journaling: enabled

… trying to be more regular about posting.  :D  I’ve corrected the comments form issue.  I like the way this theme looks, but I’m not a big fan of how it handles fonts (default is serif fonts in very small sizes … I think the designer must have 40/20 vision or something like that).  Anyway, I’m sure it will continue to be tweaked.

I pulled the feed out of facebook this evening because I’m not sure I’m comfortable with it sucking in all my posts and keeping them.  Not that I want to hide them from my facebook friends … I’d just far rather Facebook didn’t suck the content in for its own.

Two days of work done this week already.  It’s flying by.  Monday started out like a “Monday” … and not in a good way.  A couple of little crises to deal with at work but nothing that couldn’t be handled.  Today was a day full of meetings.  I basically spent 5 hrs in meetings today.  Thankfully my day started out really productive so it wasn’t a loss.  Tomorrow I don’t have a lot going on so hopefully will be able to get more documentation done for our Active Directory project as well as make some progress on building our web sandbox.

On the home front, I had hoped to do some updates on the church website but the Internet connection was being ornery, so I punted that for the evening.  I think I need to get someone out here to figure out if it’s a cable or our connection or what.  It’s been pretty flakey since mid-August.  They (BTI) have replaced some equipment on their end but it still flakes out a little now and then.  Tomorrow I need to call up the hosting company for the church website and talk down the price.  We’re currently paying about $30/month for hosting … but new people can sign up for a better plan for $8.95/month.  Saving the church money would be good.  Speaking of church, I’m also researching video recording equipment for church services.  I keep waffling back and forth about what route to go though.

I decided today that it has really been too long since I’ve gotten together with Rich.  We need to catch up on what’s going on in our lives and “talk shop”.  I also need to get him over to the house to see if he can help me out with my FreeBSD booting problem … it boots, but it needs some geeky assistance to do so since I did some hard drive swapping.

I’ve not been sleeping well lately. I know part of it is due to fighting a cold and being a little congested, but I think a large part of it is stress. Some of the stress is work-induced and some is from home. I’m meeting with my boss on Friday to talk about how I can better manage the work-related stress. I think part of it is I need to get back into the habit of leaving work at work. I used to be pretty good at it but haven’t done so well lately. I think it would help if I didn’t use my work laptop at home so much. Another part is simply juggling some of the more recent challenges that have come up. One of those challenges is combatting phishing emails. It’s a serious security issue, but is very difficult to deal with programatically. It would be lovely to be able to whack some people upside the head with a cluebat for giving out their username and password because someone has told them that if they don’t, their email will go away. Another part of my stress is here at home. Finances are tight, in part due to Liz not getting called as much for substitute teaching jobs. I know she’s frustrated by it too. Hopefully things will be picking up soon as some of the cold bugs get going.

I had another thought on last night. I believe that some people have failed to acknowledge our nation’s place in the world. I believe that for many years we’ve often taken the approach of an older brother who knows better than everyone else what needs to be done and doesn’t believe anyone else can do it right. I don’t think many of us take a look at our country from the outside. We need to acknowledge that the world is a very different place than it was 25 years ago. We can’t pick and choose what we believe to be different but need to acknowledge the whole picture. It *does* matter what other people, other nations think.

On a different note, this past weekend I took our church website in a new direction. Two years ago I tried out a couple of content management systems and decided I didn’t like them, so I wrote my own, albeit rudimentary. Last week I re-visited the issue and decided that at least one product had improved enough that it could be adapted to fit our needs. So, our church website is being rebuilt on the Joomla platform. I’m pretty happy with how it’s turning out and I’m hearing that our members are happy about it as well.

Well, that’s all for now… I’m going to relax and play a game with my wife before heading to bed. Hopefully our daughter decides to actually go to sleep before too much longer.

Today started way too early (5:20). Was hoping to get a decent nap in today but had nappus interruptus after about 1/2 an hour …. and a power nap wasn’t going to cut it today. It’s now 11:15pm. The child has been very frustrating today. If tonight doesn’t go well, I’m probably going to be very groucny (even more so than I am now). Thank God that my work experience has given me a fair amount of patience.

Most of today and yesterday (a day off) was spent producing a DVD of our church Christmas program. Yesterday was editing, today was making DVDs … I had about 50 requests. While writing DVDs I poked at drupal a little bit as a possibility for the church website. Last year I spent Thanksgiving break re-writing the website because I wasn’t happy with any of the CMS packages that were available and I wanted other people to be able to contribute content. Now the site has been online that way a little over a year and I have yet to have another person post something. So much for that effort. So now I’m thinking it may be useful to have a forum, but I don’t want to write a module for one myself.

Work has been hectic. We’re gearing up to start moving off one of our major file servers to a new file system that’s WebDAV-based (Xythos Digital Locker). That will involve moving about 700GB worth of files for at least 7000 people. We’re running into deadline crunch time (needs to be completed by start of Spring term) so I haven’t been following up on the lower priority tasks that are part of the project.

Well, the daughter appears to be sleeping now so I’m going to go try and do the same.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted (just over a month I guess). Work has been challenging. I still need to put the finishing touches on my project dealing with our task management software, namely finish writing up a doc or two clarifying some usage elements.

I’m in the thick of another project relating to email. We use squirrelmail for webmail at work and I’ve got the lovely task of upgrading it to a current version (= one we can actually find compatible plugins for and actually supports sessions without hacks). As part of the upgrade we’re moving this application to its own load-balanced pair of servers, which should greatly help performance. One of the changes we made to make load-balancing easier was to move preferences and addressbooks to LDAP. I didn’t think this would be as much work as it has turned out to be. I’ve probably spent a total of 25-30 hours on the addressbook conversion alone. There will be more work on this project this weekend, since other staff have the responsibility of getting me a second server and getting load-balancing working.

On the home front, Liz is definitely starting to look pregnant. This makes me happy. It’s hard to describe the sort of happiness that this part of our lives brings to me. She’s really looking forward to seeing me hold our child (we aren’t going to find out gender ahead of time). She claims I like to hold the Peaches in my arm to practice. Maybe that’s true.

A few weeks ago I got to give the gig NIC in the MythTV box a workout and transferred some video to my G5 for editing. I managed somewhere around 330 Mbps. W00t! And that’s using Cat5e cable. Though I don’t expect using Cat6 would offer much improvement, since I’m probably approaching the limits of what the disks will do. This does mean I’ll probably end up doing network jacks with Cat5e rather than Cat6. Not sure when I’ll start that, but I expect to do it before the baby arrives since it’s been recommended that we put a TV jack in the nursery and I’d like to put in a network jack at the same time.

Well, I think it’s time for bed. This post was brought to you by an army of millipedes and the letter Zzzzzzzzzzzz…….

Sorry updates have been sparse of late. Don’t really have much reason for it. This past weekend Liz and I attended a wedding down in Iowa. The bride was so happy she looked about ready to explode … and would turn into a big cloud of happy confetti. On the way back we got to see the trees that were downed near Le Seuer on Hwy 169. Pretty serious stuff.

Monday night Liz and I had a nice “date” at home. We finally watched Pearl Harbor together (the one with Ben Affleck in case anybody is wondering). It’s the first time I’ve seen the movie since I bought it a few years back. I really enjoyed it. Listened to the soundtrack on the way into work this morning (yesterday’s music was Celine Dion!!).

Today at work started off fairly reasonably. One of the projects I’ve been working on is getting a Smartboard Sympodium ready to go for one of the distance education rooms. That took a fair amount of time this morning but I think it’s pretty much done. This afternoon I helped a co-worker set up a classroom computer with projector in the photography lab in KFA.

At 3 o’clock I had a meeting that pretty much started the downhill slide for the day. I got reminded why I detest Windows … or at least the security issues that go with it. We’re rolling out some wireless access on campus using Cisco Clean Access. We’re requiring that Windows users have up-to-date anti-virus software and that their Windows patches be up-to-date. So I think a lot of our support load is going to fall into the arena of getting people’s computers up-to-snuff … but we have a policy that we don’t work on personal computers. We didn’t get details ironed out today so I get to work on that some more tomorrow. Yay. Two hours of meetings plus who knows how much time planning.

Tonight at the end of the day I had scheduled an upgrade for our lab software license server software. This went pretty well when I did it on our test servers but of course not-so-well in production. It took me over 90 minutes to get the new software running to the point where I could connect to it with the administrator’s “console”. After that, I couldn’t get it the lab clients to connect. In the end I ended up reverting back to the old version and will have to try again later. I’m thinking we’ll eventually run this on a Windows server much as I hate the idea … simply because the Linux version seems rather hard to deal with (kill -9 should not be the “recommended” way to shut down the server daemon.)

Anyway … bedtime for me. *yawn*

How long does my setup at work take to crunch 356,771,740 lines of samba logs and create a database of login/logouts? Hopefully I’ll know tomorrow.

Found a story about this on CNN. Wow … the memories. Not that i generally dance though. I think that guy is *very* comfortable with himself (of course you probably have to be to be a comedian).
Life has been pretty busy lately. I’ve had a few housecalls to do recently. Work has been going pretty well, though I was kinda stuck doing paperwork-type stuff earlier this week. I finally got enough done to dig back into script coding late this afternoon. Yay. Got to meet with my new boss on Tuesday and that was pretty good. It’s nice to see an administrative type who’s as enthusiastic about our work as we are (or at least some of us are).
Just a reminder to those in LJ land … we’re having a housewarming party this weekend and are interested in having attendees.

Well, I found out tonight how long it takes me currently to mow my entire lawn … about 3 hours. Ouch. At least I’m not doing it with a push mower. Right now there are a *lot* of dandelions … almost seems like more dandelions than grass. Anyway, the dandelions don’t bother me so much as the fact that the ground is as smooth to drive over as a hay field (which makes sense since it was a hay field before they put the house here) … meaning not very.

Work was interesting today. We have a new CIO now. This is the first of many changes that are going to come about in the next year. While I don’t mind change, hopefully it’s not an overwhelming amount of work. I just need to keep in mind that in the end this should all be worthwhile. Hopefully it will result in a more positive spirit in our department.

I went for a run this morning … didn’t go particularly far… just up to the county road north of here … so I think maybe 3/4 mile each way. It made it very clear that I’m not in the shape I’d like to be, but I think it could have been worse. My goal is to start doing it 2-3 times per week. Maybe if I’m lucky I’ll get some company (even if she just rides bike).

Well, time for food.