silentcorner

Thinks have been pretty busy, which can be seen a little by the lack of activity in my blog. I’m sort of going through a time of renewal for myself. Along with this comes some resurfacing of some ambitions and brainstorming.

But first, for the obligatory gaming commentary, I’m still playing Joint Operations on occasion and World of Warcraft although my interest is waning in the latter. There just seems to be a lack of good people playing on there at least at the lower levels (I switched servers so I had to start all over leveling my chars). Brothers in Arms was just released, though, and I will definitely be picking that up probably after my vacation in a week. That game is looking pretty sharp. Battlefield 2 is also coming out soon, so I will have plenty to satisfy my war gaming thirst.

But what’s really kept me busy is I’ve been focusing on some projects I’ve left on the sidelines for way way too long. For starters I’m working on a whole new website that will likely replace this one, but that will be a fairly large project for me. I’m moving away from WordPress to a more full blown CMS system called Drupal because of a lot additional functionality I want to put into my personal domain that WordPress just wouldn’t be the best fit for. While I do enjoy blogging, I intend to make it less of the overall function of the site. Beyond that, I will leave the details for a later date when I get a better grasp on my overall plan. I have a bit of a road ahead of me, though, getting up to speed with Drupal, and with getting better at site designing and templating, as it is my intention to use Drupal for several of my websites I have in the plans.

Another thing I’ve never really mentioned in my blog before is that I host my own websites (via leased dedicated servers) as well as several others, some commercial. I’ve been hosting sites of my own, my friends, and some small businesses for several years, but have never put up a website on the domain, and never put much time into the business side of the hosting I do. All my focus has been on the technical side. However, I am starting to get enough word of mouth business, plus I now host resellers, that it’s time to finally create a website, complete with support options, and actually implement a billing system for once. I’m also working out a plan to upgrade servers to support my growing user base and my growing ambitions for my own sites.

On the personal system front, I finally got around to installing Linux on my IBM Thinkpad. The distribution I ended up selecting for it is Ubuntu. Ubuntu is based largely on Debian, but with a much shorter 6-month release cycle, using more current software, which makes Ubuntu well suited for a desktop/laptop where sometimes driver support and current functionality is almost as important as rock solid stability. I jumped right into the Hoary release which is scheduled to be a final release next month, so I had a couple hurdles to jump through getting everything working the way I want them (and still configuring things), but so far I’ve been very happy with it. It has already supplanted my Mac OS X Powerbook as my primary system now.

I’m also in the process of converting over to a new gaming PC as well. I had an unfortunate setback when I inadvertently fried the motherboard in the new system (a custom built system I had actually won in a drawing from TotalChoice Hosting, a company I lease some servers from and also do some work for, and was in the process of upgrading some of the components to make it truly game worthy), and possibly some expensive memory, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed to that not being the case. This of course, caused me to have to go pick up a new motherboard (which I also ended up upgrading since I had to buy a new one anyway). So now I have the fun task ahead of pulling everything out of my new system so I can replace the motherboard, and get everything reconfigured again.

That is all on the side, however, as I do have a regular job. In the past 8 months I have lost my only system admin, but hired two new ones (it was a two for one sale… kidding…). So far they’ve been working out pretty well which is a big help because I can finally start to see some forward progress trying to get the infrastructure of the company I work at cleaned up and on the right track. In addition, I am finally installing some real bandwidth in our office upgrading our current single provider dual T1 connection to the Internet to a 100 Mbps and 45 Mbps dual provider BGP solution. It’ll be such a big change from our current saturated bandwidth I’m not sure my office mates will know what to do with it all. (I know I do ).

If that weren’t enough, a month or so ago I had excruciating tooth pain that caused me basically not to be able to sleep for a week (and let me tell you, sleep deprivation makes a pretty good substitute for any drugs if you want to start hallucinating). Several dentist appointments later, I now have a complete root canal and a brand new crown on my rear molar. Not something I really would wish on anyone… make sure to brush and floss regularly.

Yet another project that I talked to my dad about last year and we are hoping to start working on this year, is restoring his ‘58 Corvette (another site that will likely get Drupalized). The real details of that will show up on that site when we get going on it, but the basics are we want to restore it back to it’s original dealer specs which involved finding what those were first which is in progress. Once this gets going I’m hoping to be able to make monthly trips to Michigan to begin the actual restoration process. This geek likes to get his hands dirty every so often.

If that weren’t enough ambitions, I’m contemplating participating in this year’s ACT Ride, a 4 day 300-350 mile bike ride/AIDS fundraiser. I’ve done a couple of these in recent past (550 mile Heartland AIDS Ride, and 300+ mile HOPE Ride), but missed last year’s HOPE Ride due to other commitments. However if I commit to the ACT Ride, that will mean training time and fund raising time again. I will probably end up doing it though… the rewards far outweigh the time and effort commitments, and I really enjoy biking.

Well, that’s a pretty decent summary of some of the bigger things going on with me. With all that to do, it’s a pretty good thing that I’m going on a 7 day cruise in the Caribbean in another week!