Spring In Minnesota
I mentioned in a post last week while I was in Orlando that it was snowing back home! Well, guess what – I had that pleasure this morning driving into work.
Snapped a quick cameraphone pic before going inside the office.
A Great Evening
You know, it shouldn’t surprise a person but I guess it did me. As any busy family, we don’t spend enough time together, and when you do, you realize just how fun it really is.
Brianna and I spent the better part of the afternoon and evening yesterday just doing fun stuff. We went to the park, baked some pastries and a pie, and just had time to talk. She got to run around and have a picnic, then later help make dinner (stir fry, a favorite of her’s).
It was one of the most enjoyable afternoons I’ve had in years. This is what we toil for, this is what family life used to be every day – not just a rare outtake of life. When I take a step back and look at it, I can’t believe we’ve allowed other entities (work) to overtake simple life experiences. It’s a shame, and something I vowed to myself today to change. Radically.
The time passes by too quickly to be taken up by stressful environments of which one can not change.
Winter in Minnesota – Snowday!
Well, finally in March we get one of our substantial snow storms! One storm last week dumped anywhere from 8″ on the low side to a whopping 30″ in one town in the southwest part of the state! We got around 10″ here at home.
Today and tomorrow, we’re supposed to get another potential 12″, so I had planned to work from home today. Not a bad deal – I can usually get more done here than in the office because of not being interrupted all the time.
So yes, we’re finally getting the snow we should have started the winter with back in November. Oh well, I’ll still not get a chance to get the sled out, but its just nice to see it look like winter around here rather than a brown, patchy white mess.
Rebirth of the home network?
As a true tech geek, I’ve had a home network since the early 90s, in one form or another. Over the last 18 mos. though, I’ve whittled it down to one main wired desktop (to host Orb, Avvenu, LogMeIn, Emoze, and be the main media storage location), and three wireless laptops.
In previous revisions, I’ve had as many as 6 servers, performing tasks like email (Exchange), systems management (SMS), antivirus (Symantec), web (IIS), another web server (LAMP), SharePoint, Active Directory, DNS/DHCP, and streaming media. The time it took to manage, update, patch, and monitor all these systems was enormous – with little value back to me. The learning experiences were great – I was able to try things that I couldn’t do at work (until we built a full R&D environment).
Finally I got tired of managing all these systems and moved many items to the ‘net. My web sites are on professionally managed hosting services, email is hosted by GMail (with a hosted Exchange account to push email to my MDA), pictures are on either Flickr or XDrive (depending on my mood), and video is on YouTube.
I still have that one machine that allows me to remotely connect, access high-quality media via Orb, and share files that I have on my HDD via Avvenu. All my needs are met by this configuration.
But I find I still have one need. To explore software that I find interesting.
So I believe that it is time to resurrect a more advanced home setup for this purpose – and it’ll be virutalized. I’m going to be adding a powerful system designed simply to be a virtual host for other servers. A dual or quad core Intel based system with about 1TB of disk and 4GB RAM will do the trick.
The purpose here is to simply be able to host things like SharePoint 2007 and see how they interact with Exchange 2007 and Conferencing software. Other items will be Groove and the next version of SMS called System Center Configuration Manager. Other systems/software will be running on Linux: WordPress (already been there, but will explore the MP version), Joomla, PHPNuke and a few others like a hosted version of ZoHo Office.
Technorati tags: Home Network
Change
I’ve not been blogging much lately, mainly because of getting over the flu – it really hit me hard. I’ve not been really sick for more than a decade and a half, so it’s been a hard one this time. We’ll be getting the flu shot next year.
But in addition, there has been a lot of things going on around the homefront, and its taken the steam out of my sails for writing and such. I’m looking to find the inspiration again, but all the regular stimuli has not been much to get me motivated. Yeah, there are some neat things going on in the mobile space at 3GSM, and some neat tech seminars for work, but its not getting me in the mood to write about it really.
I’m planning on getting some more work out of the way so I can get back to reading more and being able to write about it. There is a bit of change going on here, and I hope to make the most of it over the next many months. Change is good.
@MAC_Arms Pay taxes when you make your money, pay taxes when you spend your money, pay taxes when you successfully invest your money, pay taxes when you save enough taxed money to afford a house, pay taxes to live in your house, pay taxes when you sell the house that you paid taxes on to
Yup, taxes are criminal and we need serious reforms. I've always said that if you want to see a tax revolt, make withholdings illegal and have Americans write a tax check every payday. They'll revolt for sure. You don't miss what you never had.
I think it’s safe to say that @GovEvers should stop blocking audits in Wisconsin and open the books…
“Only AMERICAN citizens should vote.”
Sen. @berniemoreno says voter ID and proof of citizenship are simply common sense.
“We’re talking about a very low threshold — identify who you are and prove you’re a U.S. citizen when you register to vote. I think we’re getting closer to
Wrong. Democrats are solely responsible for hours-long airport lines.
They voted to defund TSA three times and won’t even entertain a conversation about reopening it. Why?
They’re using it as leverage to stop enforcing immigration laws.