Spent the day more-or-less computerless. Quite a shock to the system it was, too...

Not computerless today, but no updates. Good food and good company interfered. Sue me. <G>

9:00 AM I made it through a weekend without in some way injuring myself. Proud of me? I am.

Didn't do a whole lot on the computer front, other than make some plans and set a few uncontrollable events in motion. <G> That's me, playing with fire. Always fun.

I made some more changes and tweaks to the mail server I have running (CommuniGate Pro; see Tom for lots of glowing reviews) and a little fence-patrolling and tightening. Now that I intend to use that machine as my main mail server, I feel a lot less comfortable with the (already better-than-average) security in place. Tightening it, fortunately, didn't take too long; it's now at least as good as the security I require on production systems. I'll tighten that some more, later, but for now, it's good enough. Which means it's time to begin creating the DNS records and tables for GraniteCanyon, and shake the last dust of Zanova from my sandals. I have Tom's example to follow, which will help, but this will be a slightly different setup. Hydras will be the main web server for rearviewmirror.org, but I want to use my system as the mail server. So I need to create two host records, rather than just one; rearviewmirror.org, which will be Hydras, and mail.rearviewmirror.org, which will be my box. The MX record will then point to mail, while everything else points to Hydras.

Not content with these minor shakeups, I have some serious housekeeping to do around here. 42 weeks ago, when I created this site, I used a simple folder-and-file layout because it was the simplest method that matched my skill level and the amount of time I wanted to spend on it. I created a weekly template file, an index file, and that was it.

Since then, I've changed the structure twice to accomodate increased growth, changed HTML editors... three times? More, if you count experiments with various and sundry editors. I've gotten back into a heavy use of Perl and other server-based scripting languages and databasing work; I briefly considered ColdFusion, but that would tie me to a server platform not yet in heavy use. I also spend too much time typing in HTML tags when I should be focussing on content. I'm editing this page using Xemacs under Windows 2000; although it's still syntactically correct, Xemacs doesn't format things the way the editor I used to create the template did.

So what am I going to change? Well, that's a good question.

Step one is to move this site over to Hydras. For the move, nothing will change with the site structure or style; everything will stay exactly as it is now. Step two is to design what I want for the new site; that might be as simple as a new weekly template file that's formatted for Xemacs, that might be something else. Third, I'm going to make it easier for me to create a new day's entry; most likely in the short term, I'll create a post as a text file with the formatting I want in a text editor, then run a script on it that will make extensive use of Perl's Regular Expressions to format the post as HTML and add it to the weekly file. In the long term, this site will probably become more dynamic, using CGI or some other server-side language and a database. How? I haven't gotten that far yet. <G>.

Somewhere in there, I'm supposed to travel to San Mateo for Siebel. Now, this is a multi-billion dollar company. They even make a profit every year. I don't yet have my corporate "Diner's Club" card (and that's another WTF?? for me...) and people are making noises about me buying the tickets and hotel room and Siebel paying me back. Um. Excuse me? Why should I loan a multi-national company money? Not even the scandalously cheap startups (*cough* iTOOL *cough*) want their employees to do things like that. Uh-uh. Not going to happen. These guys want me in San Mateo, no problem. Them chief, me indian. But them chief, them pay.

Speaking of Chiefs, there's one now. Hope he's not on the warpath...

5:30 PM Busy day today. Lots of network work, and conversations cut short with "Hang on, I have to reset the router." Not really difficult, just tedious; lots of fiddling little changes.

The money problem regarding travel was solved quite simply today; my corporate card arrived. Now if someone would just explain why in the hell it's a Diner's Club, I'd appreciate it. To keep it from being useful? Let's see, the airlines all take it, and so do most hotels, they claim, along with plenty of restaraunts. That's nice. On those trips to San Mateo - which I expect to make, oh, three, four times a year? - airfare and hotel are covered. Purchases for my actual job, now - have you ever seen a hardware site that takes Diner's Club? I haven't. And I looked.