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Whew, it’s been a busy year. Back in 2005 I wrote a list of things I’d like to do eventually that I’d be able to do if I had the time and resources that winning the lotto would provide. I’ve made a positive step towards realizing a couple of those.

Family

The big change this year was the addition of Ian. We didn’t get off too well in the beginning, but we’re doing pretty good now. He’s just now to the point where he’s taking his first steps. He’s a smart kid, very inquisitive, but stubborn. Within a few years he’ll be learning how to read and write- I’m guessing it won’t be long until I’m teaching him how to program. He’s got an eye for any type of electronics, but goes nutty for my blackberry or laptop. Yeah, he’s a geek in training.

Jackie’s been doing fairly well, all things considered. She’s been staying home with Ian rather than going back to work, and it’s driving her a little stir crazy. To help ease the cabin fever, she got a laptop for christmas- Ian wasn’t letting her stay in the office, so now she has a way to keep in contact with people from the living room.

Weddings

This was the year of the wedding… Brad and Erin, Jordan and Beth, Matt and Carrie, William and Charleen, Jackie’s friend Joslyn, Jackie’s sister Lori, and Paul and Kristen. I only made it to 4 of the weddings, but I was standing up in two of them. The ones we went to were all in Grand Rapids, so we had the joy of driving back and forth 155 miles each way, with the added bonus of dropping Ian off somewhere along the way

Work

Work started off pretty rough. I have a habit of reflecting the attitudes of those around me, and my supervisor at the beginning of the year was pretty negative. That coupled with Ian’s birth and all the associated expenses turned me into a pretty miserable person. Fortunately the supervisor left and was replaced with a cautious optimist. Things got better- so much so that I just passed the 1 year mark at my current place and still find it interesting and entertaining.

Technologies

I’ve played with many new technologies this year- Jboss, Netscaler and CentOS being the three foremost. I’ve dug back into ruby with a couple of new projects, as well as LDAP and a plethora of new utilities. I even picked up a bit of python. This trend doesn’t look like it’s gonna let up, so the job should be exciting and interesting for some time to come.

Projects

This year saw me move away from music and go back towards software (although I have been playing harmonica in the car at stoplights on the way to work). I joined the Luma team as head cheerleader and started the QT4 branch. After becoming frustrated with the python, qt3->qt4 transition and the codebase in general, I started an unofficial sister project, Ruma. I still sit in the Luma channel and help when I can, but I’m gonna sit back and wait until we’re ready for QT4- hopefully we’ll scrap the entire codebase and start fresh.

Right now I have two other developers “working” for me on Ruma, Lars and Hiro. They’ve put a lot of effort into bringing this bad boy to life, and I’m thankful I’ve had their help. For those of you not aware, Luma and Ruma are LDAP administration tools. As a System Administrator, I use LDAP a lot, so having specialized tools can be helpful.

Another project I started this year was competing in National Novel Writing Month. I finished the rough draft for my first book, Sinblade, a week early. It’s only 150 pages or so, but not a bad start all things considered. Jackie’s (sorta) working on revising it, and once she’s done I’ll open it up for others to start giving me feedback. I’m excited and nervous about it. If it takes off and people like it, I have 6 or so more books that I’m interested in writing.

The money situation is still pretty tight, but it’s getting better. Hopefully next year will be as much of an improvement over this year as this was over last year.

So it’s the end of November, and the final count is 53,708 words. I’ve submitted it to the nano site and got a nifty little image to display:

It’s sorta funny because I finished early- I had a week left when I stopped writing, and I probably could have hit 60k if I had more plot. Maybe when the revision process starts I’ll get some ideas for back stories and such that I can weasel in there.

At 11:50pm on the 21st of November, I completed the NaNoWriMo challenge, writing 50,300 words for my book, Sinblade. I’m not done yet- I still have another 5-10k words to go before I’ll consider the rough draft complete. Here’s my ideal lifecycle for the book:

• Rough Draft: First complete version of the story.
• First Draft: First revised version I send out for people to read. Continuity and plot are checked.
• Second Draft: All first draft changes are merged. English is checked. Plot is evened out. Facts are checked.
• Third Draft: Spell-checking, punctuation, and formatting.
• Fourth Draft: Repeat of third draft with different audience.
• Final Draft: What’s sent to Lulu.com for printing.

My goal is to get the Rough Draft done by December 1st, and that seems a easily reachable goal. Next is to get the First Draft (the first copy to leave the house) out the door for editing and revising by the end of December. I’m not sure how reasonable a goal that will be- I have some catching up to do on my neglected Ruma project. As for the rest of the draft, there are no hard and fast rules- I suspect I’ll be lucky to get to the second draft, let alone the third or fourth.

The end goal is to self-publish through Lulu.com, a print-on-demand book service. This means you’ll be able to buy an actual paperback copy of my book! How cool is that?

Seeing as how it’s now 40 minutes into Thanksgiving, I think I should send out some thanks to those that have helped me:

• Jackie: for bearing with me through another time-consuming project. Hopefully this one will make money.
• Ian: for mostly behaving when I was trying to write.
• VP: for encouraging me to compete in NaNoWriMo with his books, Shining Star and Pulling Strings
• yojimbo, dev_null, mylo, my coworkers, and everyone else who offered to help me: I’ll be taking you up on your offers to help revise

Thanks again everyone for the support! Wish me luck!

Update: Don’t take this post as an example of my writing- it was 1am.

November is National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. Basically there’s a month-long open contest to try and write a novel that’s 50,000+ words. My friend VP has written two books like that, Shining Star and Pulling Strings (both are good, go buy them). This year I thought I’d give it a try- I have a couple of stories kicking around in the back of my head that I’d like to write some day, and I figured this would be the perfect chance to stop putting it off.
The contest started yesterday, and I managed to get off to a great start with 4000 words on the dot- you can check my progress here.

ok, now back to the important writing.

So I’ve had this on again, off again thing with ruby for a while now. Since I first started playing with ruby it got pretty big with rails, and I completely missed that boat. Well, now I’m playing with rails and it’s fairly interesting once you get it up and running. I picked up the O’Reilly book Ruby On Rails and have been walking through it’s Photo project. I’ve went so far as to even throw it in a subversion repository in case I pooch something.

One thing I really like so far is the Scaffolding system- once you create an object model (say, a Photo) and have it generate the table to store it in, it can auto-generate the web interface to allow you to create/edit/delete entries without having to muck with it. The coolest part is if you make any DB changes, the interface is automatically updated. That was something I’ve always hated- updating interface code to reflect DB changes.
At DP I wrote a minor system to do something like that in ASP, but it was still pretty crappy (and dangerous). Dendrite had created a system at SPX called Skel which was hideous (his words), but did sorta the same thing. The main project I worked on there (before it was cancelled) was a replacement for Skel that was very similar to this, but for perl. Now I really wish I woulda kept up with ruby because had I known of rails, I could have essentially ported it to perl and saved a lot of time.

I’m hoping that the rest of rails is as cool as this scaffolding code. It’s taking me a while (5 hours broken up) to wrap my head around it, but it’s finally starting to make sense. I’m looking forward to finding out more about it.

Bruce campbell is sort of a hero of mine- he seems like a nice guy, he’s very charismatic, and plays a lot of roles that I find memorable (which include Evil Dead 1 and 2, army of darkness, Brisco County Jr, and a hundred other bitparts). I got his book for christmas a while back and never got around to reading it- actually, I only read it after a friend borrowed it and said the beginning was ok, but it got boring in the middle.

I started reading this book sunday afternoon, then read it all of monday to the point of being up until 8am tuesday. I was drawn into it and couldn’t put it down, which doesn’t happen often.

He’s a witty writer, has a lot of good stories to tell. If you’re a fan of Army of Darkness or Brisco County Jr, give it a read. Very good stuff.

I use vim a lot. a *LOT*. One thing that really annoys me is page width. When I’m writing code, I like to have a width set to 78 characters. But in some instances, say when I’m working on a book, I like the width set to 90 characters since it’s easier to read. This got me thinking… if I had vim check the current directory for a config, I could have custom configs for different directories. so in ~/.vimrc, I added

if filereadable("./.vimrc")
        source ./.vimrc
endif

and this works great, with one exception… what if i’m sitting in my home directory?

morgajel@p-nut ~ $ vim .vimrc
Error detected while processing /home/morgajel/.vimrc:
E169: Command too recursive
Hit ENTER or type command to continue

it goes into a recursive loop… so now my question is, how do I prevent that? I’m presuming that “changing the if statement to also check and make sure the current directory isn’t home” is the way to go, but I’m not seeing much documentation on how to go about doing it, or at least I’m not looking for the correct thing. Any suggestions?

I’ve been wanting to take a linux certification for some time now. It’s been a goal, but I don’t feel I’m ready. Lately I’ve been studying a lot, trying to prepare myself and took a few practice exams.

The first pre-exam I took was a Linux+ pre-test from skillsoft, which I got a 92% on, which made me fell pretty good.

The next one I took was an LPIC test out of the back of my LPIC Exam Cram book. The LPIC is generally considered to be much harder than the linux+ exam. I needed a 70% to pass, and only got a 62%. Most of the questions I missed were RPM related or x window related.
I’ve since studied those sections and continued to make my way through the exam cram book (I’m on page 207 of 487, reading at most 5 pages a day due to the sheer volume of information on each page).

Today I took a test off the CD that came with the book and got a 70.7%

I’m reviewing my answers now to see what needs to be improved, but this is exciting to me that had this been a real test, I would have passed.
I plan on putting a lot more work into it still, but it definately lets me know I’m learning something.

I highly reccommend the LPIC exam cram book btw if you’re planning on doing any work with linux. flip to a random page and you’ll learn a handful of things- it’s great.

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

Virginia

This was my first full year in Virginia. Went with jackie back to visit friends in Michigan a couple times and realized how much I dislike Virginia. Growing up, I couldn’t wait to get out of michigan… now that I’m here I want to go back. That was quite a shock.

I worked at SPX(I still don’t use their full name here) for a full year, and went from junior developer to developer to webmaster to system admin to lead developer, which those last 3 all happening at the same time. I left the company over money issues and ended up with CSX(again, no full name), where I’m a full time Linux System Administrator. The job is great. I’ve been with them for 3 months as of christmas eve. It also allowed us to afford a new bed- the original move down here did a number on my back, and has been messed up for the last year. I went and saw a doctor and got some anti-inflammitories about the same time as we got the bed, and for the first time in a year, I was able to sleep 8 hours straight. I just ran out of the naproxin, but my back is in much better shape than it was.

We’ve been at our apartment complex for over a year now- This is the first time I’ve stayed at a single apartment this long since I started college. It’s not a huge apartment but it is quite expensive. We’ve also been digging ourself slowly out of debt. We did end up taking on a new debt- my Ford Tempo finally died, and we bought a new Toyota Corolla (my first foreign car; has a lot more meaning to someone from MI). The car is great, but we added a whole lot more debt to our lives.

Family

Family has been good and bad, lots of interesting things going on. Jackie spent a good chunk of the year working 70 hours/week in New Jersey working on a case that her lawfirm ended up being disqualified for. The big bonus she was promised? well, she got 1/3 of it. She’s the 3rd person I’ve talked to this year who got screwed on a year end project based bonus through no fault of her own. From now on she ONLY works 40 hours a week. If they don’t like that, she can go elsewhere and make 50% more.

And to round things up:

• Chaos, the cat who lives up to her name, turned 1 and has calmed down. She isn’t quite… “domesticated,” but she’s calm enough now that I don’t want to throw her off the balcony.
• Toby still hides under the bed.
• My brother Jamie broke his hand punching a guy, then got his ass kicked a few months later by a mob.
• My brother Brian is still playing trumpet at UofM- his second year there I think.
• My mom has been bowling a lot
• My dad shot Bambi in the spine. He says Bambi is delicious.
• My good friend Jeff got married to his girlfriend Corrie
• my Mother in law Rhonda got married to her boyfriend jerry

Hobbies

It’s been a Good year for hobbies- or bad, depending on how you look at it. I’ve been hitting the guitar with a renewed passion after finding the Guitar Grimoire series of books and Rockhouse “Learn to Play Guitar” DVDs. Before this year I could only play chords and single notes- I was a rhythm guitarist essentially. Now I can play all 5 modes of the pentatonic scale and the first mode of the F major scale. I still got a ways to go, but this was a big hurdle for me; one I thought I’d never get past. Now I’m to the point of being able to understand music a whole lot better.

I’ve gotten back into art with the purchase of a Wacom graphic tablet. I’ve started working on several drawings, mainly pictures of old DnD characters I’ve played. lots of fun and interesting stuff.

For writing, I finally decided to write a story about the DnD world I created- Willis. since I can’t play DnD, I figured I could at least write about it. I got about 10k words in and realized that my outline had stopped being an outline. went back through and started writing a first draft, got about 1500 words in and got sidetracked with other projects.

One thing I’ve wanted to get into since I was 10 was electronics- never got the chance though. Well, the last 2-3 months I’ve decided it would be cool to make my own guitar pedals, so I picked up “Demystifying Electronics” and started learning. It’s a slow process, but I’m getting there. Right now I have a 130 in 1 electronics kit, and I plan on getting a real breadboard in another month or two (to make sure this isn’t another failed hobby).

And of course there’s my programming. I’ve been working on a bot named Ziggy who is based on one of my favorite DnD characters. He’s become quite a source of amusement to me, though I think he’s wearing a little thin on others. I’ve also started working on a Streaming Radio interface to allow me to tag and catagorize songs and create shows. It’s called Ridllr. If I can get this up to a certain level, I’d like to place it under a GPL license and sell support for it (though I doubt there’d be many takers). The hardest part was coming up with enough music to stress test it with large loads. Fortunately there was a used CD store down the block from me at SPXwith cheap CDs.

Linux is of course my bread and butter now, so I’m continually learning about new services and such. at CSX, I’m using Redhat, which I’ve honestly not had much experience with- I’m relieved to learn that it’s reall not much different, it just has some minor annoyances. the updates and security issue is really the most annoying. I’ve done a lot of work with apache, subversion and bind this year, and quite a bit with perl.

Lets see, hobbies that are going into stasis… Jow Gar is obviously since 1) there’s no place to practice and 2) my teacher is still in MI. Chainmailing is as well because I’ve always got my hands full with my other hobbies….

Friends

As I mentioned in the section above, Jeff got married. Shabbs got his wife pregnant and she popped out little zsolt …”skullteddy”.. ugh I’m horrible with spelling that, so phonetic will have to do for now. Made some new friends- Pete(dendrite) who I actually met in 2004 but we’ve kept in touch after both leaving SPX. There’s also Tony, who’s well on his way to a bright music career. Worked with him at SPX as well. Met William(shaldannon) and Ben(ben) who we hired at SPX right before I left- I keep in touch with them to help them when I can.

Of course there’s my new coworkers, but I differenciate between coworkers and friends to keep the lines unmuddied.

I also spoke to porter for the first time in over 5 years. I’ve come to the conclusion that being pissed off at people, no matter what crime (real or imagined) isn’t worth keeping up the hate. I doubt we’ll ever be close friends again, but at least it’s less thing I have to deal with. being mad at someone is entirely too much work. That said, he hasn’t continually annoyed me like other people I’ve put on a mental banlist. He’s never claimed to own my friends; he’s never threw temper tantrums and forced me to remove him; etc. Perhaps next year I’ll bury another hatchet.

I’ve spend a lot of time back in the #asp channel, so now I have a place to focus and vent my anger and hate. Met VP in real life, and he’s just as scary in person as he is to a clueless noob who wanders into #asp. But they’re all good guys generally and a very valuable information source.

All in all, it’s been a very good year. I have a pretty good idea how I’m gonna top it next year, but that’s my secret… for now.

Enjoy 2006 and happy birthday to ME, MUAHAHAHA.

You know what I’d like to see?

Someone plop down a series of books aimed at introducing a user or Sys admin of a particular Linux Distribution to another Distribution; for example “Administrating Redhat Enterprise Linux 3 for Debian Administrators” or “Using Suse for Gentoo Users” .

Hell, they don’t even have to be big books- maybe 200-600 pages. Ebooks would probably be the way to go since it will probably not sell a whole lot of copies.

I say this because there is a giant disconnect between users of different distributions. As a Gentoo and Debian users, I’ve noticed the hatred between these two groups- if someone in the #debian channel finds out I also use gentoo, I’m pretty much mocked and ignored. If you’re used to using one set of tools, there’s no guide to give you a work-alike.

This complaint comes from the fact that I’m using Redhat at my new job, and Redhat is considered a “Beginners” distribution by a lot of people- including authors. If you’re already fairly competent with Linux, do you really need a walkthrough of basic utilities? I’ve configured samba a hundred times, and you’re showing me the exact same thing- I want to know if you’re doing anything DIFFERENT.

You know what? That’s it. I’ll add it to my Lotto List- “Publish series of books called Diff: admining X for Y admins”