Yesterday was a whirlwind of packing and travel, even though I’d known about the trip for a full three weeks. My sister (stunning, amazing, and single most giving person I’ve ever met) is giving a kidney (her left) to our Uncle (really our Mom’s cousin-in-law). He has spent the last 5 years on Dialysis, and finally found a match in my little sister.

Today was a mostly full day of tests at the Texas Transplant Institute, for both my uncle and my sister, that ended in all ‘”this is good news” (only holdup is waiting for the uncle to drop another 10-20 pounds) and “we’ll let you know what we find”. We went on a boat tour in downtown to wind down, post-anticipation.

Tomorrow morning is another 5 or 6 hours at the hospital, then we fly back to Michigan in the afternoon. Then more waiting. Always the waiting. But we’re so close. So. Very. Close.

Early last week, I presented at cPanel’s Automation Bootcamp 2011. The title of my talk was ‘PCI Compliance: It’s about to get real.” Since neither cPanel nor I recorded the presentation (and the EiC over at  the Whir mentioned having a hard time trying to keep up), I figured I’d recap it here. If you just want the slides from the presentation, you can get those here.

PCI (DSS) Compliance for e-Commerce Sites

As much as people love to hate PCI Compliance (or more specifically, the scanners), it is a necessary evil. In an industry-wide race to the bottom, the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI-SSC) had to implement a standard to which they could hold everyone accountable, and by which they would judge the security of consumer data, in all payment card transactions.

In 2006, the PCI-SSC got together and composed a standard that everyone in the Payment Card Industry (everyone who accepts payment cards, from brick and mortar stores to e-commerce), which they called the Data Security Standard. They wanted to help streamline an increasingly complex process (getting approved to process credit cards through your own in-house-developed payment application), but without compromising the security of consumer data. While the importance and relevance of PCI DSS can be overinflated, it is just as necessary as any other standard. Treat it like a list of regulations to follow, use common sense, and you should be fine.

To help you along, I have outlined much of what’s included in the PCI-DSS, and what you can do to help secure your server, and help your server pass its scan.

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Two things you need to know, to understand #MismatchedMonday

#1: I am a simple creature.

#2: I don’t wear white socks.*

Long sock season: Labor day to Memorial Day

With those established, it shouldn’t seem like too much of a leap to understand why I do a thing every Monday that I call #MisMatchedMonday.

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I found out on Wednesday that the position I’m in at LW (Quality Control) is being dissolved, so I was given a few choices: Support Supervisor, Monitoring Tech, and Support Tech. After lots of debate and hemming and hawing, it looks like I’m gonna do some support for a while. I’m actually kind of excited, which will probably make many of you think I’m crazy. A month or so ago I came in on a Saturday night, and spent a good 6 hours just doing tickets. It was the most fun I’d had at my job in quite a while. I miss the daily challenge and the weird stuff. I still have a lot of technical knowledge, but it’s slipped quite a bit from where I was when I stopped doing Monitoring full time (you know, three years ago).

I’ll have another week to tie up my loose ends in this spot, and then it’s back to the phones and helpdesk. I’m sure I’ll tire of it shortly, but I welcome the challenges.

Ani suggested we set up a cage match for the department heads, and let them fight over who gets me. Think we could make some money on that one?

So, what started as a post about how companies encourage and welcome women into their company has become a pretty good discussion about the actual barriers that women face entering any kind of strongly tech field.

Double the women = way cooler.

Comments are wide open on this one. What do you guys think?

I’ve got a new project going. For this project I wanted to be able to have a few different sections of the site act like different sites, and I wanted to be able to share administration with many people of varying admining abilities. From what I’d read about WordPress Multisite, I figured it was going to be the easiest way to do it.

I wasn’t entirely wrong, but it sure wasn’t as easy as I’d expected it to be. Mostly for two small reasons.

The setup

I decided I wanted to try some local development for this project, on my laptop. A google search revealed: the easiest way I found was using a piece of software called MAMP. It installs PHPmyAdmin, MySQL, and Apache, and has an easy interface to help you set everything up.

I followed these directions in order to install WordPress on my laptop, and started on these in order to get MultiSite set up. I got to step five before I encountered my first error.

The error

The second part of Step 5 is to add the lines that the network installation gives you to the wp-config.php. I did that, added the .htaccess lines. I then went back to my install to log in, and was faced with the giant error:

After a lot of troubleshooting and attempting to duplicate the error on my VPS, I figured out that WordPress Multisite is completely incompatible with InnoDB, and my MAMP install was set InnoDB by default.

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Today one of my very favorite people is leaving the company that we have worked for, fought for, sweat for, cried and sacrificed for together. I’ve been here 4.5 years. He’s been here about a year longer than me.

Most techs don’t deal well with emotions. The longer I’m in this industry, the more I’m convinced that a lot of us are boarder-line alcoholics because we both don’t know how to deal with our stress levels, and don’t know how to deal with our emotions. (That’s probably true for a lot of professions, but this one I know for sure.) And my eyes are wet. So I’m gonna write it out.

Jay was an amazing mentor when I first hired in. I knew almost nothing about Linux (which is crazy to think about). All I had was customer service, and even that waned when I got so frustrated at not knowing what I needed to know. Jay took very good care of me in those first few months. He talked me through fixing so much, and fed me information as quickly as I could gobble it up. … and he wasn’t even in training yet.

As he and I both worked up through the ranks, and worked together to make this company better than it thought it could be, we started taking trips to get coffee. It was a small thing, but it ended up being one of the defining moments of our weeks: coffee together. We bitched, we problem solved, we discussed, we congratulated.

More than that, though, we supported. If there was a question to which I didn’t have an answer, Jay was my man.

I have been touched by Jay’s kindness, his genuine-ness, and his enthusiasm. Even though he and I do not interact as much as we did when we were in the same building, I am scared that without him in my day-to-day life I will fall short of what I can achieve. Now that he’s moving on to bigger and better things, I’m wondering how many people will fall short because he’s not around as much.

To avoid it negatively affecting people, I am going to hold myself to a higher standard: I will be as kind, genuine, and enthusiastic as Jay has always been to me, to everyone I encounter every day.

<3 you Jay. Let’s coffee soon.

If you follow me on Twitter, you know that my nephew is absolutely the cutest baby on the planet, and that I’m not shy about telling you that.

DJ (David James) or deeje.

…okay fine. I may be a bit biased. But he’s still pretty damn cute. Last night was the first night he’s stayed with me. He was awesome, as expected. In November (at ~2 months old) he took his first family road trip with us to Texas. He only fussed the entire time was to tell us something was wrong. Wet, hungry, hot. Other than that he would just hang out, sleep, watch the sky go by, or play with his ma. (more…)

From Ariel, noted to make later.

Cake
1 18.25 oz pkg yellow cake mix
1 pkg vanilla pudding mix
4 eggs
1.5 C strawberry mix

for the strawberry mix
1 pkg frozen strawberries, thawed
.75 C water
Put this through the blender

For the glaze:
the rest of the strawberry mix
1C sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla

mix cake ingredients, pour into bundt pan prepped with Pam for baking. Bake at 325 for an hour. While that’s baking, cook the glaze on medium until reduced, the entire hour (gentle boil for the last 5 minutes).

Stab cake repeatedly once out of the oven with a skewer. Spoon on the warm glaze. Enjoy!

7:39:25 PM Ariel: It’s simple, and with no oil, relatively healthy too
7:39:28 PM me: So simple, and so awesome.
7:40:26 PM Ariel: I took a rum cake recipe I had, and just played with it until it worked
7:40:57 PM me: Can you do essentially the same thing with all fruits for the glaze?
7:41:03 PM Ariel: As one of my friends is allergic to alcohol, and as such I had to figure out something to do for her birthday that’d be awesome
7:41:23 PM Ariel: Yep. Normally I use peaches, but you could probably try cherries too, or raspberries
7:42:14 PM me: my mom has a thing for cherries. the boyfriend has a thing for mangos. Both of those came to mind. :D
7:42:42 PM Ariel: *nods* Mango would probably work quite well
7:43:06 PM me: that’s what I’m thinking.
8:15:20 PM Ariel: Apple and pear, probably not. It has to be a more liquidy fruit, although if spiked with apple cider it might work
8:16:11 PM me: That makes sense. I was thinking of replacing the water with mango juice, too, with the mango idea.
8:16:32 PM Ariel: *nods* Yep. Bolthouse farms mango lemonade maybe?
8:16:44 PM me: oooooh, that’s a good idea!
8:16:57 PM Ariel: I could drink that stuff by the gallon :D

Next week the boyfriend and I are taking a trip to Kansas City, MO for a concert. We’re stopping Thursday on Saint Louis for a night with my Aunt Lisa and her awesome husband. I’m stoked. I’ve been craving a road trip, and the boyfriend is stoked because we’re going to see his very favorite musician (on his birthday).

This is what our trip will look like (so far).  This week Zeus gets an oil change. And a good deep cleaning.