I woke up on Friday July 19, 2024, and read that there was a massive IT outage in progress that was affecting airlines, financial institutions, and various other businesses worldwide. I was aware of CrowdStrike prior to this outage, and it was not surprising to me at all that something like this finally happened at this scale. While I have never been a customer of CrowdStrike, I have used products in the past that worked in a similar manner, and they always made me nervous how they deployed updates. These updates have the potential to cripple all workstations and servers in an organization with only one minor issue, and that is exactly what happened.

After writing about the Skills Ontario competition I also wanted to go into the details of the Skills Canada competition that I attended in late May 2009, and go over the entire experience. It has been 15 years since I attended and competed in the Skills Canada competition. The Skills Canada competition was a week-long experience, starting on May 19, 2009, and ending on May 23, 2009, at various locations in Charlottetown, PEI. I won first place in the IT and Network Support competition, making me the first student from Cambrian College to win in that competition. On top of that I was also the first student from Cambrian College to ever win gold at Skills Canada in any competition.

This article from Windows Central came up the other day and it sums up a lot of the current issues with the consumer side of Microsoft, not necessarily on the Azure or Office 365 sides. Obviously, short term gains are most publicly traded companies primary concern, but Microsoft is no longer playing the long game on its core products and services, and it is starting to erode trust in the company. Overall, a good read and worth the time to go through it.

I wanted to go into the details of the Skills Ontario competition that I attended in early May 2009, and go over the entire experience. It has been 15 years since I competed at the Skills Ontario competition. The Skills Ontario competition took place from May 4 to May 6, 2009, at the RIM Park and Manulife Financial Sportsplex in Waterloo, Ontario. I won first place in the IT and Network Support competition which qualified me for Skills Canada in late May 2009, which I also attended.

On May 1, 2009, I finished the last day of my field placement at Health Sciences North in Sudbury, Ontario, and completed the final course that I needed so that I could graduate from Cambrian College in the CETY (Computer Systems Technology) program. The following week I travelled to Waterloo, Ontario to represent my college in the Skills Ontario competition in the IT and Network Support category. I ended up winning first place in that competition, and I then travelled to Charlottetown, PEI a few weeks later to the Skills Canada competition to compete again where I also won first place. It has been 15 years since I competed at both events, and I wanted to go over the experience.

On March 21, 2024, the United States Justice Department and 16 States filed suit against Apple for monopolistic practices in the smartphone market. The main allegation is that Apple has violated antitrust laws by making it difficult for competitors and other third-parties to interoperate with the iPhone (and with iOS), and as a result they have a monopoly on the smartphone market in the US. This was certainly an interesting thing to hear about and it seems to have come out of nowhere. It is a complex case, and despite what others are saying, it is not completely related to the whole ‘‘green bubble’’ situation with iMessage.

World Backup Day was a few days ago and I wanted to go into the details on my current backup strategy, and the reasons behind the way that I handle the backups of my important data. While it is not overly complex compared to other backup strategies that I have seen, it is important to have a formal process in place to ensure that data is being backed up and correctly protected. It is very easy to just assume that everything is being backed up and that is the end of it, but not properly scheduling, validating, or tracking your backups is what usually causes data loss.

Several years ago, I acquired a Dell Wyse 3040 Thin Client while I was doing some contract work. The company that I was working for was getting rid of several dozen of them and offered me one if I was interested. Right after that happened, I moved and it ended up in storage, and I only just recently rediscovered that I even had it. This turned out to be quote convenient because I was using a Raspberry Pi as a Pi-hole server on my network, and I needed to repurpose that device for something else, so I decided to use this system to replace it. Even though it is an old system that is end-of-life, it is still useful.