damn damn damn....

So the day I've dreaded for the past few years has finally come...  My CISSP has expired.  I knew it was going to happen and I did little to prevent it.

Yeah I could have proctored exams (actually after doing this once NO I CANNOT.  It's absurd that I can get 8 CPE's for watching people suffer and giving up a weekend day.  ISC explain to me how watching people take a is FURTHERING my education)...  I could have watched webinars etc...  I kept hoping to go to a conference but didn't get to go.  

So now I'm faced with two equally unpleasant decisions.  Do I buy the latest guide and go take that horrid exam again, or just do without the worthless cert, and yes I believe it is an absolutely worthless certification.

Honestly as long as I'm employed I really don't care if I have it or not, but if I need to look for a job it's going to be a challenge to get one in short order, so....  I guess I'll need to pony up the $500 and buy a cram guide or 2 and take the fucking thing again...

ARGH!

The shitty part is, one of the other guys here gets sent to RSA every year to maintain his CISSP.  If I'd been sent to a conference this year and last year I could have probably scraped together enough stupid classes to keep it.

whither linux

I don't think it would be a surprise to most people that I am a huge fan of Linux.  It is coming up on 20 years since I first installed Slackware.  I bought the cd set at a computer show and installed it on my pc.

I remember that because of my Diamond S3 card, and the "secrecy" over the timing/refresh rates I couldn't get X running and when I showed my friends they asked "so what can it do?".  They were skeptical, but I was sold.  I eventually got X working and that was that.  Fast forward 20 years and I've had laptops that run it, servers that run it and even work computers that run Linux.  Suffice to say there is little I haven't done with Linux and I've only ever used Windows for work and gaming.

There's one small problem now, I've been using a Mac at work.  I switched because my work laptop was unstable when it ran Linux.  It would randomly lock up and nothing could recover it except for a hardware reset.  I finally decided this was unacceptable for work.  I ran windows 7 in a VM for office etc... and that kept getting corrupted.  I still don't know why, but I suspect it had to do with the switchable graphics.

Anyway now that I have the mac, the more I use it the less I want to use Linux.  I have a rock solid UNIX laptop.  With other hardware I've been able to replicate this under Linux but it's required almost constant tinkering, and I'm just getting too old for that shit.  Maybe I should use a different distribution, but I do prefer source based ones.

I hope I'm wrong, but I'm the type of user Linux can ill afford to lose...