Minorsoft.com

I recently finished Lincoln’s Melancholy a book written by Joshua Wolf Shenk. This book is a very interesting read the part that I found interesting was when the concept of failure was talked about. Back in Abraham Lincoln’s day the term failure was generally used by business people to describe an event. Today the term failure, more often than not, is used to describe a person and rarely an event in that persons life.
Sir Ken Robins talks about how we have created a system in which failure is the worst thing that could ever happen. Many of the “successful” people I have ever read/listened to talk about the importance that failure has played in their own lives. They were willing and able to pick themselves up and not label themselves failures even though they had experienced failure.I have noticed that many of my great successes have come after a period of failure.
A few years ago I had gotten a new job I was really excited about this job because it was a lot better than the phone place I had been working at. Well I made it about a week in my new job. When they decided that I didn’t have the proper skills to be effective in the job. It really crushed me for a long time. I went and got another job at a call center. But if I had done well at that job I would of most likely stuck with it and missed a golden opportunity that came my way shortly after it. In short it would of dramatically changed my life for the worse if I had actually stayed at that job. I was able to take a job up on campus that lead me to a wonderful opportunity to be student director for the Recreation Sports program. I learned more from that experience than I would of ever learned at the other job.This doesn’t change the fact that experiencing failure is any easier it just helps to know that failure is an experience that will pass and most likely replaced with a greater experience we would of never had if we had not failed.

Yesterday we went up to campus we grabbed an elevator and before we could get in Cozette ran into the elevator and pressed the only button that was at her height. Yeah, it was that big red one that you shouldn’t push unless the elevators cables snap or you get stuck. I wonder if the 911 operators ever get tired of hearing “Sorry my kid pushed the big shiny red button that is at their level” ?

So to all you elevator designers out there why do you put the button for emergency at such a low level? Some federal requirement to protect us? Ahh well at least we know that it works and that 911 in Rexburg picks up really quickly.

I am in the process of creating a custom theme in word press for a client. I was going to use Drupal since that is what I have been using for a bit. But Drupal just seemed overkill for this simple business site. It was a lot easier to theme than I thought it would be but this is probably because of the experience I have had in learning to theme Drupal. Side note:
If you are doing any sort of web design and don’t have firefox with firebug you are missing out.

But you may be wondering why I choose Wordpress over Drupal so as follow are my top 3 reasons:

1. Didn’t see clients site ever expanding into something more that they would need the enhancements that drupal can offer.
2. Administrative interface in word press is much more polished than Drupal’s. This also makes sense in that Wordpress has concentrated on one thing and been able to focus more energy on the interface (my opinion I have no facts or articles to back this up). Drupal is focused on building A Content Management System. Which is a whole different beast than blogging software.
3. I wanted to learn more about Wordpress and its capabilities. This was a good project to do that with. I learned alot and was pleasantry surprised by the versatility that Wordpress offers.

Chris Hall is an amazing designer. Chris you did amazing work with those presidential widgets! Good luck on your move. Look forward to working with you in the future on some more cool projects.

Dave has an interesting perspective on GTD. I must say that I agree with him. I tried GTD for a bit. And now I feel like I am even more disorganized now that it has crashed and is not being used. I don’t know whether this is because I realized how unorganized I was/am. So for a small point in time I was super organized and things went smoothly. Then I got knocked off. So its time to “cowboy up” and get going on it again.

Dave pointed me to an article written about Jason Calacanis’s new venture mahalo. I agree with Dave that Mahalo makes more sense now.

However “Go mahalo it“, “I mahaloed him” just don’t have the same ring as the google’s.  So maybe Jason should look at grabbing some domain name like tinyask.com (your welcome dave expect a check from Jason any day now). “Go tinyask it” … Nope doesn’t sound good either.

Ahh well hopefully they will figure something out. Maybe they should read some Dr. Suess for inspiration.

I am writing this from the ScribeFire extension for firefox. It seems pretty cool. Life has been pretty busy these last couple of weeks. Trying to get project widgetnest off the ground. Starting sumer semester and trying to get my senior project started/approved. Its a frustrating process that is all I will say.

Oh yes I am going to try out the GTD process of organization It looks pretty interesting and I hope it will work for me better than my current system of organization. It expresses alot of how I think things should be done and I couldn’t really find anything to say see this is why it won’t work for me. Like I have with other organizational processes.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Yesterday I set up an Edubuntu server for the Jefferson Montessori School. They have been running the straight Ubunutu for the past year. However, it hasn’t been an ideal situation. They have limited resources(money) and I have limited time. So the two seemed to conspire against us and cause all sorts of problems. I plan on changing that by installing Edubuntu server in each of the Class Rooms.

The following is just a list illustrating some of the problems I had with a straight Ubuntu solution for the school.

1. NIS its just a pain, and doesn’t play well with NFS on Ubuntu
2. We had a single server that was acting as everything. While it could handle everything when it went down everything went down since the home directories were located there.
3. Teachers couldn’t easily push software to their students computers. Edubuntu makes this easy.
4. Keeping all the computers up to date was hard with no central way to see what computers needed updating.

While these were my top complaints with a straight ubuntu school system we will be testing out this next week to see if it is a better option than the previous solution.

The problems I had with Edubuntu

1. DHCP-
   I would of thought that the DHCP would of configured itself properly or at least asked for some configuration during the install. But nope it didn’t work out of the box.  I had to do the following:
   1. configure my second ether network card to 192.168.0.1. it was configured to 192.168.0.254 yet the dhcp file in /etc/ltsp/dhcp.conf is set to use a 192.168.0.1 address.
   2. Had to set the interface to listen on in the /etc/default/dhcp3-server
   3. I then had to copy the /etc/ltsp/dhcp.conf to /etc/dhcp/
   4. started the dhcp server (my network card wasn’t up so it gave me some problems here. Make sure it is up. check by using the ifconfig command. the edubuntu network manager showed the system as up but it really wasn’t for some strange reason.)
2. The thin client manager shows that you can view the students deskto. But you have to install x11vnc to the chroo. I don’t know much about this and could find no good documentation on how to do it.

So far those are my biggest complaints with edubuntu. Both of these are easily solved by better documentation which will come with time as more people use the system. Some may ask why post this here then?  1- it is easier to post it here and  2- I don’t know if what I did is actually how it is supposed to go together.

Well that its for now. Let you know how this little expirement goes.

In working on the RSS engine for fatTrackr.com it has brought up some interesting dilemmas of the best way to parse data and actually figure out what that data means. It is mostly because numbers are very arbitrary things. Well I am going to spend some time to really figure out some regular expressions. Off to class.

Current weight and using to test fatTrackr.com.