13 steps

There, I’ve said it. Out loud, in black and white, there’s no denying it anymore. I know looking down on the 2 is the hip thing to do on blogs these days. You only need to look at some of the blogs on Technorati’s top 100 to see plenty of posts and countless comments praising the latest Web 2.0 fad (Newsvine anyone) and saying it’ll bury Slashdot. Well guess what… it’s not going to happen.
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This entry could be called: What I’m currently listening to / What has been my main musical companion while commuting this week / What best describes my mood / How I love Diary of Dreams.
So take your pick while I crank up the volume for ‘Haus der Stille’.

Here’s a bunch of stuff on my list I hope to get around to sooner (or later). I’m noting it down here because half the stuff isn’t written down anywhere and just pops up randomly when I’m laying in bed and should be getting some sleep.
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My main comp is working flawlessly again. It went wonky after I added RAM a month ago or so, black screen and everything. After getting it back to work eventually it’s been unstable eversince. So yesterday I decided to take the plunge and reinstall… no boot option for cd. Big aha moment seeing as I know my Asus board (as any Asus board I’ve encountered) is rather picky about which drives it accepts with what cables and what settings. And seeing as I have 10+ drives in there… some quick rearranging, moving some stuff around to the onboard ‘raid’ controller, some to the standard IDE and some to my pci IDE controller and tadaaa, there was the boot option again. But… no need to reinstall XP anymore, it’s been running sjweetly for 18 hours or so with none of the problems I’d been having. So yay!

It’s a big load off my back as any problems with that system would have priority over some other plans, like getting a server up and running on a dedicated ADSL line to host the site myself. So now I can wait for the ADSL connection (ordered last week) and look around for a server. Hopefully I’ll be able to find a good one before the site crashes and burns on the current shared hosting account given the increasing amount of traffic over the last couple of months. :)
Interesting times.

as the minutes tick away.
Bring on the 2006 freshness, enough has been said about 2005 already.

Training’s over, and most of it was quite interesting, particularly the Exchange 2003 stuff. I have to admit there’s quite a bit of functionality hidden away in there, but I still wouldn’t touch it with a ten foot pole for my personal mail server. It’s just too damn wobbly and some of the more interesting features (RPC over http for example) feel like they were last minute afterthoughts that were added in the most clunky way possible. Does it work; yes. Would anyone with half a brain implement a feature that requires poking in the registry and making obscure keys that bind/open over a dozen ports in a production environment; hell no.

So after about 9 or 10 courses I’m done for the year, and I must say it’s been educational indeed. I learned a lot about Linux’ weaknesses I didn’t know and a lot about Windows’ strengths I was unfamiliar with, leaving me more in the middle when it comes to ‘taking sides’. I’ve always preferred to look for the right tool for the job instead of playing OS wars. But some of the stereotypes are just too true, when you look at the stuff we did during all the Novell Suse CLP trainings almost everything always worked and at the end of each course all servers were still running silky smooth. In contrast during some of the MCSA courses we all failed to get something working and we were lucky if half the machines were still running as intended by the end of the course… that does say something.

A week of Exchange training awaits. Joy… not. I still have to pack, crashing at C’s will inject teh fun into a week of struggling with software I don’t really want to use to begin with, for obvious reasons. Last training only 1 comp running 2003 was still running as intended after 4 days. That’s bad, even the instructor’s machine was borked.

The past few days have been entertaining, an evening with Bres, an evening with Angel and afterwards drinking with other peeps, yesterday Corvo’s birthday.

To infinity, and beyond!

A discussion here got me thinking about why it rubbed me the wrong way. Aside from the fact that I think it’s a Bad Thing for Mint to have people charge money for peppers because it will seriously limit the appeal of Mint I think my main beef is not with the guy charging for a plugin, it’s a free world, do what you want. No, I don’t like the reasoning of some of the people commenting.
The way I see it is this; either you code something because you have a use for it, because you want to flex your coding muscles simply because you can. Or, you do it because you want to earn money. Black or white, at least in this case where there’s no other way to get said plugin.
And I’ll be damned if I fork over any money to someone for a small subset of a program which is basically just a small bit of eyecandy. To me that’s something totally different than for example this one, where someone creates something because he gets a kick out of it, distributes it for free (and under an open license, meaning you’re free to modify and redistribute the code) and just put up a small donation notice asking for a few bucks to buy a beer (or whatever) if you like what he made.
Maybe I’m anal about it, but I’d rather hand over a few bucks to the second guy than the first, and I hope many people will follow suit.

After a few months of still rather warm weather winter has finally started here as well, causing huge traffic jams on friday with some people being stuck in traffic for 12 hours or more. Luckily I had no problems whatsoever although I am slightly worried if this weather continues seeing as I have 7 days of training up north, starting on the 5th.
It does make for pretty pictures though.

I had a loooot of ideas for this year, most of which bombed for one reason or another, either work or social life related. Things are starting to smooth out a bit (he said while crossing his fingers) so it’s time to start looking forward to next year. There are a lot of thing I’d like to do or change, some lighthearted, some more serious.
Several of the things I’m looking forward to;
- Doing a colab with Moggy for a new design
- Poking the site and making it more me again, which has already started, still no idea where it’s all going to lead but it’ll be a fun ride nonetheless. Actually I have several ideas but I’ll save those for another post.
- Begging, borrowing or stealing a Mac laptop.
- Vacation! That exploded in my face big time this year, still feeling rather meh about not having been able to kick back and chill.
Which also lead to the following brainfart;

The plan (insert drumroll) is to go off for a weekend each month next year to a different country in Europe and just chill, party, cruise, enjoy the scenery or whatever. My partner in crime as always is CommSie, and it’s something I’m very much looking forward to. It doesn’t have to be the thrill of a lifetime each and every time but just the thought of getting away from everything for a weekend a month seems so damn… relaxing.

So, does anyone have any suggestions regarding where we could go and what we could do there?