www.TheJoe.com

Well, a lot has happened in the past few weeks. I have been meaning to blog, but I have had a birthday, my son has had a birthday, we’re going through a server migration, and I have been flyin kites.

Let’s start with the birthdays…

My birthday was on March 8th. It was pretty uneventful, I headed out on March 7th with some friends and went to the Palomino strip club (all nude with booze - BONUS!). For my actual birthday I went and saw 300 with a couple friends at midnight. We got lucky and were the first ones in the theatre and got choice seats. Had a drink at Hot Shots (now called Kelley’s) said hey to my favorite bartender Bobby and went home. Nothing spectacular.

My son’s Birthday was the 19th. He had a great birthday, we took him and about 14 of our good friends to the Excalibur and did the Knights dinner thing there. We were supposed to go to Blue Man but they changed their age limit to 6 (bummer). He had a good time anyways and got lots of gifts.

Now for the server stuff… UGH!~

We’ve had our server co located with The Planet for a few years now and we decided to upgrade. It’s been quite the experience. It’s been nothing but a series of mis-communications. I won’t go into details since they are a GREAT hosting company. We just got our wires crossed is all.

For the fun stuff… Kites!

As per my last post, you know that I have been getting into kites lately. Well, I can definitely say that I am HOOKED! We’ve all been getting into it… Angel, Dana, Draylan, Jens, and I have been going kite crazy. Although I can say that I probably the one most into it. We’ve gone from our two cool EO6 and EO10 single line box kites to well… I got a couple stunt kites (dual line), the Newtech BLK and Prism Hypnotist (aka Mirage), we got a couple HUGE kites, and are planning on getting a REVolution quad line kite soon. We also purchased a Beetle for draylan and I got a Prism 3D ultralight for low wind days.
We’ve been going out to Silverbowl park by Sam Boyd stadium every Friday evening and flying them and learning. This past weekend we went down to Venice beach in cali and had a blast flying them on the beach. We got a lot of great comments on our kites.

My son and I went kite flying tonight.   Earlier this week, we went to the local kite store ( http://www.awindofchange.com ) and bought a couple kites.  We found out that there is a local kite group that meets on Friday nights and flies kites at the Sam Boyd stadium in Henderson.

So, we headed down there.  Met some cool people, one of them took the time to teach my son and jens how to fly a trick kite.   It was not windy enough so we were unable to let our kites fly.  But, we had a great time,  it’s a wonderful thing hearing my 4 year old son whoopin and hollering at the kites as they did their tricks..

Well, I have to give you a bit of background on me and my beliefs of computers and operating systems. I consider myself a computer person. I don’t ascribe to a particular operating system or computing platform. My experience in computers dates back to 1977 and an IMSAI 8080 running IMDOS and BASIC. From there to various CP/M, Vax, and early SCO Unix. I’ve seen and worked on the gamut of operating systems and hardware. Including proprietary stuff like Cisco IOS. I’ve been through my share of network operating systems from Novell, Unix, early Microsoft Server stuffs. So, I think I am a relic.

Over my career when I was primarily in the tech fields, before my management and lately entrepreneurial phase, I jumped on the Microsoft bandwagon and learned how to maintain large networks with Active Directory and Windows Server. I got complacent and forgot about my roots and love of command line OS’s. I had dabbled with Linux in it’s early days, but as my time between tech and management roles became demanding, I gave up “playing” and stuck with the practical and corporate based applications. I actually got to the point where I got so involved with management that I no longer had any time for anything “fun” in the computing world.

Well, over the past few years being in business for myself, I have had the opportunity to get back to “playing” I have built and configured servers internally running every OS I could get my hands on. I have to say, I missed the fun. I am lucky that I am able to afford a decent co located server or two and several PC’s (about 40ish) at home. (Well, we got up to about 40ish as of 6 months ago… we’ve since sold most and have switched to laptops which we now are at about 10+ current models)

So, I started playing with Linux again. I have played with all the current popular flavors (Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo, and others) I have decided that I like CentOS best for server stuff and Fedora for my personal stuff. But, man, I must say I am having fun again.

The crazy thing is, that since I went into management about 10 years ago, I lost touch with a lot of friends that were die hard tech people (or most of them just found their career and stuck to a particular path of technology). Anyways, since I was getting into Linux, I decided to find a LUG - Linux User’s Group.

Since we’re moving to the Los Angeles area and I would need to make some friends there, I looked up L.A. based LUGs and found the San Fernando Valley Linux User’s Group ( www.sfvlug.org ). Jens and I took a trip down there last Saturday and finally caught up with them since their regular place got the reservations mixed up.

We met some real cool people, and for the first time in a long time I felt like I was around my own kind for a change. I am thinking of driving down on Monday and meeting up with them again. Might be a regular thing.
Anyways, there was no real point to this post, I was just thinking about it and happened to be on my blog… hehehe