Pre-Christmas message :-)

A few things:

Life:

  • Spending Christmas with the family this year. As is tradition, I’ll be sleeping on the couch/floor/other non-bed flat surface.
  • Dad is not well, unfortunately. We’ll find out more next week from the specialist.
  • Organized a fortnight off work starting new year. I’m not going anywhere, as long as I don’t have to deal with computers that aren’t mine I’m happy.
  • Got Bri her Christmas present a little early. Her friendship is her gift to me, something you can’t put a price on.
  • Trying to keep up the gym work, but overtime at work seems to hamper it.

Tech:

  • Finally got the Samba domain sorted out. I don’t really need LDAP – it would be nice but it’s not essential.
  • Word to the wise – always clean the dust bunnies out of your servers regularly. My case temp dropped 6 degrees after a cleanup last week.
  • Switched version control for my code/website/RPM specs and patches from Subversion to Bazaar-NG. Turns out I’ve never used Subversion correctly anyway (basically nobbled proper trunk/branch/tag usage) so I pulled the code and did a clean import into a new bzr repo. It’s working OK so far
  • All disk / crash issues with defender are sorted out now.
  • Few packages to update and nothing really interesting to add barring maradns, which I’ve been meaning to do for a while. Pity there’s no IPv6 support for recursive/caching service otherwise I’d replace BIND on my servers.
  • WTFs: Steam is down, so I can’t play HL2 or even pull updates. CPAN mirrors in Australia are also a little lacking – I’ve been trying to update my CGI::Session RPM but I can’t pull the current tarball from ilisys or PM/AARNet.

Work:

  • As it’s almost the end of the year, things are slowing down, which will mean less support work and more chances for me to get some processes and scripts cleaned up. I’ve been waiting to do some of this for months.
  • More people in the team in January, also badly needed.
  • Had the company Christmas party last night at the Rugby Club (Eagle Street Pier). Nice place, but like the last 2 years it was merely finger food + obento (with rice!?) . The theme was glitz + glam, however the night was notable for a lesser turnout of bling and pimp hats than last year.
  • Further to the above, we also seemed to scare away our Melbourne IT overlords, who apparently came and went as a unit (insert Borg jokes here.)

If you don’t hear from me beforehand, Merry Christmas everyone ?