I’m back, but very very tired.  I worked until 4:30am, then slept for a few hours, then jumped back in the car and hauled it to the airport.  I dozed off and on during the plane ride, then got home.  I’ve been mindless ever since.

I’m taking Monday and Tuesday off to let my brain cool off.  We worked close to 80 hours this week and I’m just roasted.  We accomplished a lot, but it was rushed… way rushed.

Now from the Don’t Knock It Til You Try It Department comes word that I’ve fallen upon a copy of Windows Vista to try it out (yes, legally).  So I will do so on the primary x86 machine at home.

This will be, of course, the final determining factor about what I do… either branch off completely to the Mac or stick with Windows/PC.

Here’s to hoping it’s a good experience… cough.

So I’ve pulled down the latest Parallels software and thrown it on my Mac.  My first action was to do a leap of faith and blow away the VM of Windows that I’ve had for some time and reinstall it as a Boot Camp’d partition.

Then, I fired up Parallels and told it to use the partition.  Shockingly enough, it works… and it works well.

It’s scary for Microsoft when software has advanced so far that they can corral Windows into a window or a partition, either way… with little user effort.  VERY little user effort.

It’s pretty sad when you title a blog post just so you can jog your memory about what you’re going to say, just in case you go onto a long-winded schpeal (sp).

Exchange Tears

Okie, if you’re an Exchange admin – particularly an Exchange admin – even more particular an Exchange admin of a large enterprise – if you’ve not been paying attention to the disaster that Satan doth bring upon you known as Daylight Saving Time 2007, you should be fired from your job.  You should be setting expectations of your users right now.  Their calendars are toast, friends.  Toast.  Those three weeks during the delta period, they are toast.

Is it just me, or did the iSight cameras (non-integrated) disappear from the Apple Store?

Could we be seeing an upgrade in the iSight line in the near future?

Today I became quite fascinated by the Twingley Blogosphere Screensaver (I lost the link and I’m too lazy to go look it up – Google it, gang).  The Twingley Blogosphere Screensaver gives you that spooky feeling you used to get when you first hooked up a Hayes 300 baud Smartmodem to jack into the rest of the planet.  It’s that feeling where the entire world was at your fingertips.

Tonight I’ve been listening to Macbreak Weekly and watching the screensaver roll.  Interestingly enough, now that it’s nighttime in the states, you can see the activity blooming like mad.  It’s beautiful to watch… and if you were able to watch the waves from space, I’d imagine it would look something like that.

So, just as soon as I spread my wings on Ubuntu one more time, it smacks me down like the bitch I am. For some odd reason, directories just began to disappear from the disks. Disappear! Can you believe that? I first noticed it when network mounts weren’t coming back and there were long, odd pauses on the desktop when it loaded.

Back to Windows again. Sigh.

I had a problem in Windows over the past two months – it was a problem so annoying that it drove me to try Ubuntu again. I had a problem where everytime the computer toked on the hard disks or the network, it would pause. The mouse would stop moving – just enough to annoy. On first glance, it’s easy to think… okie… my hard drives are messed up (especially after what Ubuntu did!) – but then, I rolled back to some ancient revisions of the SATA driver and the problem went away. We’re talking… ancient as in 2005.

Okie, I took the plunge and threw Beryl onto Ubuntu… along with all the other goodies.

Now that is some bad-ass 3D desktop goodness.  Well worth the effort.

Okie, well, Kubuntu won’t load on my system.  It seems to load successfully, but then won’t reboot.  Going back to what I know – regular old Ubuntu.

Okie, I’m going to drop an F-bomb here.  It’s fucking cold outside.  Fucking.  Cold.

I have also realized that among my many skills as a server engineer/architect/administrator/whatever you call it in your company, I am NOT a very good cabler.  I suck at it.

It’s stupid when it’s warmer in your data center than outside.

Did I mention it’s fucking cold?

I ramble because I have tired.  I am in burnout mode.  I turned off the work phone.  Mail system could go down and I won’t care.  Unplugging from work for the weekend.