status: simple and laughing at failure
Mon Oct 23 18:29:07 EDT 2006
SIMPLE JOBS THANKS/WELCOME GYM LAUGHING AT FAILURE SLEEP COFFEE SPAM SIMPLE I'm working on a grant [1] that is due soon, so this message will be overdue AND simple. [1] http://www.mass-service.org/funding_opportunities.shtml#boomers JOBS Josh Bonnet is now working at sputnik systems.[2] [2] http://www.sputnik.com/ THANKS/WELCOME These past few weeks, with VISTA recruiting and grant writing Melissa Carino has had a hand up in the right spot several times and for that I am grateful. Mary Kenny explored being a fund raising VISTA, but decided instead to be a remote fund-raising volunteer. Gregg Croteau continues to inspire with his cheerful encouragement of criticism. When Matt installed Mon, Gregg was supplanted as a server monitoring service. For a short time Gregg seemed at a loss for 3:00am to 6:00am activity. Now all is good. He's moved over to reporting subtler bugs like hotmail putting our mail into their junk folder and our webmail not handling more than 1000 messages in an folder. Felicia Sullivan is now ED of the organizer's collaborative [3] [3] http://organizerscollaborative.org/ GYM There are still three of us. We're still going. We're still getting fitter. I know I wouldn't be going if I didn't know that there would be encouragement waiting for me. LAUGHING AT FAILURE Last Friday night, the main ldap server puked. Because of Matt's work with Mon my cell phone beeped seconds after it went down. I called John at the lab (flex-time is good). Because John had setup a backup ldap server we had no downtime. Because john is John, he restored from backup and got the primary up quickly. We were without ldap redundancy for only a short time. SLEEP It sounds easy: "Go to bed at a reasonable hour, don't feel like crap" ...but except for Kamala we're all still struggling with this. The gym is helping me a good bit. Maybe it is part of the whole quantity vs quality thing. More/bigger awake time, food, money, car, house, beer means less energy,fitness, health, clean air, happiness, sanity. Paul forwarded a link [4] we've seen before on this list but it is good and relevant enough to repeat. [4] http://www.globalrichlist.com/ DIFFERENT STATUS For those that can't stand the suspense of when the next status report is coming, There are other cadre lists. cadre-config [5] is for sharing info about configuration changes. You pretty much need to be Gregg or to have root to be interested in this list. cadre-cvs [] is where changes to configuration and software go. You probably need to think that 'diff -u' is better than plain 'diff' to really groove on this list. [5]http://lists.thecsl.org/pipermail/cadre-config/2006-October/thread.html [6]http://lists.thecsl.org/pipermail/cadre-cvs/2006-October/thread.html [7]http://lists.thecsl.org/pipermail/divinerightofkings/2006-October/thread.html COFFEE A while back at Friday coffee, the talk turned to books that we might read more than once. I couldn't think of one until John reminded me of The Last Unicorn [8] [8] http://www.amazon.com/Last-Unicorn-Peter-S-Beagle/dp/0451450523 Since I have less grey hair than men half my age, I think sometimes I am Schmendrick. SPAM In our spare time, we're jumping through the hoops that AOL, Hotmail, yahoo, gmail impose on people who want to prove they are not spammers. Right now, if somebody with an AOL or hotmail account complains that our mail is SPAM we'll get a copy, so we can remove them from a listserv or speak a few words of gentle correction. I'm sure that this is a a big surprise but Hotmail has a complicated procedure that only works with Internet explorer.