Ooh! Wallpaper!

[darkrose.livejournal.com]

Dear Luser,

Yeah, I went to MCSE bootcamp too..back in the NT 4 days as a matter of fact. Windows 2000 was still called "Windows NT 5" and was in very early beta by the end of the course work.

I regularly cracked the instructor's machine during lectures, despite his best efforts to lock it down. He didn't even know it was me until I started laughing hysterically at pulling out random contents of the system32 folder onto his desktop during a powerpoint presentation causing a pretty major crash of his PC. Sure, I did minor things, too..inserting slides with wacky sounds into presentations, cracking the firewall so my mate and I could play internet games while we were supposed to be learning all that great marketing material about NT 4..stuff like that...

He bought me lunch for the last month of class when he figured out all the computer trouble he was having was because some little shiat (me) was pwning him. The last day I formatted his drive for him..unfortunately he was still trying to use it.

So yeah, I've got NT 4 wallpaper. Those courses simply taught me that I didn't want to be a MS admin.. It was the biggest waste of (my employer's) $8,797.50 (+$600 for tests IIRC), EVER. I wasn't working for that company 6 months after completing the course. I turned away from the "Microsoft Family" (that sometimes reminds me of the Jonestown family in a lot of ways) and started learning Linux for real. I had dabbled in Linux here and there in the past, and after the MCSE training fun, I realized my skill sets were better suited for the CLI.

So yeah.. ask me if I really give a damn that you're an MCSE. Go ahead, ask me. Wait, I'll save you the trouble. NO, I don't care.

What I *DO* care about is that Microsoft is "granting" you an MCSE and you don't even know the keystrokes to copy and paste. That makes me sad..but then I fondly remember my 6 months of MCSE boot camp, spending my Saturdays hacking the living shiat out of that guy's computer..and I laugh..so thanks for the laugh, pal. I wasn't laughing at the fact that my 4 year old knows how to do something on the computer that you don't, oh MCSE God..I was laughing at the days gone by..when pwning a Microsoft box was just as easy then as it was now when an idiot like you is running it.

No love,
~Darkrose

Comments

[thecrazyfinn.livejournal.com]

Damn, those idiots still exist? Or does he have an NT4 track MCSE? (which are all expired). Win2K/Server2k3 track is much harder to get certified in, MS upped the exam difficulty seriously when they realized what a joke the MCSE had become.

As to me, I spent my time in NT4-track training doing the labs with RH5.2. That was more interesting than the 5 minutes it took to do the lab right once and then 3 hours of waiting for the rest of the class to catch up. Didn't help that the guy doing the training was so clueless that he couldn't figure out why a machine with ISA NE2000 NIC's and SB16 PnP Soundcards wouldn't network by default (hint, what's the default IRQ for those cards?).

[tmesser.livejournal.com]

ISA NE2000 NIC's and SB16 PnP Soundcards wouldn't network by default (hint, what's the default IRQ for those cards?)

Wow, it's been a while since I've heard that. IRQ 5, isn't it?

[darkrose.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but the NE2000 default IRQ was 10...sb was 5 and/or 7 IIRC.

[mawz.livejournal.com]

Nope, SB was 5, most NE2000 clones were 5 as well.

[darkrose.livejournal.com]

Really. I don't think I've ever had one run on 5 to my knowledge.. Always 10 or sometimes 11..Granted that might have been the default PNP IRQs or something..

I remember a installing an old 8 bit SB clone in my 386 circa 1992 or 1993..DOS drivers of course.. and the installer asking what IRQ, DMA and something else (forget what) the card was configured to which is why I said it ran on 5 or 7 because I remember those were the only 2 options.

[thecrazyfinn.livejournal.com]

NE2000's were wierd little birds. Not PnP, but software configurable using a DOS utility (or in this case, the NT4 driver).

PnP SB16's were much more configurable than earlier models, the software configuration allowed many more IRQ and address options, but you often had to configure them like the old models to handle hardcoded software options (this wasn't an issue of course on NT4 systems, which couldn't run that software anyways).

[thecrazyfinn.livejournal.com]

Yep, for both. Got a Pizza dinner for pointing that out, took me 30 seconds to diagnose & fix (all the lab systems had the same spec). The instructor had spent a good hour before class troubleshooting.

[darkrose.livejournal.com]

I don't know about now, but I damn near fell asleep every time in those classes. I don't know what this guy's deal was, but he actually asked me how to copy and paste not 3 minutes after saying "I'm an MCSE..." and then blubbering off about how hard it is to configure one of our products...

[commonsensehere.livejournal.com]

This story is fabricated we have an op failure here.

[darkrose.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I fabricated the letter.. but everything in it was true.

[moopet.livejournal.com]

Agreed.

[catmmo.livejournal.com]

Wow - I could've written this.

My favorite is my co-workers putting that they're A+ certified in their email signatures ... they made us get that at work and I'm still embarrassed about it. (I even took it off my resume after a recruiter laughed at me.)

[wherdafux-d-cat.livejournal.com]

The guys in the data center and hardware were in the habit of putting their certifications (including A+) in their sigfiles, bolded and often in larger font than their names.

So whenever I had to reply to one of their emails, I'd add 'History D-' or something equally inane and overfonted (and inaccurate :-þ ) to my own sig.

After a little while, those sigfiles became a bit more reasonable, go figure.

[jecook]

yep.

I still think it amusing that the IT industry in general disdains academia for certifications, which generally mean dick to the people doing the work.

Hell, the only reason I took (and passed easily) the XP client exam for the MCSA is becuase work paid for it, and it got me a promotion. (Which is why I'm taking the other two core exams for that cert next year- work is paying for it.)

[politas.livejournal.com]

So you're proud about being a dick and messing up an instructor's day? Talk about transferral. Trainers aren't the problem, they're just trying to give the courses that people ask for.

[darkrose.livejournal.com]

It's not being a dick when the instructor actively invites you to test the security of the operating system, now is it.

Trainers are indeed the problem. Talk about transferral? A student is only as good as his instructor, no?

[politas.livejournal.com]

Ah, not in that case, no.

Generally, I would hope that students would exceed their instructors, otherwise we would never achieve anything, would we?

Testing security

[cog-dissident.livejournal.com]

Big difference between testing a user's security and letting him know theres holes. Hey, maybe one popup during a presentation that says "your security could use work" and a good laugh can be had by all.

What you were doing was just giving the guy a hard time because you wanted to brag about the size of your e-penis.

Re: Testing security

[darkrose.livejournal.com]

..because a real-world haxx0r/script kiddie's going to do that? Besides, I wanted him to show some of the auditing tools (that suck mightily) from the resource kit that would be used to catch a security breach. The point of the exercise was to prove that NT4 was not secure. Stable is debatable, but certainly not secure. It had nothing to do with my e-peen because I didn't even bother to cover my tracks. Intentionally.