In a press release issued on October 25^th, Brian Branson, President and CEO, said, “Our new relationship with MidOcean will enable us to accelerate our growth plan and our response to the changing market needs for high quality IT and business skills training. We look forward to working with MidOcean to further develop and deliver innovative training solutions.”

MidOcean has a strong track record of adding value to its portfolio companies, and they support our goals of providing quality and value to our customers and partners. Our customers will continue to receive top-quality service and can look forward to growth via expanded course offerings, broader geographical reach, and new training delivery methods.

“I worked for a small company with doors that locked automatically, and the restrooms were outside of the office. One day at around 4:45, I went to the restroom and forgot my keys. I didn’t realize everyone else had already left for the day. I didn’t have any phone numbers because, of course, my cell phone was locked inside. I had to wait in the hall until 6:30 for the janitorial staff to show up and let me in.”

“Our company moved into a ground floor office that had been vacant for quite sometime. We learned two things that year — roly polies (also known as pill bugs) are migratory, and nothing — and I mean nothing — will change their path. Despite the exterminator’s best efforts we had a carpet of roly polies for a month because our office was in their migration path.”

” While working on my predecessor’s script I found this comment hidden in a badly-nested series of “if” statements:
//what am I doing? I used to think that I could change the world
//through programming, yet every day I waste my soul in this
//office. If you’re reading this this is my silent cry for help.
//Also, the function below returns true is the current request
//is a POST variable.”

“I walked into my office building’s bathroom one afternoon and found a completely naked woman bathing herself at the sink. She stopped to ask me if there were any showers in the building.”

“I had a co-worker train himself to sleep sitting straight up with his hands on his keyboard while wearing headphones. He was busted when his supervisor tapped him on the shoulder, and he fell over.”

“My cat ate through my work laptop power supply cord. After I had to explain to the IT department what happened, they meowed at me when I stopped by to pick up the replacement.”

“In 1999 my company’s IT department did a great job making all of our clients’ software y2k compatible. We found out on January 2, 2000 that they forgot to do the same to ours.”

” When my co-worker’s laptop battery caught on fire at work, the guy next to her picked it up and threw it down the steps of the fire escape, which meant no one could go down the fire escape when the alarm went off. ”

” Our database has had two fields with “person” spelled “persion” for the last 10 years, which makes running sql queries interesting. ”

“I remember struggling through a really rough quarter with my computer science classes. I was riding up an elevator on the way to class with a couple of guys I’d never seen before. They get off at their floor and one of them turns around, points right at me and says, “Everything you will learn here is bullsh*t and won’t help at all when you get out in the real world.” Elevator door closes. ”

“I worked at a vet hospital with a “Love for Sale” sign in the window. The clinic was staffed only with women.”

Probably the most notorious superstitious use of the number 13 is Friday the 13th. Whether you cater to this belief or not, it’s still as good a reason as any to take advantage of the end of the week to reminisce about unlucky (or lucky), funny, strange, unusual, or just plain creepy work stories. So, without further ado, here’s a few ancedotes to get you started:

• “The CEO of one of the agencies I worked for had meetings every week at 9am — and always had a bottle of wine at each one.”
• “One April Fool’s Day, students walked into my classroom for their class in Windows Server administration. Sitting down, they looked up and were surprised to see that their cruel instructor had written the following course title on the board over his name: Advanced JavaScript Programming for Macintosh.”
• “While working at the Los Angeles Times as well as other smaller newspapers I experienced numerous cases of rain induced office flooding. Whenever the forecast called for rain we would pull out the plastic sheeting and trash cans (used to funnel water into). Many a computer and project were lost.”
• “An infamous user called to say, ‘My laptop is dead because my cat spilled soda on the machine while it was turned on.’ When the machine arrived for repair, the keyboard keys were melted together. When asked what caused that level of damage the user stated that a hairdryer was used to clean up the soda but that s/he had forgotten it was on for several hours and by the time the user remembered it was too late.”
• “Once a coworker on the 3rd shift tech support was so mad at our boss that he left a little yellow rain notice that he quit on her desk the next morning.”
• “One Christmas everyone was on vacation but two of us, and two trolleys of marketing material came in for one of our coworkers. We walled his cubical in with the boxes.”
• “I used to work at a vet clinic that also had a pet store. Someone’s adorable child decided to let all of the iguanas out of their cages one day while our clients were dropping off and picking their dogs up.”
• “I’ve been locked in the elevator when the lights have gone out (I clung in fear to the closest co-worker — thankfully she was an understanding co-worker and didn’t mind), the lights used to go out right at 8 p.m. (I’m deathly afraid of the dark, so you can only imagine my response), I have fallen down the small hill in the parking lot MULTIPLE times, and locked myself out of the building.”

And my personal favorite:

• “As a manager presenting workshops and activities for my team, I had this glorified image in my mind of how I could inspire my team to greatness. Halfway through my self-proclaimed Oscar-worthy performance, I started to notice that those seated began making tortured faces; their eyes darting indiscriminately across the room. Not exactly clear on what may be going on, I made a point to begin walking around in order to recapture their attention. Bad idea… Now I’m not exactly sure what I expected was going on, but I was not wholly prepared for the nose hair burning mushroom cloud I stumbled into along the way. Let it be known that although I realize that flatulence is a natural body function and is often regarded with great humor, this was a weapon of mass destruction. “Silent but deadly” was a gross understatement as whatever this was could have killed a donkey.Not wanting to embarrass anyone and not exactly sure what to say (“What are you people eating?!”), I did what any professional would do — I ignored the problem through teary eyes. The only issue with that strategy was that it happened every single time I presented for weeks after. I did everything I could think of. I hid room deodorizing spray under the table and discreetly pulled the trigger when another shock wave rolled in. I even tried to be the martyr and sniff out the root of the problem to no avail.

  Soon enough it became too obvious that this “situation” was bigger than me, so I sought outside guidance for a plan of attack. I took a long, hard look in the mirror and told myself that if I can’t put a lid on this, the terrorists win. And I gave another speech. I employed my best oratory skills and addressed the problem head on. When I took the job, I never imagined I’d give a speech about that, but a part of me thinks they were inspired to greatness that day. Regardless, I only wanted two things to happen: 1. that it never happens again, and 2. that they didn’t think it was me. ”

Feel free to share any unusual or funny stories that happened to you over the years, and look for more stories in the future!

We want to thank you for your support and comments over the past year. We have a lot of exciting plans for 2011, and we can’t wait to share them with you.

In the meantime, here are some of our most popular posts from this year, in case you missed them.

• Supporting Windows 7 Group Policy Settings with Windows Server 2003 Domain Controllers
• Smartcards in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2
• Quality of Service Part 7: Service Policy
• AnyConnect Syslog Troubleshooting
• CompTIA Continuing Education Policy

Those cities with the largest increases in technology jobs include:

image courtesy of user lusi at rgbstock.com

• Silicon Valley at 61% (although, I guess that’s not really a city…)
• Seattle — 78%
• Atlanta — 58%
• Chicago — 51%
• Dallas — 41%

Other cities, like Los Angeles; Washington, DC; Boston; and Philadelphia came in at around a 30–35% increase.

The jobs are concentrated in the areas of technology management, health care management, and computer systems engineering, according to Dice.

If you are working in one of these cities, or even not working, do you think the rate of hiring has increased? Where else do you think technology professionals should job hunt?

Based on an article at eWeek by Don Sears.

National Cyber Security Month (NCSAM) began in October of 2004, and is now supported by companies and organizations like the Department of Homeland Security, Cisco, Lockheed Martin, Facebook, and of course, Global Knowledge.

In fact, during the month of October, we’re doing our part to improve cyber security by offering a discount on select security training courses. Visit our NCSAM promotion page to learn more about how you can save money when you register for featured security courses during the month of October ONLY!

For cyber security tips and information geared toward parents and kids, visit the NCSAM web page.

This is why programs such as DoD 8570 are so important.  Depending on the job role, Department of Defense Directive 8570 (DoD 8570) provides guidance and procedures for the training, certification, and management of all government employees who conduct Information Assurance functions in assigned duty positions. These individuals are required to carry an approved certification for their particular job classification.

Certifications such as Security+, CISM, CISA, and CISSP all qualify under various aspects of DoD 8570.  Having one of these certifications is a good way to help your chances should you be looking for one of these jobs.  In today’s environment, anything you can do to boost your career opportunities is worth considering.

Software & Hardware

• The vast majority of ITSDMs monitor employees’ technology use to learn what security applications (63%) and/or OS employees are running (58%).
• More than half (56%) have determined that employees are using unsupported applications. Among them, the most common is social networking (68%).
• About 4 in 10 have determined that employees already use unsupported network devices, while more than half  indicate their organization is likely to allow personal devices on the enterprise network in the next 12 months.
• The majority of ITSDMs indicate their organization has a complete technical process in place to lock employees from all access if needed (74%) and restrictions on what employees bring onto the network (79%).
• The vast majority (88%) of ITSDMs have centralized control (either technology or process-based) for updating software. The two most common methods are employee training (73%) and automatic deployment solutions (68%).

Threats

• Along with Social Networking (51%), more than half of ITSDMs perceive that unauthorized users (55%) are the biggest IT risk to their organization.
• About 4 in 10 have experienced a loss of information due to an unsupported network device.
• A variety of solutions are used to track vulnerabilities; vendor notifications (48%), Symantec Threat Alert (46%), security mailing lists (44%), or third-party advisory services (43%).

Policies

• The IT Department is responsible for setting, maintaining and communicating company security policies according to 75% of ITSDMs.
• Policies tend to be enforced through training (62%) or URL filtering (57%). But nearly half (48%) are running an automatic policy enforcement solution such as NAC.
• Most ITSDMs (71%), recognize that overly strict security policies can have a negative impact on the hiring and retention of employees who are under the age of 30.

Excerpted from Cisco Systems Bi-Annual Security Research Security Solutions Marketing and Insight Express June 2010.

The time for Lessons Learned is as close after the lesson is discovered as possible. In many cases, this review is when any important phase or aspect of the project is completed. Reviewing and updating the Lessons Learned should be ongoing and is especially beneficial at the end of the project to ensure a clear account is maintained while it is fresh in everyone’s mind.

As the leader of this endeavor, you should plan a get together of key stakeholders and your team to review the ‘good, bad, and ugly’ items at every phase of the project — and after completion, too. It doesn’t matter whether the items were successful or dismal failures; allowing everyone to bare their souls and tell it like they saw it can alleviate the burdens heaped on their lives during the crux of the deadlines.

During the meeting, everyone should be able to voice their opinions about any and all topics. Everyone needs to be comfortable with what they are saying, who they are saying it to, and when they are saying it (which is, hopefully, not too late).

Anonymous surveys are one way to ensure everyone has the opportunity. Whether they respond or not is usually directly related to the perceived value or benefit. See if you can make doing the survey worth their while. Offer something tangible as the benefit, something that you would want if you were to do a survey for someone else or another department.

There is obvious benefit to the corporation from these Lessons Learned, but what about the benefit to your participants? What can they take away from this event? How about a clear conscience? How about a feeling of being heard? How about a message that they are important, are being listened to, and even more importantly, that their requests are being acted on.

This is a leadership event. You get to listen to your team as well as the clients, sponsors, and stakeholders. This is a great opportunity for building rapport and firing-up the team. Find out what each individual thought about the project to this point and what suggestions they can make for improvements, as well as ask them whether they witnessed any MVPs, specific accolades, and/or any outstanding efforts.

Another approach to consider is getting praise from the outside world and sharing it with your team. It will be beneficial for you and them.

Do not put a Lessons Learned opportunity off until it is too late! You will be surprised at how much of a relief your team will feel with being given a forum to voice their concerns as well as heap their praise on others.

Image from Microsoft Clip Art

With all the talk of the cyber security bill that wound its way through congress, it is interesting to note the findings of the recent Federal Cyber Security Outlook for 2010 survey. This poll found that 74 percent of respondents believe that a network attack on the government’s IT infrastructure is expected in the next year. While there is much to debate with regard to these findings, I think we can agree that there is a need for greater network security in the government realm and in the private sector.

The real question is…where do we start?  With limited funds and budgets tight, every penny spent on IT security must be justified.  One area with good returns can be gained despite limited funds is training and end-user awareness.  Many attacks are now targeting end-users.  Web 2.0 sites and social sites such as Twitter and Facebook have become much bigger targets in the same way that email used to be (not that it isn’t a target anymore).

Here’s where training can reap big returns. Something as simple as a periodic email, newsletter, or a lunchtime event that occurs once a month can be used to inform users of these current threats and the types of attacks to be aware of. This type of training can help users spot trends and techniques used by hackers, which can reduce the effectiveness of social engineering and phishing techniques. Like it or not, security has to become a much bigger part of everyone’s computing experience.  Much like most states require seatbelts while driving in automobiles, safe computing is going to require increased awareness.

Do you provide security training to your end-users?

From Michael Gregg