Home and work life have been keeping me supremely busy these past couple weeks. At home, I’m just about finished unpacking. The last pieces of furniture for my living room (namely the sofa set) should be delivered this week. I’ve tentatively set a date for my housewarming party (Saturday, June 8), now “all” I have to do is tidy up, put everything in its place, and decorate, roughly in that order.

Tech status: ADSL service has been superb so far; did a 1.6GB download (from work) of the new Microsoft Visual Studio .NET software development tools yesterday and the connection didn’t skip a beat. (It truly boggles the mind how a piece of software can take 2GB to install; I’ve not yet taken the time to find out…) My 1100VA UPS one died yesterday so I replaced it with a 1250VA unit.

Last but definitely not least, my latest bi-annual “Linux flirtation”. I installed a new hard drive on my server and along with it, Mandrake Linux 8.2. Spent some time this weekend setting up a VNC server so I could use the machine from a remote graphics terminal session on my Windows XP workstation—the integrated Trident CyberBlade graphics chip on my server has an extremely poor DAC that yields an unusably fuzzy display. With the display problem out of the way, I’m going through IBM’s Samba tutorial to (hopefully) configure the Linux machine as a domain controller for my network.

I kid not when I say “bi-annual Linux flirtation”. Roughly every two years since 1996 or so, I install Linux on one of my machines hoping to do something useful with it, only to ultimately fail and decide that Linux isn’t ready for me (or vice-versa) yet. I’m hoping to have better luck this time around; Linux is definitely slicker and easier to set up than ever before, but one still can’t escape mucking about configuration files with a text editor, so it’s still not idiot-proof. Whether or not it will stand up to this idiot this time around, remains to be seen…