CryptoJ.net

My guess is as good as yours. When I look at the charts I still see bitcoin in a downtrend. I started zooming out from 1-4 hour charts to just using the daily chart to check indicators. The reason I did this is because this market changes so fast and on the craziest news. One minute things look like they are pointing towards a breakout and I start seeing all those “next week is gonna be awesome” tweets and messages on telegram, then POW! Massive sell action begins. Honestly, unless your day trading theres no point in looking for a breakout on a 5 min chart. 

Because I don’t day trade, I’d rather see what we look like on a daily basis. Right now at this moment, it doesn’t look very good, and it could likely get worse. We’ve been able to hold above 3200, but i’m not really sure that is a support level, because we haven’t been at these levels in a while. Bitcoin seems to run into resistance around that 3500 area, and honestly I’m not sure we’ll breakout anytime soon. I actually think we’re going to fall more in the next few days, but if today ends in the green, then that might change my perspective.  

If you’ve been watching the bitcoin charts anywhere, they look like this:

I’ve been trying to make sense of the mass selloff happening right now, but I can’t really put my thumb on any one item being the cause. Sure, the SEC had some rulings, and then there was that whole BCH fork, but maybe this was just another correction. I don’t know. When these things happen, I typically just sit tight and buy more of whatever coin I believe in. 

To piggyback off of that, I think it is extremely important to focus on the companies that are building something you think is actually viable. Sure, it’s fun to catch a win on a pump and dump of a sh*tcoin, but really is that investing? Is that even trading? Sounds more like gambling to me. To be honest, there are only a few tokens that I’m really putting my fiat behind, and mainly because they have actual value. By value I don’t mean dollar value (yet), but I mean real teams of intelligent people, working to solve real-world problems. 

I read charts, but I don’t really bother with trying to catch a wave based on charts alone, because to be honest, there have been too many false breakouts for me to feel comfortable making moves solely off them alone. I focus on fundamentals above everything else in this space because it’s still so new, and regulations are coming, whether you like it or not. 

Anyway, stay strong out there folks. This too shall pass. 

I think everyone in the crypto space knew at some point the regulators would start really cracking down on various aspects of it. As a speculator/participant in the United States, this is something I was well aware of. Now in late 2018, we are starting to see how it will likely play out in the future.

This past Friday, the SEC released a statement regarding their viewpoint on ICOs, Exchanges and Broker-Dealers working with digital assets. You can read the full thing here. After AirFox, Paragon, EtherDelta’s founder and more were hit with enforcement actions, I’ve seen mixed responses on social about what this means for crypto. Honestly, I think these rulings were a good thing for the space overall. I know there is a section of crypto-investors who want the entire space to be decentralized and unregulated, but that just isn’t realistic. We saw a shift late last year, when a bunch of new folks entered the space and without doing any research and were throwing money at BTC and various alt-coins because for the most part, everything was delivering solid returns. That’s what happens during a bull market. 

But the problem was many people had not even invested before in a traditional sense. So when signs of a bear market started to appear, many didn’t know what to do, and ended up losing tons of money. This left a bad taste in their mouths, and a lot of folks simply left. Not to mention the many ICOs that were being held by “companies” that ended up not being viable. Add in the bitconnects of the world and POW, you perk up the ears of regulators all over, including the big dogs like the SEC. 

I’m kind of split on this whole deal to be honest. Because a big part of me thinks that people need to start doing more research on what they are investing in, and outside of the clear scams, information is available if you’re willing to look for it. I mean, the concept of holding your keys means you are responsible for what happens to your funds. But on the other hand, I think knowing that the companies that are holding ICOs, running as exchanges, broker-dealers, etc. are following some kind of guidelines is good for the overall space. It leads to greater adoption of cryptocurrencies and digital assets, which is what we want right? 

At the end of the day, people who are just getting in need to know that the exchange they’re using is legit. They want to know that the ICO isn’t trying to dodge the scrutiny that comes with being a security. They want to know that their investment isn’t going to disappear into thin air due to some security breach. This is why regulation is needed on some level. Could you imagine E*Trade or TD Ameritrade sending an email out that all billions of accounts had been compromised due to a hack? That would be the end of them! I know crypto is still extremely new, but we need to hold ourselves to a standard just as high, because honestly, I’m tired of hearing about “silk road”, “terrorism” and “bad actors” every time someone brings up bitcoin. 

Seriously. I think about all of the technological advancements we’ve made over the years, and wonder why voting is still such a slow and annoying process. Over the past weeks, multiple claims of voter suppression have come out. Obviously there is a deep history of this in the south, but it’s 2018 now and we have the means to completely curtail it. In Georgia right now, over 53,000 voter registrations have been put ‘on hold’ because of things like typos and missing information, 1.2 million registrations have been cancelled due to the voters  not voting in several past elections, on top of the nearly 400 ballots being flat out rejected in certain counties. 

Is this voter suppression? Probably. The problem I have is that the reasons behind all of these on hold or cancelled registrations is a lack of using the tech we have available to prevent it. We can use algorithms to easily check if someone put the wrong name in, or address, or birth-date. Frankly it’s really stupid to reject someones voter registration due to the fact they are missing a hyphen in their name on their registration.

The same goes for notifying the individuals about the incorrect information. Many reports have come out saying people weren’t even notified of the errors. If you’re not notified, how can you fix them? There is ZERO excuse for there not to be some sort of text-message or email notification that goes out to people letting them know their registration needs some corrections. That should go out within a day. We get notified ASAP when something isn’t right with our tax returns, so we know it can be done.

Now when it comes down to voting, I know it’s been mixed opinions on whether or not it should be allowed online or if something like a block-chain could be used to prevent voter fraud, etc. I think more work needs to be done to have this fully implemented. Again, the tech is there, we just need to figure out how to make it all work together. In my opinion, and I’m no security expert here, but if I can enter my banking information online, tax information, etc. online, I should be able to cast a vote online. I don’t even think the biggest thing is about the actual casting of the vote. I think it’s more about the registering of a person to vote. Things need to be checked, but using a more robust version of a KYC (Know Your Customer) system could be done. People could upload documents to verify who they are. Those documents could be confirmed at the State level. And those folks who think the records of deceased people are being used, could simply require anyone who seems like they could be doing this to stop by an office to be verified. Simple. 

I think the bigger issue above everything else is the politics of it all. Like the fact in Georgia, Brian Kemp (running for Governor against Stacey Abrams) happens to be the current Secretary of State of Georgia! This guy directly monitors voter registrations! If that isn’t a conflict of interest I don’t know what is. But hey, I don’t make the rules. 

The entire system is TOO slow. I registered to vote in Texas a while ago (we moved here from Maryland this year) and I’ve received ZERO notice in the mail about anything. Luckily, I checked on the site just last night, and I was FINALLY in the freaking system. My whole point is that process should have taken max of 1 business day, or been instantaneous. The government at a State and National level needs to step it up. For real! 

Oh yeah, 

It’s difficult to do, I know. When you think about dropping your hard-earned money into something that could potentially go to zero, it can be nerve-wrecking. But look at it from a different perspective if you can. The market is not out to get you. At the same time, the market is not your friend. The market is what it is. Say it out loud a few times and you’ll start to realize why getting emotional when trades/investments don’t go your way is kind of foolish. 

I say this because I went through nearly every emotion when I got back into investing, and mainly in cryptocurrencies. Last year when my portfolio was going up, up, up, I was a different person. I had made more money in a few months than the whole year at my day job. I wasn’t doing a lot of trading, mainly value investing (which is still 90% what I do in crypto), but I felt like a WIZARD. One of my big wins was Stellar (XLM). I bought in at under .02 and just watched it take off. Did the same with Ripple (XRP), but I got out of my position too early (you live and you learn). 

Then of course January hit. Everything was just crashing through the floor for folks new to the market, and no one knew where it would stop. Because of that, I cashed out on the coins I didn’t have 100% belief in, just to be safe. Greed is what kept me in certain positions longer than I should have been, thinking things would turn around. I was studying technical analysis and it seemed like every time there was about to be a breakout, we went back down.

The anger and resentment finally set in, when I realized I left A LOT of money on the table waiting for the “bull” to come back. Sadness came next, and I saw/heard it from a lot of the folks who had gotten in months prior. Some of the horror stories I heard about people taking out second mortgages for bitcoin, or getting personal loans to buy cryptocurrency blew my mind. Why would anyone take that level of risk for an investment in such a new technology without widespread adoption?

Then it hit me; EMOTIONS WERE THE REASON! 

People saw what looked like a get-rich-quick-and-painlessly card, and played it. Many lost and even more walked away before seeing how the game truly ends. 

Now I’m not going to get into how much money I lost, because it’s pointless. I know people who lost WAY more and I lost a good deal. I also know people who lost next to nothing and were still complaining (the “I put $10 bucks in and lost $5 dollars in a day! I quit crypto!” types). In the grand scheme of things, we have to ask ourselves why we are really here. I had to do it a few times, because when things were GREEEEEEEAT(tony the tiger voice), I forgot. If you still don’t know the answer, let me tell you....

We are here because we are the pioneers of this thing. Forget about the investment side of it for a moment and think about the technology and all the good it can do out here in the world. Blockchain providing immutable records for pretty much any industry. Cryptocurrencies and tokens being used in place of fiat or for some other kind of value-based exchange. I’m here because I believe in the next 10 years my kids will be paying for things with cryptocurrency. Do I know which ones? Of course not. But I know mass adoption is coming, and that excites me more than the returns that come with being an early adopter. 

Now, with that said....I’m not just dropping my money into any old coin/token out there. Do your research!!!! And by that I don’t mean seeing which coin is trending on twitter. If you’re into ICOs DEFINITELY do your research! I had an annoying experience with one that was advertised as available to US investors and decided to do a 180 right before hitting exchanges (worked out in my favor, but that’ll be for another post). Find the companies that you believe in. With cryptocurrency, I believe it makes way more sense for most people to be value investors as opposed to hardcore speculators. Value investing led me to stellar and KIN. Speculating had me left holding a bag of dentacoin for a moment. 

And for crying out loud, If you find yourself in a bad position, don’t stay in it and be hopeful if all signs point to it going down further! Learn how to cut your losses and take a moment before jumping into something else that looks like a “sure thing”. That time in between your next buy will allow you to actually think about the moves you’re making. 

DISM & PowerShell to troubleshoot

This issue actually happened about a week ago, but I couldn’t find the draft post I started for some reason..anyway, I was spinning up another server instance (2016) and everything went well for the most part. Until I tried to add a new AD DS role to the server. ALL of my roles and features were grayed out! WTHeck man!

I went to trusty Google and surprising there weren’t many articles with this issues. I checked several forums and nothing. Until I finally came to a page where a user had a similar issue. Another user suggested the DISM tool. So I started googling further to see how it could help me out. Actually before I even loaded the DISM tool, I went into PowerShell and started looking around. The install state of all of my features/roles was “NotPresent”. 

So yeah I found the DISM command to run to enable all features and let it fly. Sure enough, all of my features were back! Alive and well! Onward to the role installation!

Hey there!

It’s been a few days (or more) since my last post, frankly because I would start writing about something new I was working on, and then stop and I had a couple drafts built out, but it looks like I might have deleted them by mistake (happens when you try writing a post half sleep from your phone). Anywhoo, some of the things I’ve been toying around with are Hyper-V, MDT and thinking about (attempting) a SCCM build. Now the extent of my SCCM skills are pretty much pushing prepackaged items out to end users, so doing a total configuration would be pretty awesome. The problem I’m running into at this point is the fact that my home lab is all configured from this laptop from which I write this. I’ve done some customizations to this macbook pro (maxed the 16gb ram), but it’s honestly reached its EOL i think. It’s the 2012 model, and I’m looking to get a PC for my next machine. Not that I don’t love mac, it’s just for what I’m trying to do I need greater freedom. And I’m just talking about from a personal PC standpoint. 

Now from a home server standpoint, I’m looking at a few different options. I definitely want a tower, the question is how big of a tower do I want. I’ve been looking on newegg, ebay, amazon and even offerup the past few days and I think I want to start with at least 32gb of ram and a couple tbs of space. I haven’t gotten into how many cores, but I’ll cross that bridge when Its closer to buying time. Anyway, my woes with this mac lab I have started like two days ago when I fired up virtualbox and my virtual adapters were gone! I figured it was some issue with the new update to VB I did, so I tried to recreate them but kept getting an error message. So I turned to my most trusted resource: Google. 

Turns out a lot of people have the issue, especially on Mac OS X High Sierra. Problem is, most of them are running into the whole “unknown developer” thing where you have to manually force your mac to let you install new software.

That wasn’t the case for me. 

After hours of googling and testing, I decided to restart my laptop and see if something would happen. VOILA! While the restart still didn’t explain where my vboxnet adapters went, upon restarting I was able to recreate them again. I was a minute or two away from moving my VMs over to Parallels (which was also acting wonky, btw). So I haven’t been able to do much with my two server environments, but I have been able to play around with Hyper-V on another laptop I have. It’s pretty darn cool, and I enjoy the interface (reminds me of VMware stuff). I spun up a couple Windows 10 instances, and did a checkpoint or two. I’ll be going through the product as time goes on. As far as learning outside of labs goes, I’ve been watching a ton of videos on Lynda. I still have my free account from my school days so I want to take full advantage. I went through a Server+ course, which was about 7 hours. Did a Windows Deployment course, some powershell stuff, and started an SCCM course. The SCCM config on the course didn’t seem so bad, but the prereqs are ridiculous! I won’t be trying that install on this setup, but when I get my new one I’ll definitely be running the 1511 with the update (1602?) 

I also stumbled across a book called “The Accidental SysAdmin” and I started reading it. It’s pretty good so far. Looks like it covers a good deal of technical as well as managerial items required to be a good sysadmin. I’ll give an update review whenever I finish it. 

Over the past weekend I've been watching Eli The Computer Guy's Windows Server 2012 video series. His videos are better than most of the IT videos I've watched on any topic, which is crazy because he has them available free on YouTube and Google Drive. After watching a couple of the series vids I thought it would be good to spin up an instance and build out a server environment on my computer to tighten my skills up.

My equipment consists of one thing: My MacBook Pro w/ 16 gb ram. To spin up the virtual machine, I used Virtualbox. I have a 90 day Parallels trial running, but honestly I've been running into issues with their latest version, so I decided on using Virtualbox for my VMs from here on out. Anyway, I grabbed an eval copy of Windows Server 2012 and installed it. So far so good. I installed the Active Directory DS role, along with DNS and DHCP. This is where I ran into my first snag.

So I was looking to keep internet on the server, and add a couple VMs to the newly created domain. But my router from Frontier kept auto turning back on DHCP, which was throwing off the scope I had configured on the domain controller. Thus, my newly created windows 10 vms weren't able to find my domain controller. While I was looking for a fix I came across a couple forum posts warning about issues with ISP routers. The recommendation was to use a host-only adapter in Virtualbox, so that's what I did. After configuring that, I had to reconfigure the DHCP scope, and the DNS IP. I set my Win 10 VMs to automatically find IPs with DHCP and manually added the DNS IP.

Success!

I was able to add them to the domain without any more problems and I got to leave my ISP router alone :) 

After adding these few VMs to the DC (and verifying their presence in Active Directory), I got to work creating some user accounts and groups. I made 5 or 6 users, 4 groups, just to mimic a VERY small office environment and got to work building a few OUs to put them in. After that, I set up a Group Policy Object that would prevent any user from accessing the Task Manager, Altering the background image, fooling around with Add/Remove Programs, using Command Prompt or accessing the registry. I tested this using one of the accounts I made. Worked well!

The next thing I decided to do was add a file share to the main DC for these “users” to access. So I set that up and allowed access to everyone (thought about removing inheritance, but I decided against it for the time being). After that wanted to test out roaming profiles, so I created another share folder and configured it for roaming profiles so that no matter where a user goes, they can access their files as if they were sitting at their local PC. I did read some things about why you shouldn’t configure this (due to caching issues, etc.), but I thought it would be cool to at least test it out in this environment. Again, this worked well. 

After that I set up another two file servers and a print server. I will continue to tinker with this setup, and more than likely spin up a similar one in Win Server 2K16. One thing is for sure, building out labs is the best way to learn!

So over the past few weeks I've been thinking about my career and the direction I'd like to take it. A combination of things came into play, including not being bored, money, work/life balance, etc. Ultimately, I decided continuing on the path towards being a full blown sys admin was the way to go.

There are a lot of things I don't have a solid handle on yet. I realized this when I was spinning up a Windows Server 2016 VM last weekend. The install went fine, and i even threw Active Directory on there w/ the DNS. The wizard is pretty awesome at letting you roll through pretty smoothly. What i realized after I had the domain set up was that I didn't have much understanding of DNS at all anymore.

I say anymore, because believe it or not, there was a time I was completely focused on networking. This was years ago and I thought that was where I wanted my career to go. Then i had got into programming, got a wife, kids, etc. Pretty much, life happened and my learning sortof got away from me.

Fast forward to now, here I am looking at the network adapter, in the ipv4 properties wondering to myself what the heck am i doing???

I realize I have to brush up on my network skills. So now I'm going all the way back to the basics and reading a book called Windows Networking Essentials. Its actually a book that covers the topics for the MTA for networking. Now i'm not going for that cert (got my eye on the MCSA Server 2016, hence the lab setup), but i'm not even halfway through and things are starting to come back to me.

Which is awesome.

One thing is for sure, I won't let my knowledge lapse like this again. My problem has always been that if i'm not working with something on a particular job, I just stop fooling around with it altogether. I'm going to make it a point to just continuously lab to push my skills forward, whether i get to use a tool in a production setting or not.

In my last sysadmin role I was pretty much given free reign to use tools to make the job easier. PowerShell was one of them. I used it from time to time, but I never really took the time to focus on what was really happening behind the scenes. Until now.

I have a decent handle on python and javascript, but the problem is I’ve never had a real need to use either of these in a production environment (outside of the one, short-lived web developer job I had). For the most part, I work in Windows environments, and most admin tasks have been done through the GUI. This has never been a problem for me, even in face-paced shops because for the most part, the IT dept has been able to control the speed things go (regardless of how fast users might want things done). But after making so many accounts in Active Directory or O365, I felt like I needed to speed things up (mainly for my own sanity). That’s when I started diving into PowerShell for the second time.

My first real experience with PowerShell was during my time as a VMware consultant at an MSP. We would go to client sites, school them on the products they had an interest in, and eventually implement and train their IT staff on them. The product we were pushing at the time was called Mirage. Mirage is a desktop image management and migration tool, and honestly it blew my mind when I first learned about it. I was so used to the good ol’ PXE boot network migration that the idea of rolling out an OS to dozens of endpoints at a time seemed impossible. Even better was the fact I did these deployments remotely from my home in the evenings. But prior to getting to that point in the migration process, a great deal of configuration and testing was required.

One of the senior consultants would write and run custom scripts in each environment to locate all endpoint devices on the network (including the make, model, OS, etc.). In addition to this, he wrote scripts for removing bloatware, installing device drivers and installing the client required for the Mirage product to even work on individual endpoints. One of my tasks prior to these evening migrations was to run all these scripts via CLI. Sometimes, things needed to be adjusted in the scripts, and I would have to load up PowerShell ISE and edit things, which by the way looked like complete gibberish at the time. I often worried I would add something incorrectly that would keep the entire script from running. This actually happened a few times (nothing like seeing paragraphs of bright red error messages minutes before a migration). I realized I needed to bite the bullet and try to learn a bit about the code I was running.

The first thing I did was watch videos. YouTube, Microsoft, Lynda. The problem was the information just wasn’t sticking the way I thought It should. This was because I wasn’t actually following along on my own PC. Once I started doing this, all of a sudden I could remember commands, and I could even do a few things on my own outside of the scripts provided to me. I even started to step my command line game up too. Problem was, I couldn’t stay focused long enough to really solidify that knowledge and it soon faded.

As soon as I got serious about cryptocurrency investing, I purchased a hardware wallet.

Why?

Because of the exchange and wallet horror stories of course.

I understand the convenience of storing your crypto in a mobile wallet (not talking about Coinbase, obviously they are on another level security-wise), but imagine if you lost your phone with the app still open? Or if you did what a good deal of people do and “screenshot” your security passphrase only to forget it when you need it most.

There are a lot of things I am careless about, but my crypto (luckily) is not one of them. This is money storage we’re talking about here after all. And because Bank of America is not yet storing cryptocurrency for customers, we have to make sure we take the proper steps to ensure we don’t lose it.

This is especially true for the folks who have a sizable portfolio of coins/tokens. I’m not sure why, but some people will just keep their crypto on the exchange after purchase. What I’m realizing is, many people new to cryptocurrencies haven’t read up on the hacks like Mt. Gox. Another thing I’m realizing is that some people treat the crypto exchanges like the stock market.

This isn’t your E*Trade account!

The good news is I think the fomo of last year has worn off for the most part, and people who DO decide to start investing in cryptocurrencies are taking precautions. But the best advice I could give anyone really serious about investing in this space, is to invest in a hardware wallet first.

Seriously.

Anyone looking to get into data analysis/data science should definitely consider signing up and running through their Python 3 primer. I taught myself python years ago using books, but forgot a good deal of the syntax since I wasn’t using it on a regular basis.

Truth be told I had a Dataquest account last year, but I didn’t do any of the work because I was wrapped up in my job at the time and didn’t have a ton of free time to do extra stuff. Anyway, two weeks ago I signed up again and MAN it has been amazing! All of the Python skills I had before came rushing back, and I honestly feel like I understand certain programming concepts even more now.

I just finished the Python blocks, and now I’m in the middle of the NumPy module lessons. Data science is fascinating to me in the sense that you can really drill down and answer questions/solve problems/make predictions based on information already out there. I also feel that with all of the false information floating around on the internet (mainly on social media sites), being about to look at real data is the best way to know what is fact and what isn’t. Right now I’m on the Data Analyst path, but after I finish these courses I plan on upgrading and jumping on the Data Science path to continue building out my skills. I also picked up a book on Statistics for Data Scientists the other day, but I decided to hold off on reading it until after I finish at least this Data Analyst study. That brings me to another point; If learning online or interactively isn’t your thing, then Dataquest won’t be an enjoyable experience for you. Their platform is literally a sort of “dive in and write code” kind of deal, so if immersion learning isn’t your thing, this won’t be either. Me personally, I like reading books and following along with examples, but this removes the extra step of setting up a new environment to work in. It’s all built into the system, even the Jupyter notebooks for projects. I dig that because I can start a lesson from home, and pick up on it at work seamlessly.