rootflags.org

While I was on paternity leave, my office mates decided to, er, pack up my office.

On a spur-of-the-moment gag, I asked one of our Site Management guys to print out a giant “You Suck” banner on the plotter at work for one of my co-workers. Once he started working on the banner, it took on a life of it’s own. Eventually we ended up building a frame and mounting it to poster board so it would be free-standing. Thanks to the ladies in security for the photo.

While most people would see this as childish and immature, anyone who knows the co-worker pranked would say this is right up his alley. So Andrew, Thanks for coming in today.

I’ve been swamped of late and as such haven’t been blogging recently. Not that that’s really an excuse. Enough has transpired recently that I thought I’d start again.

42° 2′ 4.6428″ north latitude, -87° 40′ 56.9424″ west longitude. That’s where I’m sitting right now, as I type on my laptop on the sofa. For the less geeky, that’s 933 Sherman Ave, Evanston, IL 60202. We’ve been settling in and unpacking for 2 months now, and it’s finally starting to feel like home.

Visiting with my family yesterday, I found out that Aaron Gautier, son of Dan Gautier, was recently killed in Iraq. I’ve known Dan for more than a decade, and have been camping with Aaron and Dan numerous times in Luray, VA. The news saddened me, and my heart goes out to Dan and the rest of Aaron’s family. It seems unfair that he wasn’t old enough to drink, but he was old enough to lose his life in Iraq. He was a great kid, and he will certainly be missed.

On the lighter side, my cousin, Julie Edlow is now engaged to one of her former Recipe bandmates, Kris Kehr. Christi and I (and the whole Silver family, really) are tremendously excited for her. And I’m secretly hoping this will give me an excuse to buy yet more camera gear for her wedding.

After all the stress I’ve had the last two months, I will be thrilled to close on our new home in ten days. As if loan issues weren’t enough, Thursday was my first 13 hour day at work, debugging a sporadic e-mail receipt problem which turned out to be a problem with Cisco’s latest PIX firmware. For reference, Sendmail logging a “421 4.4.1 collect: I/O error” means you need to turn ESMTP fixup on the PIX. The network team owes me a beer.

On the less stressful side, the little one has been toddling around the apartment, though she refuses to budge unless she’s clutching my fingers. Watching her walk, stumble, and get right back up makes the stress melt away.

One of the really annoying things about starting a new job is learning a completely new infrastructure. Oh it’s not figuring out what 900 Linux hosts do, learning to debug SAN issues, or comprehending the multiple financial businesses my new company is involved in that’s the challenge. The challenge is figuring out how to conveniently read my personal e-mail.

Since most internet access there is restricted or proxied, I decided to just make better use of my webmail setup which runs Squirrelmail. It’s a fine product, but it’s not very flashy, and lacks any sort of Gmail-like conveniences like drag-and-drop message control. Sure I could use ssh to tunnel multiple ports through multiple hosts so that I could run Thunderbird locally, but really web applications like e-mail have gotten a huge boost from “web 2.0″ technology like AJAX, so why not?

I spent about an hour looking at various applications, and ended up installing a PHP-based application called RoundCube. The product is still very much in development (you can’t collapse folders, can’t force a message pane at the bottom of the screen, and the inbox list doesn’t always refresh even though it tells you that you have a new message), but looks promising and has a really nice UI. It was simple to set up, so until I stumble upon something better, I’m hooked. It’s definitely high on my “cool AJAX apps” list with mp3act (a really cool streaming music server).

If anyone has any recommendations for other webmail apps (or other must have AJAX-enabled apps), please comment below.

On Monday, I thought for sure I had somehow managed to avoid the wrath of the dreaded rotavirus that had plagued the little one just a few days before. Ah the sense of humor viruses have. The stomach flu hit me late Monday night, and continued for nearly 24 hours. It felt awful to call in sick on my second week at my new job, but I’m sure they wouldn’t have wanted me there.

The little one is still sick, though now primarily a residual head cold. Fortunately the weekend is soon approaching.