One thing people will warn you about when moving to Germany is that they are not big fans of credit cards. I thought that this would be a minor/annoying inconvenience as it was when I traveled to Germany on vacation, but what I didn’t realize was how truly annoying this would end up being. Before I get into details, I should probably provide some background for those who are uninitiated in the lovely process of trying to pay for things in Germany. Credit cards are rarely accepted… hell I went to IKEA and although they have the capability to do so, their official policy is not to accept credit cards.  What the Germans vastly prefer are a.) Cash or b.) German debit card a.k.a. EC/Maestro card. People will use cash for small purchases up to and including things like computers. Unforeseen Annoyance 1: Expense Reports suck even more For longer trips being able to have a digital record to track expenses, especially for smaller expenses, is nice to double check with. With everything being cash, I now need to be much more diligent with tracking what I’m spending. It also means more cash advances at ATMs which can be annoying/difficult depending on how your card is set up. Unforeseen Annoyance 2: Getting money from the USA will cost money/take time Picture this you just moved into your unfurnished apartment in Germany (which is likely the case since the vast majority are unfurnished). You’re looking around at the wires hanging from the ceiling and realize it would be nice to have some light at night. (German apartments often come without lights) You also realize that it would be nice to have a place to hang some clothes and that you would need some clothes storage (German apartments often come without any...

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The current version of CamStudio apparently is packaged with some nasty advertisement software. So to get around this, instead of downloading at: http://camstudio.org/ Download direct from source forge at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/camstudio/ If you get this error: “This application has failed to start beccause of MSVCR100.dll was not found. Re-installing the application may fix this problem.” Then install this: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=5555 Finally I always suggest getting Cam Studio’s lossless codec from the camstudio site (which links to sourceforge) http://a.fsdn.com/con/app/accelerator/button?button_size=small

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Cisco NAT/PAT (Network Address Translation)/(Port Address Translation) Types of NAT 1. Static NAT 2. Dynamic NAT 3. PAT Static NAT: Allows you to map an individual IP address from your private network (inside) to a global IP address. In the image below the laptop with IP 10.1.1.100 is being translated by the router to the global IP address of 222.31.238.15 Copyable Cisco Commands   Dynamic NAT:  <coming soon> PAT NAT:  <coming soon>            

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Text instructions to follow    

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I got back from a fairly long business trip a couple of weeks ago involving 1 week in Amman, Jordan and around 5 weeks in Abu Dhabi, UAE. During this trip I didn’t have many opportunities to run outside or play any of the sports that I usually participate in around this time such as soccer. This was mainly due to a lack of time, safety, and mostly extreme heat. When I was in UAE I would often be out on a base working in either a large warehouse type of building with minimal working or outside testing and installing equipment. During the working hours the temp would be between 105 and 118 degrees Fahrenheit. Even at night the temp wouldn’t really get below the mid 90’s. So when I worked out I was doing so at the Hotel gym which was actually fairly nice for a hotel. I tried to fit in a decent amount of workouts on the treadmill in preparation for the JP Morgan Corporate Challenge in Syracuse , an event my team had won two years earlier resulting in a free trip to Singapore for the championship race last year. I got back so close to the date of the race I only had a chance to do one what should be fairly easy run for me of around 5 miles. After I was done I was way too sore  and was surprised to see how different running on an uneven surface like a road and sidewalk was compared to a treadmill. I ended up not running again until the day of the race. When the race day finally came I was quite nervous about how I would end up doing. I was with my team doing some warmups when they came on the loudspeaker at the race and announced that due to extreme...

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Today I was laying down on the bed thinking about taking a nap and decided that I should really get in a distance run this week since I haven’t put in many miles this week and decided I would try to map out a 14 mile course. I have been running a decent number of 5k’s over the last two summers since I moved to Rochester. I hadn’t been working out much over the winter so it was really time to get in shape if I wanted to be in race condition by the time the corporate challenge hits. I ended up going out and was surprised how nice the weather was.  The run itself felt good for the majority of the distance, although I think i finally have hit a distance where I will need to put out some water on the course as I was feeling pretty dehydrated over the last couple of miles. It will be interesting to see if I can make it to the pick up football game tomorrow at 11am.

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