10:00 AM Good morning to you all. Did everyone do their taxes? Heh. I put it off to the last minute, of course - I did the taxes a while ago, but since we owe the government money (so they tell me) I haven't sent it in yet. Remind me to do that later today... <G>

An interesting link came in this morning - here is a BBC story about the completion of Charles Babbage's printer. He designed a mechanical computer for the calculation of mathematical tables over 150 years ago, and when it was finally built (completed in 1991) it worked flawlessly. The printer - which is half the size of the computer - is an amazing device; apparently, it works more or less as a printing press, but it produces not only regular printing-press plates as well as paper copy, but it allows the user to preformat the tables. Number of columns, column width, typeface, line spacing, even line wrapping. Amazing. I can't even get HP to do all of that...

Other than that, a quiet weekend. Spent some time with Perl and various mail servers, but I haven't found anything I'm really comfortable with, either. We'll see how it goes. And now, as most of my time budget was taken up with the weekly maintenance, I had best get some real work done. Later.

9:30 AM Now that Tom has recovered from his "incident," we're free to laugh at him for it. <G> Of course, if I were a fair-minded individual, I'd have to admit that I've pulled some pretty glaring ones (like this weekend when I rebuilt my router box without gcc installed - ouch), but since I'm not we'll just pretend I'm perfect. Did I say pretend? I meant "acknowledge."

Boy I'm in a snotty mood today. Must be the lack of caffeine.

New Linux magazine on the block; Maximum Linux." This magazine is excellent; the first "real" issue, which I have here now, has quite a few excellent articles in it. The only one I consider useless is the one on Unreal Tournament, and that's just personal bias - the article is, from what little I read, well written. Pick it; you won't regret it. The article on configuring Apache is worth the cover price on its own. And, wonder of wonders - the editors aren't too biased! They actually mention good things about the Windows operating system! They feel Linux us better, and I can't disagree with them when they say so; they state reasons, they're clear, and logical. How refreshing.

Heh. Toys.

9:30 Hee hee hee. I was busy playing with new... er... software yesterday. We got $200 of Nerf guns as a "morale booster." So very little productive work got done yesterday; between meetings and ambushes - some of which were one and the same - I didn't have any free time. There's something relaxing about firing foot-long arrows that scream at your boss. Very cathartic. <G>.

Today's going to be a little more hectic, lots of running around and waiting for other people. We'll see how it goes, and if things get boring, that's what the Nerf guns are for. I am going to spend some time this afternoon - hopefully - building an X Server on Windows. That should prove interesting...

9:30 AM I need some of those drugs of Tom's - I can't remember much. My name occaisionally escapes me as well...

Spent yesterday afternoon taking a tour of a brand-new AT&T data center here in the Phoenix area. Very impressive. The facility itself was built in the bad old days of the Cold War, and designed as a communications switching facility; since it served Luke and Williams AFBs, it's got a lot of redundancy. Two separate power feeds (now THAT's redundant power), a UPS capable of running the facility for 1/2 an hour, and four diesel generators, each rated at the same power feed as the main power inputs. The generator room also has footings and pads for up to five more generators. The tank farm has enough fuel for five days at continuous load.

In short, they aren't going to go down. Apparently, in the 15 years the building was in operation (it's been vacant for a while before being rebuilt) they never, ever lost power. Not even for a minute. They have enough power generating capacity that in an emergency, they could power two of the city grids themselves.

We can't beat that. Wow.

Time for another meeting. Sigh. I hate meetings, I really do. Isn't there some way around them? Why can't I just send a robot to go, take notes for me, then throw the notes away? That's all I do...