nerdnet

We just wanted to say to Nicole and Richard Moore "Congratulations!" on the birth on their new baby boy Roman James Moore who was born Sunday June 8th at approximately 8 PM. He weighs 8lb 9oz and is 21 inches long. He lucked out and got his mothers good looks :) Lots of love from all of us :)

As of this morning, I am now a licensed sport pilot, weight shift class land. After many starts and stops over the last couple of years, I was finally able to complete all my requirements and testing. Because of the weather and because I kept changing aircraft I've had a hard time getting finished.

After being grounded from flying for over a year (money makes planes fly!) I got back to it this last weekend. I spent an hour in the air with John Beaman, my former trike instructor. He got a new Air Creation Tanarg, which is the Cadillac of weight-shift trikes. It was great, and I was certainly a little rusty. The Tanarg felt a lot different than the Air Creation Clipper I used to fly, so getting used to it will take a few flights. In all, it felt great being back up there where I belong!

I'm a huge fan of all things Linux / open-source. I've been a Linux user for over 10 years now, and I have to say I am very impressed at how much it has improved in usability and reliability. I was very excited to try out Ubuntu 7.10 after enjoying the earlier versions so much. I decided to try it on my laptop and on my work PC. I won't go into all the details of installing it, running it, etc. I just wanted to point out a few issues I've noticed using it. Overall, I think its a great distro and its very polished, but its not quite perfect.

I don't often dip into the shark infested world of political debate. Its a sure way to spark a migraine or an online flame-war. Lately, however, I've read and heard time and time again about how so many other nations view us here in the United States, and it has rarely been positive. We're a nation of people that cannot satiate its own excessive consumption, run by a corrupt government of power, money and oil hungry tyrants who keep the rest of us in control with lies and scare-tactics. This seems to be a fairly accurate description of things as they now stand in this country.

When it comes to running a network with mixed OS clients, there really is no "easy" solution when it comes to serving files, printers, and other network resources. Throw in access control, user management, and network monitoring and things can get to be really tough.

The company I work for as a network engineer has used Novell for the last 15 years or so, and once its set up and running properly, it does a great job of blending everything together into a homogeneous system. Unfortunately, it works best with Windows clients, and as of late, its Linux client is catching up. Still, getting Novell to provide the same services to any OS client, at login time, via single sign-on, can be torturous, expensive and time consuming. The cost of licensing and upgrading strains the relationship. So, for us, it was time to figure out how to break with the past and step out of the comfort zone a bit.