I’ve come to the realization that I love utillizing older computers from yesteryear. And when I say yesteryear, I mean around 7 years old. Our current family computer is an “mature” machine I built in the early months of 2000. I haven’t been able to part with it, so I’ve spent the last 7 years updating it with new hardware and software to keep it current for our basic needs.

Lately, we have been running low on disk space and it has been extremely taxed with even the simplest of tasks, so there has been some thought of an upgrade. I’ve had my eye on the Macs, but our current financial situation wouldn’t allow me to get that Mac Book Pro I’ve been eying for the past several months (starting at $1999 for the entry-level… yikes). As for the Windows OS, well, let’s just say that the prospect of upgrading to Vista leaves me feeling less than inspired. I’m not a “hata”, but I haven’t found a compelling reason to make that jump quite yet.

I’d been a CLI Linux user for the past 6 years and loved to use the OS as a server with the LAMP stack and various Tomcat installations, but never found X Windows that attractive or user friendly. Looking back at it, I was using a Slackware distribution, probably the most user-unfriendly one out there, but after checking out others, I was still unconvinced. One day, my trusty server box with Slackware blew up and I was forced to buy some new hardware. Ubuntu was the new, cool distro on the block so I loaded that up, and to my pleasant surprise, it was a breeze (can I say a “delight”?) to install and I was up and running in under an hour, unlike my Slackware box that took months to configure to a tenuous state where if I didn’t alter anything it would be stable. More

I’m tired of RSS. Not of reading and keeping up with my favorite feeds, but of presenting the wonders and benefits to the business teams at the company. My team is responsible for keeping the masses up-to-date on the latest and greatest trends that can affect our business — and I believe we serve this role well. The problem is getting the masses to listen and really care about what we’re saying; to take five minutes out of their day and try out something new. Not that RSS is a new concept — the current RSS 2.0 spec was copyrighted in 2003. More

In large and small scale businesses there is a divide — one that separates the business from the more technical folk. In today’s marketplace, it is critical that these two forces meet somewhere in the middle, sharing an understanding of commonplace technical terms, techniques and trends. It’s scary when a business lead is driving an initative, yet doesn’t truly grasp the high-level technical concepts of the work; or when the business side sees something “cool” and says, “why can’t we have that on our site?” Sound familiar? More