Tim's Computer Science Blog

Sometimes there are good old things that we just can't get away from. Something about the continued functionality inspite of the "newer better" hype cycles in technology. I digress though, so onto the meat of this post. There is an issue that has plagued an old laptop of mine for a while. It happened when I would change the HardDrive in the machine. (Think cycling through Windows 7, 8, 10, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, etc) Each time the HD was switched up the bootloader would cease to work. Worse yet a fresh install wouldn't work. DunDunDun! Hardware Issues! Turns out the nvram was having issues. Luckily Linux has this handy command line tool efibootmgr  to save the day. Grab a Live Cd/USB and Extra entries can be deleted by command like    sudo efibootmgr -b entry_in_nvram -B    . You might also want to remove excessive dump files using a command such as    sudo rm /sys/firmware/efi/efivars/dump-*   If needed check your OS for how to regenerate y...

Recently I was invited to conduct a leadership workshop at California State University of Monterey Bay for the Networking and Security Team. They wanted the training to focus in on getting things done, so I put together a few fun training activities that help with communication, self-direction, teamwork, and having more effective meetings. Activities build leaders faster than lectures in my experience. Check out the slides and try a few of the activities for yourself! When talking about leadership a general discussion about what a leader is, is in order. When asked many of the participants shared ideas such as "A leader is someone who gets things done", "Someone who steps up", "An active listener", "Leaders are people that others follow". We didn't get too deep into what a leader was in this training and focused more on a few of the skills. If you are interested in diving a little deeper into some of the details of leadership i've foun...