I just got asked this, and my response ended up so involved that I decided to make a post out of it so I can point people to it and not have to retype it later.
“I’m thinking of starting a wine cellar, what wine should I buy a case of to start?”
You’re asking a Virgo, who lives in wine country, what wine to buy for long term storage and all the variables that come with such a choice?! Way to open a can of worms!! You’d better sit down….
Amazing… it’s almost November!
The months have certainly just been flying by and no wonder, I’ve just been grinding away so much that the days just blend together.
At the moment I just finished getting my VPS setup to host git repositories. I’m real close to switching our domain over to Google Apps. I have a test Icinga (a fork of the network moitoring program Nagios) installation up and running. I’m doing some final testing on changes I made to my ticket system and will soon be able to give Principals a view into the activities at their school and Superintendents a view of the activities for their whole district. My remote support solution just needs a few more tweaks and will be done. And I’m lining up a job to install one, possibly two, massive Linux servers for a local High School for a project that I was recommended for by the county. Which is on top of another server that I’m hoping to build at one of our regular clients.
Coming up soon is some hosting consolidation, where I’ll be moving our website and DNS over to my VPS as well so we can shave some expenses and gain some greater flexibility at the same time.
So if you throw in all of my usual running around putting out fires you can see what I mean by grinding away.
The good news is at this rate, it will be no time until December and I have some plans for that month that it seems I’ve been waiting forever for.
The seasonal change is upon us. Things are cooling down, leaves are changing, we had an early rain and there was a great day during the week with some of the nicest photographer’s light that I’ve seen in a while. It’s far too flat and sunny during summer.
Unfortunately, I was a bit busy fixing a Superintendant’s computer to go running off into the hills, but there will be other chances soon.
In the mean time, I’ll be keeping a close watch on the forecast.
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I know the timing on my postings have been a bit all over the place lately and I apologize. The trouble I have is that I start to launch into a lengthy soliloquy that ends up taking far more time than I have at the time. Then, by the time I get back around to it, either the original fiery passion that motivated me in the first place has settled down or I realize that it’s far more political and/or alienating than would be appropriate so I drop the idea.
With any luck, I’ll get back into a comfortable groove soon. In the mean time, thanks for bearing with me.
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The drawback to having an iPhone is that it doesn’t play well with anything but the horrid excuse for an application called iTunes. It also just so happens that iTunes only plays well in OSX or Windows and since I use Linux, that means I need to keep a virtual machine of XP lying aroud.
Since I’m on a development line, my VM has been non-operative for the past month or so due to a bug, which means I’ve had no chance to go into Windows. (A blessing in disuise really.)
Now it seems the bug has finally been fixed and I can actually use my mouse in the VM again. So I’ll finally get to sync my latest changes to my song ratings and upload a few more tunes.
Rumor has it MediaMonkey can play nice with the iPhone 3g, so I’m going to have to put my list of things to check out. If it does, and they have either a Linux version or it plays nice with Wine I will be ecstatic.
Of course, I’ll still keep the VM of XP around even if it does. It’s handy to be able to peek into the other world for things every now and again.
We have a “spare” desktop that we primarily use as a system for guests and as a burning station when we don’t want to create coasters of costly media because we did something silly like actually use the computer while creating a disk and caused a buffer underrun as a result. (Not to mention, my laptop’s optical drive is acting all wonky and needs to be replaced) The system dual boots XP and Debian (w/KDE 3.5) at the moment. But Debian is not friendly enough for the Better 3/4ths tastes.
I figure one of the better tests I could do for finding out how ready KDE 4.3 is for the desktop is to load it on this system and let the Better 3/4ths have at it. So my plan for today is to blast that system over as soon as I burn the ISO of the latest release of Karmic on it.
Besides, it will be a nice break from programming a Google Apps Provisioning application that I’m doing as a prototype/proof of concept.
[EDIT: I installed Karmic on it and it seems to be running well. Karmic is now in Beta and is scheduled for official release at the end of the month.]
So it seems that the school in question, that I mentioned in my last post, is still experiencing some rough and troubled waters. As it turns out, instead if implimenting all of our past recommendations, which were designed as an inter-related plan, they chose to cherry pick a few and left the rest alone.
To make a car analogy… they originally came to us because their car was pulling to one side and making a bunch of noise. We gave them the plans to fix it, but in only doing a few of the things they needed to do, it’s now lurching and the wheel is about to fall off. Things changed, but not necessarily for the better and it’s obvious that there is still something seriously broken.
By calling us in again, I think they have realized that they need more than just a set of instructions, an encouraging pat on the back and their own self guidance to make any kind of headway. They’re neither equipped nor capable of meeting the challenges they are facing in their current state. Especially since their internal politicing is one giant Gordian knot that has everything and everyone bound up. (Did I mention it’s a private Catholic school?)
We still have to hash out all of the details, but it’s looking like I’ll get to put my manager/director hat back on for awhile as I take a more hands on approach in order to put their IT department back on track.
Good thing I enjoy a challenge.
I’m having a meeting tomorrow with a client at a private school that we’ve done work for in the past. From the sounds of what they would like to discuss and from what a little birdie told me, we are likely to be picking up some regular work from them going forward.
Of course, I’ll only really know for sure once we meet, so I’ll have to update with more details tomorrow.
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Here’s an oddity for you that I was just talking about with the Better 3/4ths. When I was growing up and caught the flu, sometimes the only thing that I could keep down was Ginger Ale. Now, many years later, if I drink it when I’m feeling perfectly fine, I’ll get that blah sick feeling.
I know it’s completely in my head, but Ginger Ale is so closely associated with feelings of nausea that it actually can cause it for me. At the same time, when I’m actually sick and curled up in a little ball of misery, it’s the one and only thing that I can turn to with any sort of confidence and it actually makes me feel better. Weird eh?
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I’m still hacking away at getting remote support setup. The idea is to have it so that someone who needs assistance can click a link, either on a web lage or sent via email, and they they then run a little program that will give me access to their desktop temporarily.
My current stumbling blocks are that the solution I’m looking at doesn’t have the server portion available for Linux (which is what I’m running on my VPS) and I’m not especially clear on whether it will work on Linux desktops or not either (Yet I can’t test that part until I at least get it up and running server side).
I have the client software pretty much ready to go though, so as soon as I have time to play with it some more, I’ll try to hack a solution on the server side and I hope to at least be able to offer it to those running Windows shortly thereafter.
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