Everything happening in the world these days started to get me down a bit starting a few months ago. I decided to embrace change in my life with things I could affect instead of letting the things that I couldn’t affect get me down. A leader in my organization once brought up the concept of “hard learning”, which is learning things that are outside of your comfort zone. I decided that hard learning is what I’ll embrace in order to get the serotonin boost I’ve been craving. 

Anyone that has talked to me about certification is aware that I haven’t placed a lot of value on achieving them in the past, and that I’ve relied on the ability to hit the ground running as proof of competency. What I didn’t think about until recently is that very few people have a certificate AND can hit the ground running. An even smaller group contains people that receive certs that actually have hands on experience with their particular certification area. I aim to be a part of the very small group of people that can hit the ground running, is certified, and has significant experience backing everything up.

Part of the hard learning for me here was realizing that I was wrong about certs. I needed to make them work for me, by studying and ensuring I have actual experience so they are not just a meaningless piece of (digital) paper. The other hard learning part is pushing myself to learn new things. It’s easy to get stuck in your comfort zone. Mario Andretti said, “If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough”. In tech, we die on the vine when we are not pushing and innovating ourselves. I’m working hard to apply this principle to myself by learning things that aren’t connected to my current skill set.

Anyhow, that’s all I’ve got right now. Big things have small beginnings. I appreciate you spending the time to read this.

The post Big Things have Small Beginnings – How I Beat 2020 appeared first on VirtJunkie.

I have to say that this version of wordpress is so much better than the version I was using before (which was 2.1)

Anyways, look back for some new posts coming.

The post Back Again appeared first on VirtJunkie.

I’ve never been hugely athletic.  I’ve usually been just athletic enough to barely keep up with people who were and not look stupid.  I’ve always heard of all of the benefits of getting regular exercise besides just getting into better shape physically like having a better mood and things like that, which is why I started running.

Hopefully I can keep this pace up like I was before, because I really want to run in a 5K race in the spring, namely the Fifth Third Riverbank Run.

On another note, I’ll be honest with you, this whole personal blog thing really isn’t the most fun for me, and I feel stupid talking about myself, haha. So anyways, I’m really going to try hard to do this type of a category, but I might not do it very often.

I’m going to write a little informational post about how to grow your blog in a few steps soon, so look for it!

Thanks for listening to my boring spiel,

Jon Howe

The post Running… or lack thereof appeared first on VirtJunkie.

Anyways, I’ve been up to some pretty cool stuff lately.  Yesterday I found a small (20GB) hard drive next to my monitor…  I’m not quite sure how or when it got there, but I realized instantly that I needed to put it to use.  a friend of mine was over the other day and asked me if I had a raid array in my computer, and at the time I didn’t.  That all changed tonight…

I installed that bad boy into my computer and now I have a raid 0 (striping) array in my computer.

It was fairly easy to do, except for a fairly undocumented error having to do with not being able to have the “/boot” partition inside a raid array.  Once I figured that out it was smooth sailing. If anyone knows a good hard drive benchmarking tool I’d be interested in giving it a shot.

Well, this whole not-just-tech blog thing didn’t work so well this first time…  Oh well, I’ll give it another shot some time when it’s not so late.

Jon Howe

The post Stuff Lately appeared first on VirtJunkie.

The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is on a rampage, launching legal attacks against average Americans from coast to coast. After over 18,000 lawsuits and counting against P2P users, file sharing has continued to increase rapidly. Meanwhile, music fans, like 12 year-old Brianna LaHara, college student Cassi Hunt, and parent of five Cecilia Gonzalez, are being forced to pay thousands of dollars they do not have to settle RIAA-member lawsuits, and many other innocent individuals are being caught in the crossfire.


This irrational crusade is not generating a single penny for the artists that the RIAA claims to protect. The RIAA should be working to create a rational, legal means by which its customers can take advantage of file sharing technology and pay a fair price for the music they love. With artists increasingly turning against the lawsuits, momentum may be shifting in favor of a better way forward.


Copyright law shouldn’t make criminals out of more than 60 million Americans

The post Take a Stand Against the Madness; Stop the RIAA! appeared first on VirtJunkie.

I just got done with my first morning class in more than a half of a year and I thought that I was going to die. I didn’t really care about the fact that it was a morning class, it was more about the class itself.

My 9:30 class on Mondays and Wednesdays is Intro to Logic. The class seemed like it would be a good choice (plus it was required for my degree), but I didn’t think that it would be as boring as it was today.

The Prof talked the whole time about things that seemed complely… well, logical to me. In other words, he talked about things that were obvious to me.

I guess that this should make me happy that I have an easy class, but for some reason it leaves me a little scared.

Historically when I get into situations like this, I tend to pay less attention in class and end up with a worse grade than I would if it was a harder class and I had to pay attention.

Oh well, we’ll see what happens.

I have a break from 11:00AM – 1:15PM, so I decided that I’d get some stuff done.

I’m a big fan of IRC, and without my laptop here I have no way to use it. So I found a CGI based IRC client.

I haven’t installed it yet, but I plan to before I leave for lunch.

Later,
Jon Howe

The post Argh appeared first on VirtJunkie.

This time I’m going to Lansing with the family to see my Grandparents on my Mom’s side.

The MP3 Player’s ready to go for the car ride, now I just have to stay awake at the restaraunt.

More later,
Jon Howe

The post Argh appeared first on VirtJunkie.