So here's the thing, I have two Canon printers, and a Kodak Easyshare dock. You would expect that after a sufficent amount of time, all three of these would be fully usable through Linux. Unfortunately, an amount of time I would consider sufficient has passed, and only one of the Canons can I actually print with. The Easyshare does work to transfer pictures back and forth between my camera and computer, but that's not enough. I want full functionality.

Now, a portion of the blame certainly falls to the manufacturers, no arguement there. But every commercial distro should have a dedicated team actively working on supporting every model from the major manufacturers, instead of just slapping in all of the PPDs they can find on linuxprinting.org.

On another note, I like the purpose of Gentoo. I am fully in agreement that a source distribution is a wonderful thing. Installing it sucks, though. No one should ever, in this day and age, need to partition and format disks by hand. Or, really, do any of the other crap that installing Gentoo requires by hand.

I'm not so sure that I'm fond of Tasman routers. For those of you unaware, Tasman makes an mlppp-specific class of router whose sole purpose is to bundle together a number of T1s. It does the job well, so far as I can tell, but the interface pretty much stinks. I'm trying to keep an open mind, since it may be because I'm just not used to the logic, yet, but it doesn't appear to be as informative as I'd like. I'm used to seeing transfer rates, errors, drops, alarms, etc., and this gear doesn't seem to display that. And if you want multiple T1s, why wouldn't you use a more powerful CPE, and dual-(or multi-)home running BGP? It seems to be marketed to a niche that may not be around in a few years. Time will tell.

So I've been working at Xspedius Communications since May, and things are looking grim. Oh, don't get me wrong, they're actually hiring, but their decision making is getting worse. So it's back to shopping myself around to all and sundry, in the hopes of landing a position somewhere that doesn't fill me with a great desire to leave. More money wouldn't hurt, either. I'm a contractor through Apex Systems, Inc., and I don't know how many others of you are, but I recommend you get out now. Xspedius may be the worst environment I've ever worked in, but Apex takes the cake as the worst contracting firm I've ever been with. It's one thing to not pay holidays, vacation, and personal time, but it's another whole thing entirely not to mention that before someone starts working for you. So it's time to go...anybody need a network engineer?