Alive, and full of goo. Mission Goo.

I'm still here, just incredibly busy. Some projects that I have in the works, and a couple thoughts.

1: Beta testing for Windows Vista, and Office 12. That's right, I've gone almost completely to the dark side, and signed up to beta test the latest versions of Windows and Office for Microsoft. Can't be that bad. I've already installed the beta copy of Office 12 at home, and have poked around the interface a bit. Looks good so far, though I haven't really had a chance to play full throttle with it yet. Looking forward to getting my hands on Vista.

2: Designing either a registration or captcha system for the other weblog. Comment spammers found me. Damn. I'm either going to do a simple wordlist with links to images as a captcha system, or I'll code a little security package to allow logins, offer comments and maybe some other fun doo-dads for people.

3: Windows 2003 seminar tomorrow and Friday. Looking forward to this. I've been doing good things around here, so they're getting a bit more generous with the training and such. (A bonus or two would be nice, too.)

4: Imaging tech. I'm working as the OnDemand SME for the account now, and spent the morning showing off how much I don't know yet. *sigh*. I had to automate some tasks for someone, and we spent a good bit of the morning on it, with minimally successful results. It's research time.

5. Spare Test Hardware. Now that I'm migrating some applications, I'll have some servers free to play with, as a test farm. I'm planning on installing at least one Linux server back there, as well as one Windows 2003 play server. I want to do some proof of concepts stuff with integrating Windows and Linux. (i.e., authentication, application server and DNS/WINS on Windows, database, internet services, file sharing and DHCP on Linux.) Should be very interesting.

6. Continuing Ed. Still working on learning my web developers skills in combination with my networking skills. Also trying to work in some woodworking, tai chi, and other skills at home. It's quite a schedule.

So on with the thoughts:

1. Internet radio rocks. I've been listening to some eurodance on Beirut Nights radio. Who'd have thought I'd enjoy Lebanese radio? Go figure. It's a cool mix of stuff I recognize, and plenty of stuff I don't. The most interesting part is how multi-lingual the station is. So far today, I've heard songs in Spanish, French, German, English, Japanese, and Arabic. That's way too cool. Even heard the Numa Numa song in it's entirety a couple days ago. That's fortune.

2. Comment spammers. I know they don't care, but I wonder if they ever think about how much people actually hate them?

3. IBM hardware vs. Dell. Moved a SCSI card from a Dell box to an IBM box yesterday. Verdict: The dell box is a pain, but the IBM box was easy to get into and fit the card. We'll see how it holds up on the reliability front.

4. Tech blogs also rock. I've recently subscribed to the RSS feeds for many of the developer's blogs on the new Office 12 project. They have some interesting things to say, many of which I agree with.

That's enough for now. Time for tea.

CS