We released the latest framework last night, on the one-year anniversary of the first release (for this client--we've been working on this for years). And that's where their patronage ends.

Now is the time for self-promotion and selling ourselves once again. I'd like to get a testimonial from our former CEO on how essential the code was in making the company successful, or even possible.

I have several major goals in my life. One is to pursue acting and the other is to pursue coding. In terms of acting, I need to build a better web site to show off my talents. I'd like to add some voice clips to the site. In terms of coding, I want to 1) get my LPIC certification, 2) badger phpwebhosting to get the latest version of PHP installed, so I can convert my site from ASP/Access to PHP/MySQL, and 3) get another good client/patron or become involved in a startup with potential. I'm most partial to the startup idea. I'm young enough to tolerate a reasonable risk.

I repurposed the "junk" machine that my step-father threw away, and made a headless Linux box that I can get to from the net. I've just got it running commandline stuff, and some test services, such as apache2. I'm thrilled. I realized that the only hard parts of Linux are in the GUI. The command line is simple and powerful. I should reorganize my life to need a GUI less.

I got my hard drive copied and installed. Since CompUSA was a bust, I took matters into my own hands. I opened up my stepfather's old computer, the one which was sitting in the garage waiting to be recycled at ACCRC and figured I would plug the drives in and copy the partitions using PartitionMagic. (From the same company that makes DriveImage.) I realized that the 2.5" drives needed a different connector than the standrad IDE connector. The older drives had 40-pin connectors and a separate power plug. The new laptop drives have a smaller 44-pin connector which included the power. I wen to Fry's, bought two 40-to-44 pin converters, copied the partitions, and was off! The only little snages were that I didn't fully plug in the new drive ("No operating systm detected" error) and I needed to put GRUB back on the master boot record. Upon doing that, everything was peachy.

Under Linux, I really wanted Mozilla 1.2.1, so that I could block HTML e-mail from requesting images from remote servers (see Web Bugs), but the stable Debian distribution only has version 1.0. So I took a leap and installed unstable. Tastes great and less filling. Someday, I'll opine about my Linux issues, but I have to get to work now. I have to find out what is killing the performance of my XSLTs.

I'm going to visit my completely-focused sister this weekend, to have a brainstorming session on future work. Anyone ever tried something like that?

I am reading Just For Fun, Linus' (auto)biography. Seemingly, he's a likeable fellow. I am reading the book with a comparison of him and me in mind.

He's smart, focused, and not greedy. I'm smart, not-so-focused (spend too much time reading news), and more greedy (I would not have turned down 10 million dollars to work for a London firm.). Maybe I need to change.

Who are you? Why are you reading this?

I want to know who my audience is. I am sure that I am the most frequent visitor, but I want to know who else is reading my ramblings. Are you a friend who is looking me up from long ago? Are you a web-savvy relative? A theatre buddy? Or are you a stranger who was provoked by something I wrote? Or are you a potential employer looking for dirt?

Please leave a comment...

I brought my home machine's hard drive in to a CompUSA, even though I despise buying stuff there, to get themto copy the contents of my older 30GB IBM hard drive onto a new 60GB Toshiba drive. (Since I only have laptops, I have no machine which I can easily put both disks into to do the swap myself.) It's worth the $50 to me if they do not botch the job. I am putting a whole lot of trust in them. They say they can copy the NTFS and VFAT (FAT32) partitions, but they do not know if their software (DriveImage) can copy the ext2 partition. I am pretty sure it will work.

[Just in: CompUSA called back and said that they cannot read *any* of the partitions on the drive. DriveImage gives them a "partition not accessible" error. WTF? "David" says that it might be because I have GRUB installed as the bootloader. I think they have no clue what they are doing, and that my best course of action is to remove my hard disk from their premises ASAP.]

Where does this leave me? I am running on a machine without any version of Linux, just Windows XP. I have avoided putting Linux on the box until now, for fear I would spend too much time tinkering with it, and not getting work done (my work involves writing .NET code), but now that our contract is due to expire, I think I will take the plunge. The problem is that the Dell C400's video chip, an Intel I830, is brain-dead and Linux has a hard time dealing with it.

Hoo boy. We just lost our contract. We need to get more work. We aren't whining, we knew the risks of working with a single client, but since there are only three of us, and the client could use all our time, we didn't have time for serious other business development. This is not unusual, but it is stressful, nonetheless.