And then look what shows up in the command line interface: Arrgh!

I’m not sure how One Communications is in your neck of the woods, but here in Connecticut I have been moving my clients away from them as fast as possible. Their own networks here don’t talk to each other. When I get them to fix the issue(s), they break again. For example, I have 2 clients in Hartford and they have a colleague in Waterbury. All were on One Communications as an ISP, various levels of service. Between all 3 of them, none could route traffic to the others and they all have their own email servers in their office. I have another client in New Haven, and they have to email the Waterbury office too. Couldn’t do it (on One Communications). All 4 companies can email anywhere else, just not to other local One Communications destinations (including my accountant, who is also now moved to another ISP). So I call One Communications, they eventually (days later) find the problem and temporarily fix it. Until it comes up again 6-9 months later. About the 4th time it happened I decided I was done with them because they just couldn’t get their act together to even fix it temporarily that time.

Now the dilemma: how do I cook a whole chicken in the crockpot without getting it super greasy?  Vegetable steamer – stainless steel and some of them have removable center posts (like the one I bought).  Take the center post out (if you can’t, just spear the chicken – I’ve done this too).  Do your normal roast chicken prep, like dry rub or something.  Keep the cavity empty for this one, though I suppose since you’re cooking 8 hours you could technically stuff the bird.  I put some seasonings on the skin, then cut up some veggies (specifically this time red peppers, onions and carrots) and placed all of this on the steamer in the crock pot.

I cooked it on low overnight.  Basically had it in there by 9 pm, stopped it about 7:30 am.  All that grease drops to the bottom.  There’s still some fat in the chicken, but the meat isn’t sitting in rendered fat.  Its tender, fall off the bone kind of chicken.  Easy to separate bones from meat (use the bones later for stock).  And you have the stock at the bottom for use later (maybe in making rice…  i usually cool it off in the fridge first and scoop off the congealed fat before using).  So…  rice, chicken and vegetables – so good.  Take the skin off or your personal trainer will yell at you!

So, if you’re getting this post on facebook or an RSS Feed instead of going to the site directly, please run to the IT Legends site and poke around a bit.  We like the layout, but we can be convinced to find another theme.  Does it need to be free?  How about free as in beer or less than $50 (but we prefer free since we’ve only made $3 – actually considering the cost of the domain, hosting, etc – we’re still in the red).  Yes, if you send a theme suggestion that we end up using, we will buy you a beer (or a beverage of your choice) the next time we are in proximity.

Digestible training would be training in chunks of size that your brain has an appetite for and capacity to assimilate.  Perhaps not all training can be done in this fashion, but the tools available to us today to provide skills training at a distance are incredibly easy to use.  I think trainings can be broken down into small, 15-minute or less digestible chunks.  If a topic at hand truly takes 8 hours, then break it down into something more easily processed and retained.   If its self-paced distance learning, it gives people the opportunity to work at their pace to properly absorb the skills and information.  People that learn fast can take on more chunks at once than someone who might be new to a subject or got stuck on one point and needs to research a little more to grasp a concept.

It is my goal to issue a series of digestible training videos to my clients and different ones the public at large.  There are a lot of good examples of this type of training already out there, but I still see a lot of these intensive 3-day training camps that, in my mind, are more of a waste of money and time than a benefit (if there were other ways to teach the topic – some skills to not lend themselves to distance learning).  Here’s a good example of how to make an MP3 podcast in digestible chunks.

I’m looking forward to hooking it up to my office network (which runs an Astaro Security Gateway 220) so I have VPN hooked up all the time instead of just when I run the client.  :)

So, we begin our trek for food (I gave him Doritos to calm the burning pain in his stomach – Abe eats a lot but is thin as a rail) and I decide to have him taste Modern Apizza on State St.  Its a place a client and friend recommended to me – she suggested the bacon and onion and wow was it good!  However, they were closed on Sunday afternoon.  How sad, we were put out a little, but hungry and I remembered that Tony and Lucille’s on Wooster St served it ready by the slice (I found out the weekend before when I was moving things into the new apartment)!

So, we ventured over there.  There was, as usual, this very long line of people outside Frank Pepe’s (my first New Haven pizza, it is world renowned).  I shook my head, thinking the fools don’t even know they can get good pizza just about anywhere on Wooster St.  So we go into the takeout side of Tony and Lucille’s across the street.  We order a few pizzas by the slice and decide to eat them while we wait for a pizza to be made for us to go (for Abe to bring home to his little family in Vernon).  They are pretty amusing there, they treat you like family because they expect you to know exactly how things work in their shop.  Apparently, you’re not supposed to order whole pizzas from the takeout side, nor can you call ahead (I asked) to have them make one for you to pick up.  If you want a whole pie, you go next door to the restaurant.  I thought it was strange, but after being told this they gave me one of the pies they already had made for slices.

Starving, we headed outside to eat our slices at the nice tables they put out.  An older man, a bit portly with white hair and a gruff voice comes out as we’re tearing into our second piece.  “Where did you get that pizza!?”  We told him we got it from his place and he put a smile on and had a great conversation with us.  That was how I met Tony of Tony and Lucille’s on 150 Wooster St (they don’t have a website).  He asked us who’s pizza we thought was best, we told him the one we were eating was better than one we had to wait for.  haha.  But no, seriously, his pizza is nice.  It has a light, crispy, thin crust and is well put together.  Tony is a great guy, and when I told him I was a local business owner and had just moved in a couple miles down the road, he chatted with us for awhile.  His daughter (I didn’t catch her name) also joined in.

So far, I’ve been loving New Haven.  You just don’t get this kind of attention up near Hartford unless you twist a couple arms.  So far, all the shop owners and managers have been very forthcoming and friendly.  Especially when I tell them I just moved in, they all have some nice advice on where to go and what to do.  Oh, and Archie Moore’s is about a 3 minute walk.  They have awesome wings!  I would have had more tonight if I could have, but I made myself a promise that I’d only be going there as long as the World Series was going on and I guess that’s over now.  Not that I won’t ever go back, it will just take me a month or so.

I’d been using something similar for a month or so at the office (a self-built nettop, uses the same kind of processor) and was pleased with the results.  So I thought, what they hey and took the plunge.  $360 (I added RAM) later, I have this awesome little netbook as my most-used computer.  I’m not worried about its small size, because usually when I’m using it its hooked up to a large LCD flat panel, keyboard and mouse.  When I’m on the road with it, in meetings etc, the keyboard on this model is large enough to type effectively.  It has WiFi, wired NIC, 3 USB ports, 160GB of hard drive space, 2GB of RAM…  sweet little machine.

One thing that was starting to bug me was the number of things I had to plug into the machine when I sat down at my desk.  I’ve been able to reduce it to 4: network, monitor, power, USB hub (for headphones, keyboard, mouse).  I could, if I really wanted to, move the network and monitor over to a USB replicator and only have to plug in two devices – but I’ll wait on that.  Another thing that was bothering me was the monitor setup.  Whenever I was in the office I was reconfiguring video settings every time – that was before I found the scheme settings in my graphics adapter (Intel) that allowed me to save many preferences.  And I can even have a program run when I choose a scheme – like mapping all of my drives (since its Windows XP Home, its not added to the domain – but I can still access the devices if I put in the right username/password).

I specifically didn’t buy this unit from a cell phone provider because doing so signs you up for a 2-year contract for $40 (or more) a month to get Internet service from them for it.  Almost everywhere I go I have access to WiFi, so I didn’t think this was necessary.  Also, having the Internet built into the netbook would have been limiting for me. I can always get one of their new MiFi devices or get the USB wireless adapters for more portability between devices.  This way I can just buy 1 of these for the company and hand it out to whomever needs it the most at any given time.  Or tether my phone (Verizon lets you do that for a fee….  AT&T doesn’t with their iPhone – another reason for me not to switch).

Anyway, I vote yes to netbooks.  But I have a lot of other computers, too.  So, for gaming I have my home PC set up to game on.  This will still play some good games ,but not the new intensive 3d graphics ones.