5 Oct 2000 mattbradshaw   » (Journeyer)

sorry that it has been so very long since i've last written. i'll try to keep more regular in the future. :)

what's happened lately... lets see here.

as of late, i have been experiencing the tyranny of the urgent in full force with so many little stupid things to do. school especially. i'm *not* going to miss pointless classwork when i'm shortly gone. nor numerous tests covering material that i could care less about (can you say "macroeconomics"). pretty darned frustrating as i've been unable to concentrate on growing my business. it's going to be a challenge to meet some of my self imposed deadlines. but such is life i guess.

my wife and i have recently been trying to consistently go out with this other couple and do fun stuff together. this last weekend it was the guy's (david and myself) turn to dictate what-to-do. so we had lots and lots of fun with lasertag (w/ good radiohead music as the shooting soundtrack btw), go-carting (i'm unbeatable mwhahahaha), minigolfing (very beatable here), and the like. and we topped off the evening with some killer food. i don't know how to pronounce what i had but it was tremendously tasty. i'm really looking forward to doing this again soon.

i've come to the conclusion that wikis are really cool! use them. read them. saturate yourself in them. etc. i'm advocating the use of a zope product doing wikis here at (isu) work to do internal documentation. the traditional documentation cycle is tedious and i see wikis as a fun (!), new way of doing documentation here. i'm planning on setting this up before the end of the week. i want to augment our wiki a bit though - user authentication, tighter versioning, the capability to deny anonymous writes, etc. hopefully something already exists along these lines but if not i don't see why i couldn't do this all quick-like.

in other news i've learned that standards bodies are funky. very funky indeed.

while in des moines at my father in law's, i set up (and am still in the process of setting up <grrr>) a little linux based firewall protecting his internal network from the big and nasty internet coming out of his cable modem. we're using old (486ish) hardware with an isa bus so i'm a bit concerned about performance hits. i didn't get any metrics on the kind of speed he's getting out of his cable modem but i suspect it's not fast enough to be hindered by a slow firewall. if he says its slow i'll take a look at getting him some better hardware for the firewall. but anyway, this little project was completely painFULL. went thru 2 cdrom drives and both were damaged. so no easy distro install for me... :( was curious about the linux router project so i finally gave it a whirl. cool, linux w/ needed tools all on a floppy or two. no install needed. all smiles. doh. it runs 2.0.x kernel with ipfw. i want my ipchains!!! don't want to learn an obsolete tool if i don't have to. ok... found materhorn (modified lrp) with 2.2 (ipchains... ahh). its working after a lot of tweaking to get the kernel to like his older hardware. but now i find out that his @home provider changes to use dhcp (@home had static ips before???). curses! have to fit that (dhcp support) on a fregin tiny floppy too. arggghhh... to be continued.

in sysadmin work, i've been trying to figure out how to put some of the high availability stuff i learned a while back to use in other services such as our print servers, etc. sometimes i feel that its all academic for us as we'll hardly ever need it. at least its decently fun to do.

been working on getting some good (good == somebody besides me making them) logos. i finally think i've come across the winner. and that's good as the website needs to go live SOON (before nov 1).

speaking of websites, at (isu) work we just hired a pretty cool web person. seems like a very nice and knowledgable lady. we really needed to refill that position. this should take some stress off of our backs.

btw, thanks lilo for the information on file delta stuff that you threw up in your recent diary entry. very good stuff that i wouldn't have come across easily otherwise. thanks again.

been reading david kahn's the codebreakers. its a fun read. also in the history side of things, i just now noticed that i got the history channel on cable. this very good veg-on-the-couch-when-i'm-too-tired-to-think material. better than, say, oprah. ;)

i'm sure there's been a lot more that went on but i forgot it all.

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