17 Sep 2002 logic   » (Journeyer)

Still here...

I'm still around, even though I've been a little too quiet lately. Life has taken a few interesting turns lately, which has resulted in very little energy for updating the diary. I'll be better from now on. Honest.

What's down?

Tomcat is dead again, bah. I'm having no end of trouble getting it to actually fire up; it's failing with an obscure exception. Likely another case of PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair). On top of that, a recent glibc upgrade appears to have b0rked jabberd (or, more specifically, the AIM transport; I really need to start lobbying my friends to start running Jabber natively). On the upside, I've cut over completely to Apache 2.0. I can't imagine ever switching back to 1.3 after playing with this version.

Hosting

I'm hosting a friend's website for his election campaign (no link just yet, I'm not sure if he wants it made public until he's done setting it up). Sounds like he's a pretty strong candidate for the position in comparison to the competition. Hope he wins. :-)

Work, or lack thereof...

I have been without a full-time employer for 292 days now, not counting the occasional consulting work I've been able to find in the interim. Money is getting very tight these days; yay stress. I continue to be amazed at the change in the job market from just a couple of years ago. (Shameless plug: Anyone looking for a jack-of-all-trades fellow who can manage high-availability/high-visibility UNIX environments, read and occasionally write in a hodge-podge of programming languages, and put up with requirements that change daily without strangling too many nearby developers? I'm your guy. Have your people call my people, we'll do lunch. :-)

Random ramblings

It's 2:30 in the morning in my neck of the woods, and I've been seeing this hour come and go quite a bit lately. I've always thrived on a little bit of stress, and this is the usual result; late nights doing anything until I can fall asleep quickly. ;-) I've noticed that I don't take to the weird hours like I used to; yet another sign that I'm not a kid anymore. I've been polishing the resume a bit lately, and I have nearly a decade of honest experience in this industry behind me now; a few of you old-timers reading this might laugh, but that sounds like a lot longer than it felt. Today, I have friends running for public office, educating at the post-secondary level, and operating successful companies, but it doesn't seem like very long ago that I was talking with neighbors in residence about what we'd be doing four years from now (then?) when we graduated. Back then, geekishly asking a cute music major to dance and making a complete fool of yourself; today, wives and ex-wives, long-term plans, and wondering what ever happened to that cute music major (or if she even remembers your name ;-).

Yikes. I just re-read that; you'd think I was 80 from the way it sounded, but I'm only barely approaching 30. Hmm, I wonder what I'll be remembering a decade from now?

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