process.

thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/5zjhw0/wired_my_120_year_old_house_with_cat6_ethernet/

imgur album w/ descriptions: https://imgur.com/a/in9fZ#ee3lDEN

http://venturebeat.com/2017/03/12/watch-aws-shock-test-its-snowball-edge-data-storage-box-with-underwater-explosives/

This is cool and all, but how does it fare with typos?

BOOM. ROASTED.

@RojoLoco I really need to just get to Luke Cage. It's been sitting in my queue since its release.

@RojoLoco said in What Are You Watching Now:

If anyone has any suggestions of what we should check out that aren't every Star Trek show made since the 1970s, that would be great. My interest in this thread goes far beyond y'all arguing TNG vs DS9, ffs.

I heard that at least a dozen non-Star Trek shows got made between the 1970s and now, but that could just be a rumor. If anyone has any insight, please post that instead of "Star Trek _______ is the best!!!!" Thanks, signed everyone who doesn't feel the need to debate which Star Trek/Star Wars/Whathefukever is considered best by internet nerds.

Have you seen any of the Marvel shows--Daredevil, Jessica Jones, etc.? I'm behind on Luke Cage, but I'm looking forward to Iron Fist.

Chef's Table on Netflix is an amazing documentary series that follows the top chefs in the world...highly recommended!

@coliver said in Random Thread - Anything Goes:

Youtube Video

Mad ups.

Aaaaand humans are screwed.