Coolness in its infancy

I'd say give this technology 10 years (maybe less) and it will be at a level we would today consider sci-fi...

More information is just what we need right? I won't delve into the potential positive or negative ramifications (there are arguably many on either side) but merely from a geek point of view this is super cool stuff.

Time to start studying...

Well the time has come for me to get off of my butt and upgrade my Microsoft certification. I am a MCSE 2000 and I would like to be an MCSE 2008. This will take two steps... first upgrading to 2003 and then from there upgrading to 2008. Fortunately I know enough already about the 2003 environment that I think I can get by with just grabbing a couple good study guides and then taking the two tests required to upgrade. This step is necessary because there is no upgrade path from 2000 to 2008 and I would have to take the entire series of 7 tests to attain 2008 otherwise. The upgrade from 2003 to 2008 is as I understand it a single (albeit long) test. Now that step will take some additional training but my company is going to pick that up I think. I may still have to pay for the actual tests but that is fine... in fact I've found that I study a bit harder when I am covering the cost of the test ($130 a pop last time... who knows what they cost now).

My goal? To have my MCSE 2008 by the end of the year or very shortly after the 1st of next year. Since we are in a salary freeze this year I am hoping this cert upgrade will help in getting some kind of increase next year but my real motivation is just to get current.

Next year we will have replaced our Lotus Notes/Domino email server with MS Exchange 2007 so after I get my MCSE2008 cert I may move towards getting a specialist certification in messaging but that is down the road and one thing at a time.

A religious post.

After this I will be sure to post something trivial.

Over the weekend two people I know accepted Christ as their Savior. The first and nearest my heart was my 8 year old Son!!! He has been asking the right questions for about a year now but neither my wife nor I had peace that he really understood the implications or why he needed to be saved. Recently though he began showing real conviction about his need for Christ and Saturday morning I led him in praying for Salvation and his little face was glowing. That really made quite an excellent early Mother's Day present for my wife and it is a huge weight off of my shoulders to know that both of my kids have their eternal destinies worked out.

The second person is my step-grandmother. My wife had several opportunities to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with her a couple years ago after my grandfather passed away but she just wasn't ready. She recently suffered a heart attack which naturally opened her eyes to her own mortality and my little brother's wife was able to share the Gospel with her and this time she did give her life to the Lord. So I am very happy about both occassions and thought I should put it up on the blog.

Using a JPG as hidden lockbox.

Found a very cool way to hide important files on your computer without using encryption or anything.

1. You put your file (i.e. online banking passwords or something) into a Rar archive (i.e. secret.rar).

2. Put a jpg image into the same directory (i.e. picture.jpg).

3. Open a command prompt and go to that directrory.

4. Now type 'copy /B picture.jpg + secret.rar picture.jpg'.

What you end up with is a file that looks and acts just like a jpg but the file size will be the sum of both files. To access to the Rar portion of this concatenated file you simply right click it and use the 'open with' option then choose WinRar and voila you can access your secret data. The only catch is, if you were to try to edit the jpg with a graphics application, you risk corrupting the Rar file it is attached to.

Once a year I must say it...