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Well, I was checking over my email and I noticed that I had a ‘comment’ I needed to moderate for this blog. Every month or two I get one of these, so I ruffle through my old emails looking for my login info to delete the ‘permalink’ or whatever. Then I notice that I havn’t posted to this blog since last October. WOW, thats a long time! I still have eight subscribers, and every once in awhile I get an email from some grateful person thanking me for something in a post from what seems like eons ago. Which is why I keep the blog up, in case some desperate ‘googler’ finds something of value from one of my old posts.

Truth be told, I have a hard time mustering up the desire to post here, because of two reasons. The first of which, last August I took on a new job at a public school system. The school systems technology department was a shambles and the users side wasn’t any good at all. In fact, we still had people on the Windows 95 environment, and were using programs that utilized DOS, if you can believe that. My co-worker and I have been spending the last year just trying to get a handle on the network, and putting out fires. There were no ‘managed’ switches in the district and we are spread out between four different campuses. Besides not having any time for playing with new stuff, I noticed a deplorable lack of IT intelligence in the public school systems. Not many have even HEARD about blogging let alone being able to identify one browser from the next. Interestingly enough it seems most of these people have masters degrees, but when you tell them to ‘open up your browser’ you get met with dead, deer-in-the-headlights stares. “Go to the Internet.” is usually my follow-up, I don’t even ask, “Do you know what a browser is?” question anymore.

While this environment can be more than a bit annoying at times it provides a lot of opportunities, if I ever have time to scoop them up. My co-worker and I have started keeping a ‘trophy bulletin’ board on the wall in our building. This trophy board is adorned with some of the most hilarious requests we have come across. One of which was a post-it someone had put on our door, it read, “My computer un-installed itself! What do I do?”. That is a verbatim quote by the way. There was no name, no number no nothing, just, “My computer un-installed itself! What do I do?”. In addition, we have been saddled with numerous support things, like projectors, sound systems, basically anything you can plug into a wall falls in the IT black hole of disaster. We only were able to get a hold of problems, by implementing a ‘help-desk’ system. The one we are utilizing is called ‘School Dude’ and it is pretty effective. I pretty much hated it at first, but one of the things you have to learn real quick when entering the public school world is ‘If it works, use it!’. And that is no lie. My being picky about the programming, the interface and the overall functionality are pretty much long gone. I don’t get to play with new web-based toys any more since most of my time is spent on the network side of things. I would like to take a minute just to say however “Novell Rocks! Even if their social network sucks like a Hoover.” You don’t have near the nice community that you get with Ubuntu or Mac for that matter. Reading a Novell blog is like reading a prospectus from a Fortune 500 company. About as dull as a deer antler. There is absolutely no ‘zip’ to their community. But I will have to say this, their network, Zenworks, and such pretty much beats the hell out of anything Windows has. Its reliability, sustainability, and management is something all Windows network/server administrators should envy.

At this time, I am not really sure where this blog is heading. I hope that over the course of the next year, we will have enough of a handle on things in general that I am able to 1. play with the fun stuff again. and 2. not come home and hate computers and users so much that I feel up to blogging about my experiences.

The second reason why I pretty much quit posting here was because I kinda have a new hobby that takes place out doors. I have been attempting self-sustainability and DIY projects as a break in my computer laden responsibilities. You can track my progress over at, WildCraft That blog is a far cry from the computer and web-design based blog that this has been, and since I do very little web-development these days, I hardly feel adequate to even discuss the subject. I still read all my favorite technology related blogs like, ‘Solo Technology’ and ‘Randa Clay Design’. You can get to the links over there on the right-hand side of my page. In my opinion these are the two best technology blogs on the web, even by todays standards.

So if you have ever looked over your feed reader and have seen my dead rss feed there in your bookmarks, and wonder to yourself, “Where the hell has that guy gone to?”  Now you know.  If you have stumbled upon this site by accident and are reading this and asking yourself, “What the hell is he talking about?” just think to yourself, “Well, that was nice, but pretty much a useless post.”.  In any case, I would like to tell you that I will update this blog a lot more often, but between my five children, my new outside projects, and all the networking management crap I have to deal with at the public school system, I just don’t want to promise anything I can’t deliver on.

Next stop in the school district…..managed switches!  If only our P.O. gets approved!