LinuxWorld Expo 2007 Day 3

As usual with any show, the last day on the exhibit floor is very light. Both Marc and I were scheduled for the morning and Scott was not scheduled at all Thursday. We didn’t always stick to the schedule though. Marc didn’t get in until after 1pm and Scott was there most of the time anyway. Both Kir and Kostya made their rounds to see other exhibits as well did Scott. Not much swag was left, but it was fun to speak with others. In some cases it turned into just a cold-calling out on the floor. One exhibiter from rPath turned the tables on us (after Kir asked why rPath doesn’t support OpenVZ while several other virtualization products are supported) and wanted to know about OpenVZ instead of telling us about rPath. We ended up back at our booth finishing with a demonstration.

The DVD burning continued and we had no trouble keeping up with the demand… however we did end up burning all of the spool of 50. By the end of the show we only had about 5 left.

Good Friday

Had our monthly Linux meeting last night! Was great to see some new faces. It’s a perfect chance to “get back to the basics”. Seems we do that a couple times a year. Our meetings tend to get a little dry when you hesitate to ask questions or do particular topics and such when you know your other members too well; or not well enough. You think you know what they are already interested in or know what they know already. So you don’t ask if they know how to fix this or if they have ever done that.

Ordered some great server equipment today at work! Getting some rack mount equipment and server. Want to place our existing PowerEdge 6400 into a contained rack to controll the heat and noise. Still need to talk with one of Dell’s engineers on that. But today I ordered a 48 port 10/100 4 port gigabit switch; 2 rj45 and 2 fiber. They even went down on their $999 price to $827! This included a free gb nic for the server. I also got a rack mount dual Xeon 2.4GHZ Raid 5 with 32GB SCSI drives. Planning to use this as the web/mail/file server.

Happy Easter! Planning to go to church tonight and then off to Anaconda for the weekend.

The hidden stress of getting taxes out of the way is gone!

I’m recapping from last night to start; my family normally attends Wednesday night church services, and I decided to take that opportunity to start the drudged taxes. I have been doing my taxes for the past three tax years online with Turbo Tax. The past two years required me to use Netscape since they had some java scripting that detected your browser. Even the cool feature in Konqueror for changing its identity wouldn’t fool it. No I had to use the good old Netscape. But hey! I was adamant about using Linux to do my taxes. I always had been very cautious about doing it online, and therefore it took me 1-2 weeks to finish. Last night… start to finish in about 2 hours! Also with Mozilla this time! I highly recommend using Turbo Tax online as it comes out the same if you were to purchase the box-set. The only advantage of having the box-set (I think) is that you can possibly share it with others but they’d still have to pay for the electronic sending. But then again I have never used the box-set. My dad does but he also does both grandmothers, two aunts and a great aunt’s taxes with it.

Finally got started on setting up the bosses new Dell computer I had ordered with three other Dells about three week ago. This is the machine is going into his office at the mansion :-\ For a third day in a row now, I have gone to his place for various computer fixes. Today was a classic MCN email account setup! I was glad to see the old settings still work with Earthlink. FYI I worked for MCN a couple years ago as a part time technical support person.

Just got notice a Butte Linux Users Group exists! Added them to the growing list of Montana LUGs. Sounds like they have a very healthy start. I hope to make it over there some time as it’s in my old stomping grounds; I travel back to Anaconda quite often. I wish them well and hope for their success.

Mozilla 1.3 is finally announced! Gee I must have missed this on their site by minutes today. I installed a nightly build of 1.3 (non beta) I downloaded on Feb 28th to my bosses new Dell. I paid a visit to the Mozilla site because I was surprised to see it saying I was using old 1.3b version. Guess I really was but didn’t see the official 1.3 listed. I highly recommend this version; it is awesome!

This week has been the least Linux week I’ve had in over a year!