Welcome to September, my how time flies. We only have a month to finish preparing for UTOSC, and you only have a month to register!

The price is our standard $70, but there are plenty of discount codes available. If you are a member of any Local User Group (LUG) then you can get a code for up to half off!

A quick word to potential sponsors: UTOSC is the premier event in the Mountain West to capture the attention of hundreds of IT professionals, as well as active hobbyists and some very loyal customers. Please contact me for more information about sponsoring UTOSC.

Remember, register now! http://2010.utosc.com

When I was attending high school, only 10-13 years ago, I remember learning cutting edge technologies like HTML, JavaScript, C, and Hypercard. We weren’t quite a networked school, in fact we only had 1 or 2 classrooms with internet access. I spent most of my time in the graphics lab working with Adobe Photoshop 3, and Pagemaker. I was running printing presses that were cutting edge too, they worked like over powered copiers. I designed, printed, cut, bonded, folder, and distributed every document, award, flier, etc. the school needed. We downloaded the newest in music technology the MP3. We were crazy tech savvy kids.

Shortly after I graduated from ITT Technical, a mere 3 years later, I remember hearing about kids being able to take the A+, CCNA, and some Microsoft certification test right in high school. I felt cheated. Cheated because I had just paid over $30,000 to some monkey who ran a school that wasted 3 years of my life giving me a paper that said I already knew a bunch of things kids were learning in high school.

Dark Corners

In the tech world there are two ways to learn anything. First, you can go to school and pay a ton of money to learn things from a book, and if you are lucky you will get to put the rubber to the road, at least a little and see how all this theory really works out in real life.

The second I call the Dark Corners. Most tech savvy folk when asked will tell you they prefer to work on their systems, programs, etc. in a lightly lit dark room, usually in the corner of a building. Somewhere that they can loose their crazy socially awkward side and get some real work done. My personal “Dark Corner” is in the basement, a common favorite.

The folks spending time in Dark Corners are learning by doing. They are plugging holes in firewalls as they are learning how they are exposed, and exploited. They are designing websites in HTML5 now because they want to have the advantage when the spec is standardized, and just to be sure they are covered they are working on XHTML2 as well.

These people in the Dark Corners are your geeks. They guys who would rather spend their evenings and weekends figuring out where their packets are going across the network, how they can better encrypt their computer’s data without losing everything when one of the drives in their RAID fails.

The folks in the Dark Corners are the doers, and they are the people who know the most, no questions asked.

Bright Futures

I am sure you are wondering the point of all of this, the bright future I am talking about is this:

http://newsltechhs.wordpress.com/

The New Salt Lake City “A Charter School Preparing Tomorrow’s Tech Progeny”. This is a charter school that is designed around the idea of having your kids be tech gurus! They will learn everything from the history of computing and punch cards, to the latest and greatest OO Programming, supporting and maintaining *nix servers, and even the Windows world.

a brand new charter high school in southern Salt Lake county/northern Utah county area, dedicated to preparing tomorrow’s software and network systems engineers

This is something I would have killed to attend when I was a kid.

Help Out

They are looking for support from the community in the way of Human Resources, Policy and Procedure, budgeting and more!

As this is something I would hope my kids would one day attend, you can believe I will be getting involved. I hope each of you will see the value of something like this in our community and culture and will give it your honest best effort to help it come to fruition.

You know you wish your kids were sporting Fedora tats!

Isaac with Fedora tattoo on chest

Madison with Fedora Tattoo

FourSquare Logo

Until today I had really only been sliding around on FourSquare, making my self known when think about it, but now I have to up the ante.

Today I was unseated as the Mayor of Wal-Mart (4800 South 900 East, Salt Lake City, UT), by David. This will not stand!

Mayor of WalMart?

So in FourSquare you are basically playing a little game of land grab, only there is almost never any real land grabbing to do at first, so you can simply check in everywhere you go and eventually become the mayor. To become a mayor you have to qualify a few criteria:

• Have a FourSquare account
• Have a Profile Pic (on your FourSquare account)
• Have the most check-ins at a Venue (e.g. Wal-Mart)
• Have a previous check-in within 2 weeks

So until today at 2:15PM MST when I got this email:

Hey there -

Sorry for the bad news, but David has just replaced you as mayor of Walmart!

http://foursquare.com/venue/221122

Don’t take it too hard – a few more checkins and you could be back on top…

- foursquare

I was Mayor of my local Wal-Mart.

So?

So, the funny thing is this. Until The other day I was really already tired of FourSquare because I seemed to be the only person in my area using it, and that means I was pretty much winning everything all the time. Just as I was about ready to end it all, FourSquare made me a Super User – Level 1.

What does that mean?

Super User – Level 1 lets you edit other people’s venues, and is only a few promotions away from Admin when you get to create badges…

Badges?

Yes, badges. When certain criteria are met you get badges and apparently you can add new badges if you are an active enough player.

So now that I have been notified that I can become and Admin (if I keep playing) and now that I have been removed from Mayorship, well… I have to start playing harder.

So if you follow my @twitter I am sorry about the double tweets from FourSquare.

BTW – If you have an iPhone or Android based phone, you should play FourSquare

A break from the normal routine of book reviews and code. This weekend I was the recipient of some great white elephant gifts. The most notable of all a 2Lb log of Summer Sausage.

This brought to question:

Why is it called Summer Suasage?

And thanks to the geek in me, I wikied it! Without further ado:

Summer sausage is the general term for any sausage that can be kept without the need of refrigeration.

My first guess was close, I guessed it was made of meats that would be left over come Summer, which if you keep reading

Summer sausage, like all sausages, makes use of leftover scrap meat and organ meat that would otherwise be wasted.

Finally, when is it made? Summer, right? Wrong!

In spite of its name, summer sausage actually tends to be made in the autumn, during traditional hunting seasons in North America and Europe.

The more you know!