I hate Windows

Maybe “hate” is too strong a word.

And to be honest, it’s not entirely Windows’ fault.  I mean… Windows 7 is actually pretty decent.  It has things I like about it.  The new taskbar is a thing of beauty, even if it does steal some ideas from Mac OS X.

My current Windows Desktop.  Me and Happy Deer are friendsOriginal by Nathan Lanier on Flikr.

So let me be more specific.  I hate administrating Windows.  Especially when it comes to deploying software.

If you’ve ever had to manage a large group of Windows systems, or a large group of computers in general, you probably know what I’m talking about.  Even with Active Directory and Group Policy software deployment, you are just too limited to be able to easily administrate any software package that comes along.

Especially poorly designed software installers.  *queue angry glare at older Adobe packages*

So what is an administrator to do?

Use WPKG.

Continue reading

Super… stuff.

thisisinadequate.jpg

Today the Patriots faced off against the Giants.

I spent the day at work to avoid it.

And to get some work done, actually. But that’s my fault for saying certain things would be done by Monday. They’re still not completely ready to go, but I can at least get things sorted on Monday instead of being several days behind.

I never really understood the big deal about the Super Bowl really. I’m not much of a professional sports watching person at all. Though I do find some things fascinating. I remember watching a Cricket game during one of my trips to Australia, and just trying to figure out what was going on was amusing.

Maybe it’s just American sports. It just all seems too… commercialized really.

What I’m really interested in is the current political scene in the states at the moment.

Super Tuesday is this week… and the democratic candidacy looks more and more interesting. Personally I’m rooting for Obama. His whole campaign currently is based around change… and though a lot of people have scoffed at the whole “change just for the sake of change” thing… honestly, this country needs some change. And its heartening to see others, from other countries, rooting for him too. Maybe at some point I won’t actually have to feel ashamed for living in this country. It at least has pried me out of my apathy this year to actually get up and be involved more. I’m going to make every attempt to attend the local democratic caucus this year. It should be a learning experience if nothing else. I don’t expect much of a turn out, considering the area where I live is so Republican it scares me… but it is one of the few times where a voice, no matter how small, matters.

Scary Hillary

Besides, Clinton scares me. There’s something about her that is unsettling. And I’m tired of the same two families being ensconced in the White House for… what? The past 20 years? It’s absurd when you think about it. I’d say it’s past time for some new blood.

So I guess I’m publicly stating that I support Obama for the democratic nomination. It seems to be the popular thing to do lately.

Otherwise, life moves on. Work sucks, haven’t talked to my family for a couple weeks, feeling a bit cut off… the usual. It may be time to get in touch with some people I haven’t seen for a while. If they haven’t completely given up on me.

One last note. If you get the chance, watch Six Feet Under. It’s the Netflix series de jour at the house here, and it’s amazing. There is a complexity to the characters that is fascinating, and it has a fantastically morbid, dark humor to it at times. It is, after all, set in a funeral home. Highly recommended.

Photo Hunt Week 11: Technology

Mmmm... Apple

I had a lot of choices for this week’s photo hunt picture, considering the field I work in. This photo is the one that caught my eye, however. It was taken several months ago, during our December of installing lots of stuff in the attic (you can find the blog post about it here), and echoes back to my comment about Apple hardware being damn pretty in a rack. Pictured, on top, is an Intel Xeon Xserve paired with an Apple Xraid below it. Part of our summer project this year is transitioning fully to them after their testing period these past few months.

Now if I could only convince them to buy a few more.

Racks for the Holidays

One rack + one attic crawl space = fun and merriment for all.

For those of you that have kept in touch with me over the holidays, you’ve likely heard me weave a tale of wonderment and joy as I’ve explained what I’ve had to do over my holiday break at work.

This picture pretty much captures the entire situation as succinctly as possible.

Now, after you get that seven foot rack up into that attic crawl space, figure out a way to jostle the equipment that’s already up there around to make room for it in a fairly cramped space, all the while having fun with a hydraulic scissor lift in the process, imagine, if you will, proceeding to carry up and install almost $50,000 worth of network equipment as well.

It made for some interesting work weeks.

I also have several pictures of us unboxing our new “toys”, but I’ll spare this blog from those images, even though there is one rather amusing shot of Shawn praying at the altar of his new Xserve and Xserve Raid. I will say one thing. Apple hardware is damn pretty in a rack.

Where am I?

Well I think I’ve covered all things meme for now. I should probably do a quick update about what the hell I’ve been up to.

Sadly, it’s mainly one thing.

Work.

Warning… loads of geek and work related drivel below.

About a month ago I was hoping that things would quiet down and that I’d be able to get back to the usual routine of the 9 to 5 job, settle in, and hopefully be able to pursue some of the hobbies I’ve wanted to get into for a long time now. I have a huge list on this site of 101 things I want to do, and not only have I not even updated it for a while, I’m a far cry from making any sort of progress on it.

This depresses me in a lot of ways.

But work marches forward, and it’s hard to keep standing as the waves crash in.

What I thought would be a wonderful bit of progress with virtualizing some of the servers has turned into a nightmare. The software isn’t stable. Not by a long shot. But the really wonderful thing is that it only seems to crash when there is heavy load on it. And that it’s not a sure thing it will crash even then.

Word to the wise: Xen is unstable on new Intel hardware. Take it from me personally.

Luckily there is an update coming out soon (as in this week) that should eliminate the problem. This will of course mean more work for me, as upgrading Xen isn’t exactly the simplest of tasks, as it’s heavily integrated into the system kernel.

At this point I just want it to be stable, though.

The other issue I’ve had is with the Macintosh workstations; though admittingly this has affected Shawn more than it has me. Don’t get me wrong. Mac OS X and integrating with a Windows Active Directory server has come a long way. It’s actually fairly painless for the most part.

Unless you need to do any sort of user management.

You see, I have unruly users where I work. They like to poke around, change settings, hack systems, and generally make my life difficult. I try to prevent this from happening as much as possible.

This is why generally Apple’s Workgroup Manager is my friend.

But it has… issues… with Active Directory.

Namely, to get it to work as a single solution with it I have to modify the Active Directory schema. That’s not so bad in and of itself. I’ve mucked around with LDAP enough now to know what I’m doing most of the time. There are other problems with going this route… which I won’t get into here. Leave a comment or e-mail me if you’re really interested.

So… the other route is to setup an OS X Server to act strictly as a Workgroup Management solution, and then tie that into Active Directory.

This all works hunky dorey. If you don’t mind managing everyone in a blanket format. If you need special groups to manage different users differently, good luck, as you’ll have to add all those users by hand to each individual group and keep them updated by hand every time you add users or their groups change. I don’t exactly work for a huge enterprise operation, but I still don’t want to have to go through and hand manage 1200 different users for their group permissions.

Add to that the fact that OS X 10.3 workstation act differently then 10.4 workstations, and they both have their own set of caveats and workarounds.

I love OS X. I really do. It makes me smile everytime I boot up my MacBook and log in to an OS X workstation to do the major part of my work every day.

But there are still some major limitations to deploying OS X in an Active Directory world. Especially if you need any sort of end-user settings management.

Speaking of MacBooks though… it looks like Shawn has gotten one of the first generation ones unfortunately. It’s beginning to show classic signs of hardware issues, with it doing the random system shutdown thing, and now showing the discoloration of the plastic on the palmrest. It’s going to have to go into service at some point unfortunately, though it will likely have to wait until I get back from Australia.

And that brings me to my next blog post.

Blerghy blergh, with a not so blerghy future.

Working 14 hour shifts two days in a row can start to do weird things to you.

I just slept for 12 hours straight, and can’t decide if I feel better or worse for it yet. I think my head feels better from just knowing that I’ve decided not to go into work at all today, even though I’m still a tad stressed about knowing there is still so much to be done. Things will just have to be done piecemeal at this point. I can’t keep doing work days where I’m there from sun-up to sun-up.

To my credit, I’ve done the nearly impossible. I’ve configured a directory server for nearly 2,000 users with an attached file storage server all using virtual hardware and also fully deployed about 100 workstation images and fully tested and confirmed it all works. In about a week. And that’s even dealing with crappy Windows software on the workstations, which I now loathe more than ever. I get more and more jealous of Shawn and his Mac workstations. He’s been working with software called radmind to seamlessly deploy software updates to all his systems and bring them up to the same spec. I think I’m going to tell Jim we’re getting only Mac workstations from now on.

Enough work drivel though. At least now I feel somewhat safe about getting back on a regular schedule. This means absolutely no working this weekend. Which means I’m very much looking forward to playing World of Warcraft with my close friends again. It’s one of the few times I have a chance to really enjoy myself lately.

Though I do hope to get out and do a few more things in the coming months. I still have photos from a semi-recent camping trip that need to be developed. And I have a trip to Australia in a couple months coming up.

Work may suck, but there’s a lot to look forward to.

The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire.

What a dearth of entries lately. 🙁

I can only blame inordinate amounts of work stress and lack of time. And generally not wanting to be around a computer when I do get some time. Except maybe for World of Warcraft.

Even World of Warcraft weekend isn’t looking like it will happen this week, which is depressing to no end.

I’ll have to explain work bits in a separate post at some point. I don’t really feel up to geeking out about it tonight. Maybe when things are actually in place and working.

I did have some excitement tonight, however. Shawn and I drove home today to find the roads blocked off to his house. And lights flashing.

His neighbor’s house had caught fire.

Evidently they’ve been working on putting it out for the past few hours. There are still fire trucks humming outside as I type this. The house is still smoldering, but I don’t see any visible licks of flame at this point at least, so they’ve kept it fairly well contained.

Still a bit worrisome though. Don’t know what I would of done if it had reached our house as well.

Probably huddle in a corner somewhere, cursing myself for wondering if my day could of gone any worse.

It will be interesting to see how bad the damage is tomorrow during the daylight hours.

Honestly, though… this neighbor across the street from us is definately the ‘crazy neighbor’. They house has always been just overloaded with stuff. Boxes and boxes spewing from the hallways and doorways of the house into the garage, sometimes even into the lawn… and their cars. Shawn even told me a story about a time he watched the neighbor guy walk out and relieve himself on one of the tires of their car. Possibly because the bathroom was full of boxes of junk. Who knows.

It wasn’t a complete surprise to find out their place had caught fire.

It’s just a little disconcerting.

I am geek. Hear me squeek.

So, this shall officially mark a landmark in the slow yet continued updates to this, my little blog away from blogs.

I am posting from work.

It’s about an hour past the time I should of headed home, and the building is well and truly deserted. But I had to post this little gem of geek ingenuity.

Shawn and I have found a temporary use for all the old iMacs that are getting moved around this summer.

Behold, the ultimate iLamp workstation!

This setup took a little time and planning to put together, but is actually quite fun to use. To the left and right are two 700MHz G4 15 inch iMacs, and the center machine is a 800MHz G4 17 inch iMac. They aren’t the fastest machines, but they get the job done, and being able to balance Office, web surfing, and general administration between three machines means things are a little snappier all in all. Plus it’s fantastic for being able to manage large amounts of information at once. In the photo above you can see me monitoring network traffic on the left machine using Cacti, or as I like to call it, “MRTG on steroids”. On the center machine I have Apple Remote Desktop running, with views into four separate workstations, nicely tiled using Exposé. And on the right I have an Excel spreadsheet up with assorted information on all of the switches used here at work.

Screen switching is made painless with a little piece of software called Synergy. It allows you to move the mouse to the edge of one screen and have it magically appear on the next, just as if you were simply using a system with multiple monitors. An especially nifty bonus is that the software is multi-platform, meaning you can combine Windows, Linux and OS X machines all into one huge logical desktop, complete with clipboard synchronization. The Mac version is a little buggy, however. It doesn’t handle going to sleep very well, and has some logistic problems if you want to install the software so that it launches on start-up. It’s worked beautifully for me in this demonstration, though… and if I ever do get an iMac like I want to, it will be handy in being able to have my PC and Mac side by side and simply move from one to the other flawlessly.

I can almost say that I’ve been more productive today than I have been in a long time.

I know. I am uber geek.

It’s only temporary, of course. These machines will get repurposed and are only in the office for maintenance and software imaging as it is. They are sure fun to play with though.

And now, it’s time for me to go home. Good bye work week, hello weekend.

Zombie

Feel like zombie. Need sleep. So tired.

Finished taxes tonight… err.. this morning.

I get to pay again this year. Though not as bad as last year. About half the amount from last year. Really need to get my withholding adjusted at work so it’s not as bad next time.

Between car and taxes I’ve had to dip a bit into my savings, though. I’m worried about the trip to Australia at the end of the year, but I think I’ll be back on track in just a couple months. I have until July really. If I don’t have the money to get my airfare by then I’m in trouble.

I’m afraid I’ll be pretty worthless at work today too. Though they’re generally pretty understanding about tax season.

Need brains…

Braaaaaaiiiins.

Blackout

Today has been… odd.

And somewhat tiring.

Going into work today, I just had a bad feeling about things. This past week has seemingly drug itself out in so many ways… and I haven’t been feeling 100% up to snuff the past couple of days. I had a hell of a time trying to get some sleep last night. I think it is partly because of the recent temperature shifts here. Spring is definitely here as its been harder and harder to reach my sleeping temperature comfort zone of just above freezing. Anyone that has ever stayed with me before knows how cold I like to keep my living area. I like to be shivering before I get under the covers, and then simply let body heat and insulation do its work.

It also is really effective in waking you up when you have to get out from under the covers and get going in the morning.

But I digress.

I still had a bad feeling about things today.

Things were quite busy once I got to work, and I wasn’t able to get in my general half-hour of e-mail checking and carousing through log reports and traffic analysis.

And then, once things were slowly getting quiet, the power went out.

Which, as any IT support staff or system administrator can tell you, is a complete nightmare.

It seems that the wind was so bad today (another side effect of spring here) that it knocked down a telephone pole. The power was out long enough that I was forced to shut down all the servers and hope that everything came up without any issues. For the most part, they did. We’ll see on Monday how broken things truly are, however.

The combination of stress and lack of sleep finally caught up with me when I got home, though. I laid down to catch a quick nap, and ended up getting about 5 hours of sleep instead. So now I have completely sabotaged my sleep schedule as well.

Though it does seem like a really good excuse to get some World of Warcraft play time in.

I actually always used to really love it when the power went out. As a kid, I have fond memories of lighting the oil lanterns scattered about the house and having fun assembling jigsaw puzzles. My absolute favorite memory, however, is from when the power went out in the middle of the night. I remember going outside and being in sheer, absolute awe at how gorgeous the stars were. I have never seen them so bright, or seeminly so close… like I truly could reach out and draw them down with my hands.

It’s another reason I miss camping, and sleeping under the stars. I truly do believe everyone should sleep outside with nothing but a sleeping bag and the stars at some point in their life.

Some things are just too breathtaking to miss.

I, Geek.

I had another job shadow today.

I find it intriguing the number of kids that want to get into the computer field these days… but really don’t have a clue.

I know I’m a geek through and through. I started playing on computers in grade school… entering hundreds of lines of code on a TRS-80 so that I could play a text based Star Trek game. There weren’t any sort of courses or classes I could take to help me along my way. I played with computers because I loved them as a hobby.

I still do.

I just don’t really see that drive in the kids I’ve seen lately. We had one kid, last year, who was pretty good. A fellow geek, really.

For his senior project he built his own Beowulf cluster. Sure, with crappy hardware. But he did it on his own.

Now that’s pretty cool.

Two of my books came today. Charles de Lint’s Wolf Moon and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon. Wolf Moon looks like it should be a quick read, so I hope to start it soon. I just couldn’t pass up a book that involved two of my favorite things in the title.

Mists of Avalon is a little more intimidating, but is a book I’ve wanted to read for a long, long time. The reissue copy I have is quite stunning. The dust sleave is tastefully done, and the binding is high quality. Mainly, though, I’m just glad to have a copy of it finally.

I can tell I’ll be up late a few nights in the future.

Musings

It’s been a pleasant past couple of days.

The weekend was spent mostly wasting time on World of Warcraft. And quite happily, I might add. It’s incredibly fun to play through again from a fresh perspective, with new players and playing a different class. I’m having a blast leveling up my rogue at the moment, and from what I can tell, those I played with had a rather enjoyable time as well.

Somehow I have the feeling that World of Warcraft may take up a chunk of my weekend once and awhile. Not every weekend, I hope… as I know there are things I still want to do… but it’s good to just lose yourself in something simple and enjoyable once and awhile.

Especially when you can do it with friends.

Work bits were mostly back to normal today. I’ve been able to tinker more with Cisco equipment, and was able to setup a video conferencing unit as well. Which can be a little tricky to do considering the levels of security and firewall protection that are in place. I also broke down and ordered a couple of new CD’s today. I had been poking around on iTunes and was having a bit of fun putting in known artists I enjoy and seeing what else people had purchased that was similar. I still have a hard time buying songs directly from iTunes, though. I’m a bit of an audiophile, and the 128Kbps just doesn’t cut it for me quality wise. Plus I’m a little old fashioned in that I like to have that physical disc with the liner notes and inserts.

At any rate, the CD’s I ended up buying were Ladytron’s Witching Hour, Imogen Heap’s Speak For Yourself, and Depeche Mode’s Exciter. The first two are newly discovered artists, which I hope to post reviews of at some point. The Depeche Mode, though, is to fill in one more album gap in my collection. I don’t aspire to track down everything they’ve ever done, because I think that would be a lesson in futility in ways… but I certainly don’t mind picking up an album here or there.

Otherwise, things are fairly quiet. Shawn’s girlfriend is on spring break, so I expect to see her a little more often this week, which is good. Shawn has officially declared that he’s going to take a bit of a break from work this week, for somewhat obvious reasons. We watched My Neighbor Totoro tonight, which Danie hadn’t seen. It’s definitely a kid’s movie, but it’s still amusing nonetheless.

And, one of the happiest bit of news, I finally got part of the long overdue overseas package off today. There was just way too much procrastination on my part, and it was starting to make me a little upset at myself. I feel better knowing that a large chunk of the stuff I’ve been wanting to send is finally on its way… and hope to still be able to put together a few care packages here and there in the months to come. Hopefully with more maple and cinnamon goodness.

And Cthulhu? He’s just happy to be on his way.

Something

A week since my last post…

Needless to say, I haven’t done as good as I had hoped I would.

This week has been a rough one, to be honest. Things at work have actually picked up a bit. I was hoping it would be fairly quiet until the end of the year, as it has a tendency of being this time of year, but a few major software updates made things a little shaky for a while. Plus I found out earlier in the week that a couple high school students wanted to job shadow me, of all people, for their senior projects.

I find it amusing that there are kids in high school eager to join the IT market that don’t have the faintest idea of how the guts of a computer or a network work. I can’t blame them completely. There’s not really a curriculum here that covers something like that. The vast majority of computer oriented classes at the school I work at consist of how to touch type and use Word and Excel. Which are excellent skills to have, to be sure. It’s just pretty far from things like actually building your own computer, for example. Or putting together a simple network.

I guess that’s why they have job shadows.

Although the blank stares I got while describing what I was doing as I added a VLAN to the network for use with our DMZ was entertaining.

All this has meant, though, that I have been having a hard time finding moments to dedicate to my goals.

And I’m upset at myself because of that.

Thankfully I was able to get a little bit on track last night, though it meant that I didn’t have the time really to post things here. So this a little later than I wanted it to be, but the good news is that I’ve actually made some progress… and spent some time away from work.

Shawn, Danie and I spent most of the day yesterday in Moses Lake. Just having fun for the most part. We were able to have a nice dinner at a favorite mexican restaurant in town, and fit in a little bit of shopping as well.

And me, being the impulse purchaser I am, managed to snag up a movie I’ve been looking forward to tremendously.

So, needless to say, we watched a movie when we got home.

Howl’s Moving Castle is another gorgeous work of art from Hayao Miyazaki. I am slowly beginning to collect all his pieces, including Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds, Spirited Away, and Princess Mononoke. Howl’s Moving Castle is actually more straightforward than most of his others works, with a storyline that is fairly simple, and familiar in some ways, echoing a lot of fantasy tales. It is, however, still stunningly animated and an absolute joy to watch. I’ve found out the story is actually based on a book, which I may have to track down and read. If I ever get around to doing so, I’ll have to compare and contrast the two here. This is something I would actually like to do more often when watching movies, as most of them actually are based on some literary piece of some sort. I know that when I watched the first Narnia movie, the desire was quite strong to go reread the books… and see if somehow my childhood memories of them where somehow rose tinted compared to my mixed reactions of the movie.

At any rate, so far its been a rather pleasant weekend. I’ve even managed to get a couple more chapters into The Wayfarer Redemption, and it is still my solemn goal to get the rest of the way through it before the end of the month. Which I think is still entirely possible at this point.

I do have to admit another addiction that has been stealing away some of my time once more as well, though. World of Warcraft. I’ve tried to hide this addiction for the longest time… because there was a time when it was actually a serious problem for me. Though not lately, thankfully. When I was inbetween jobs and wasn’t sure if I was going to have full time work at Royal, you could almost gaurentee that I was playing that evil game. That was a dark time for me… where I didn’t know where my life was going or how I was going to make ends meet. That game was an escape… and much worse, in ways, than drinking. I’m not saying it’s evil incarnate, because honestly, I had an absolute blast playing for the most part. Blizzard has done something amazing in building a game in the massively multiplayer genre that is genuinely fun to play. They make it easy to get started, make questing easy to do, and weave in a storyline that is actually quite intriguing. There are still some balance issues between classes, but considering the choices you have and their very differing skillset, I think there are some things that can be forgiven. That being said, I reached a point playing where I lost a lot of interest in the game. And, thank god, I was able to start working full time in Royal, which simply made it so I couldn’t put in the amount of time required for one of the most frustrating aspects of the game.

The end game content.

Unless you have absolutely no life and all the free time in the world, World of Warcraft becomes virtually unplayabe at level 60. At that point it stops becoming a matter of questing or simple runs through dungeons with a small group of friends. At level 60 you have to start running instances that require raids of 40 people… with the hope that something for you drops that you can use… and that you don’t get out-rolled or out-bid on the item by one of the others in your class that is going to invariably be there. These raids generally will take multiple days to complete… and will require being in a guild that takes such things seriously. And will likely kick you if you don’t have the time to seriously take part.

This is where it all falls apart, and, in my opinion, the game stops being fun.

I hold out hope that the expansion pack will solve some of these problems, but honestly I doubt it will. At least until you hit the level cap at 70 once again. But I have found myself playing the game once again despite these drawbacks. Because, honestly, though reaching level 60 might be rather anticlimatic, getting there is still an absolute blast. I’ve been leveling up a character with my little brother once more, and having a fun time doing it. Partly because I’m playing an Alliance character for the first time, but also because we are playing on a PvP server, which is a different experience entirely. It adds a level of apprehension to the game that constantly keeps you on your toes while you’re playing. And, of course, there is something satisfying about randomly battling the other faction and, hopefully, coming out victorious.

Add to that the fact that two other good friends have started a character on another server, and I find myself once more happily trying to level and quest to catch up to them.

The game may have its faults… but its still well worth a play through in my opinion. And maybe some day they’ll fix those end game issues.

Until then, I’m not too worried about it sucking my life away again, at least.

There are too many books that need to be read instead.

Winds of change.

Spring has arrived.

There’s no fanfare of flowers or lush greenery to signal its arrival. Nothing overt that you can sense while looking out the window as you enjoy a cup of coffee in the morning. Not even the slight upshift in temperature constitutes the telling factor.

It’s the wind.

The past few days have brought 20mph winds, on average… with gusts up to 40mph in some areas. Othello itself isn’t too bad… but in Royal City, where I work, the wind whips through the valley its nestled in with incredible speed. It’s the true sign that spring has come. In a month or so it will die down and the more visible aspects of spring will show their faces.

Generally I don’t mind this type of weather. Though it does make me wonder why I don’t cut my hair shorter this time of year.

As for work bits, things progress. You may have noticed that there is a new book in my “Currently Reading” section. This is something my supervisor at work actually purchased for me, so it’s not a leisure reading item by any stretch. There’s a serious need for a QoS strategy at Royal, and I’m the person that’s going to have to implement it. And though I know the basics of QoS, I have no clue how to go about implementing something large scale on a predominately Cisco network.

I plan to change that shortcoming in the following weeks.

It has, however, made me question my certification path choice. I do want to get the CCSP certification eventually, as the network security side of things really interests me. And I seem to have a knack for understanding concepts in that area of networking. But the CCIP looks interesting now as well. Especially considering the QoS test is one of the required modules for it.

Either way, I’d be stupid not to take the QoS test after studying up for it, implementing a strategy for Royal, and having the material fresh in my mind. Even if it’s the only test I take in that certification tree.

And I know this must be incredibly boring to most of you.

It’s good to have finally found the weekend, though. I do have some goals for this weekend, beyond just getting some time to read. There’s a package assembled here that was meant to go overseas weeks ago. It’s my top priority to make sure that it does. I also would like to find some time to work on some cosmetic aspects of this blog, since there are some minor issues that are irritating me here and there.

Otherwise, I hope to just enjoy myself, catch up with some friends, and be buffeted by the winds of spring.

I’ll miss you, winter.