I am seriously and painfully out of touch with my blog addiction right now but I am getting closer to the point where I can indulge again.
The GSEC studying is intense, not because I couldn't pass the test if I just had to take it - but the updated material is so good and it is worth the effort to review. It is worthwhile going over the subject matter once every couple years it is surprising how much does get updated that often. The most painful part is that the information is often in the form of prose and there is just so much of it that it takes a lot of time. And for those who have never taken a GIAC test... they seem to relish in some of the technical minutiae that you can only get from a close reading. Perhaps a good sexist comment would be, 'this separates the men from the boys' but you wouldn't often hear that come from my mouth ;)
On a couple other fronts...
The wife's new Apple iBook is truly amazing (as someone who has been familiar with Apple for many years and simply hadn't kept up with OSX) in that it handles very complex functions in a deceptively simple and intuitive fashion. A brief look at the e-mail client seemed to reveal a grossly simple architecture - but when I dug deeper to see if and how it handled digital certificates I was amazed at how easy and well it does. Downloading executable content from the Internet brought simple but effective control in the form of a humanly understandable question. The system easily handles updates - not just to system components but also applications that are savvy. I am still mulling over the need for anti virus - the risk is minimal (and the cost not a real issue) but I am concerned about the impact to the system (in terms of stability and performance). And speaking of performance... My relatively new Dell home system (P4 2.4 GHz) is so much slower than the day I first turned it on. I blame it on all of the MS patches including SP2 as well as the anti virus, and plethora of anti-spyware crap I need to run to keep it 'safe'. Oddly in this regard - the Macintosh tends to get faster with code upgrades as Apple claims that more of the underlying code takes advantage of native code optimized for the processors. The G5's still seem to offer a lot of punch - the iBook will be greatly improved once Apple starts to move to the Intel based systems next year but today's G4 is not a poor performer.
And finally our son had a great time fishing this evening catching about a dozen bass in the Grand River - as Matt promised, the small mouth bass delighted him with their fight. Meanwhile our daughter fell into the Gerald Ford Museum pool and came out quite the 'wet fish' - luckily the evening was hot and it helped more than hurt.
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