Friday Night Highlights
Posted on January 11, 2008
3 Comments
A Friday night after 8 PM and I’m still sitting at work. I’ve been doing some server maintenance and “after hours” network maintenance — along with just generally killing time — while a steam cleaning crew works over the carpets. It was a big week here; I got to put down the keyboard and use my power tools instead. 
See, here’s why I love working at a small company. My boss is our COO. I’m titled as Director of Technical Operations. Since we both have “ops” in our titles, we also take on all Facilities type projects. This week, with the boss’s help, we completely tore down all the cubes in our office. Then rebuilt them all, but in a much more productive, visually appealing and spacious arrangement. While at it, I cubed out some other areas of the office and reconfigured some storage areas. Lots of good ol’ brow sweat went into this one. Physically, I’m whooped! But it looks great. We also finally got rid of that 6×6 cube mindset that was so awful. 6 feet squared just ain’t much space.
Following up on my most recent twitter related post, I’ve found a windows twitter client that I really like: Twhirl. It does all the nifty things that I hope to see in a client. Note: You’ll need Adobe AIR to make it go.
The color schemes of it didn’t do much for me, but “into the dark” has grown on me enough to become pleasing. Great client, give it a shot if you’re on a platform that AIR supports (which I think is just Win and Mac).
Oh, tonight it finally hit me that my phone has a camera and a “unlimited” data plan. That makes Flickr a bit more interesting to me. I might try and shoot some pictures over that way in the future. For today, I started with a picture of one corner in my office.
[Yup, they're still steaming carpets. *yawn* I'm tired of being here]
I learned of Bitnami earlier today. What a fascinating concept: Popular open source applications all bundled up in easy to install packages for a variety of platforms. For instance, want a local WordPress install on your PC? Well, there are certainly ways to do that (for example, my “Testing WordPress” series)…. or you can just grab their package and do it all in one swell foop (hat tip to Piers Anthony for that phrase). I hope to give it a try soon. Anyone tried any of the Bitnami packages?
I’m still trying to find a fix for the stubborn Vista + VPN = Locked account issue. That’s driving me (and some co-workers) nuts. If you have some ideas, have a look at that article and share!
I’ve had some good ideas on the Linux Alternatives for EverNote/OneNote post. Looking forward to trying them out soon. My current home Linux machine is a P3 750 laptop with 384MB of ram. Not a screamer, but it runs Xubuntu well enough. I use it as a “communications” machine with twitux, meebo and a browser for the most part. A nice data capture/tracking app on it would be bonus.
Only one main bummer about the laptop: While I was able to get wifi working with NO hassle whatsoever, I don’t have any Dell Latitude batteries that work. So, it’s not very portable… I actually have to shut it down to move it from room to room. Blah. But I really don’t want to spend money on a battery for a laptop that’s approaching a decade old.
Tags: Bitnami, flickr, HTC-Mogul, linux, twhirl, twitter, twitux, vista, vpn, xubuntu
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3 Responses to “Friday Night Highlights”
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A Piers Anthony fan, yay!
BTW, my “must_read” tag enjoys having your feed associated - love your blog.
Careful with that manual labor, it’s tricky!
Let’s see some pictures of this snazzy new office layout!
BTW, when are you going to install the OpenID plugin for comments?
@Jay - Thanks for the comment! As for the manual labor… would you believe I had to find bandaids today? Man, I’m not used to bleeding at work.
@Peter - pictures would be cool… I’ll have to figure out a way to get a decent angle on it. Maybe a ladder?
OpenID is just a fad — hadn’t you heard? (I joke!)