Toutes Les Choses Italien

Sorry for the non-descriptive headline, but a lot of little things are going down today :).

Documentation

I should be wrapping up the documentation for my Africa portal today. I've decided to expand on the XML section and I also feel there's something else missing, so I need to re-read it (again).

Backups

Boy after loosing my laptop and nearly loosing my work product I'm becoming religious concerning backups. I went out and purchased a Western Digital backup drive that just sits on my network. I've mapped over to it and now I'm copying stuff to it. Of course when I see little devices like this I wonder why they didn't allow you to interface with it better, it's running Linux, so you'd think you could hack into it and make it do more than just backup, maybe act as an email server or a family web portal or something. I've always thought that companies who build consumer products should hire me as their designer (especially car companies, I mean is it nuts to think that when you park your can you can have it sync with a server inside your house to download new MP3s, new videos, mapping, information along with highlights of your route? I know all that makes way too much sense for them to implement, might actually be useful).

Hard Drive

I'm getting my new hard drive from Lenovo today. Their support group has impressed me, it's very good and very keen on pleasing the customer. Of course it could be that I have a product that's considered a corporate product. Dell was the same way for server support, I can't say how they are for desktop support, all my machines are outside the warranty period. Of course once I get my drive back it'll be about 10-20 minutes to install it and 3 hours to rebuild it :(.

Business

I'm working on a proposal for a company to virtualize their development servers. I know how they work and what they have now are 3-6 development servers that are difficult to re-baseline (they could use another 3-6 for development). I'm not sure why they can't replace those with 2 big servers and stand-up 12 virtual servers for testing and development (it also gets rid of boxes, I think all these machines are a waste of time, maybe I should invest in a big machine and virtualize several of my home computers). Big servers are fairly cheap these days, Windows is very expensive, but if you get some big servers (Quad Core/HyperThreaded) with about 8GB of ram, and run Linux on them along with VMWare, you're looking at around $6,000 and a much more flexible system with little risk and huge potential for eliminating future risk.

Job Hunt

I've been introduced to yet another recruiter, I'm kind of torn now between the risk of working on my own and the non-risk of working for someone else. Biggest problems working alone is that I love people (not many people walking around the home office) and two I'm not a great salesman. I also need to put on my list to contact another recruiter on Monday about a possible position with a company in Arlignton (not the best place to work for me, lots of driving, I don't like driving, find it wasteful).

Graduation

My daughter graduates elementary school today, in my day we didn't have such a thing, we just went to a new school the next year. Now I feel they have to celebrate everything, I guess it's OK. I am very proud of her, she's a good girl :).

Lawn Mowing

Well since I'm telling everything else, might as well say I have to mow the lawn today, it's kind of fun actually :).