28thavenue.net

This is hugely embarrassing. When I went in to vote using the new ranked-choice voting system, I figured the votes would be automatically tabulated, and whatever statistics necessary would be performed by software, to determine in each race who the winner is.

Sadly, it turns out no such software exists. The tabulation is being done by hand. What century is it? This is just pathetic.

My goal for the month of November is to keep a detailed diet and training log. I’m going to sign up for the Mora Vasaloppet ski race, as well as the American Birkebeiner (full one!). To be ready I’m beginning my training now.

I also got a bit of a shocking report back on some lab work I had done related to life insurance. In short, I need to improve my diet, I need to lose weight, and I need to exercise more.

I’m always one to make good faith starts on this sort of thing, but lose motivation three or four weeks in. I’m hoping I can make a real adjustment in my daily routine to accommodate more time for exercise, and also do a better job feeding myself. It’s hard to do.

My friend John Farrell has made the big time, in the form of a New York Times article on a study he published on renewable energy.

See the article here.

John’s organization is called the Institute for Local Self Reliance.

Quite Emersonesque, if you ask me. I like.

If you had told me 15 years ago that I would one day think she was totally awesome, I’m not sure I would have believed you.

I just moved this site over to Wordpress MU, which is the “multi-user” version of Wordpress. At least that what I’m guessing the MU stands for. Of course it uses the lowercase “mew” letter from the Greek alphabet, which is commonly stands for “micro.” Anyway, what’s in a name, right?

Speaking of names, I’m also now hosting my other site, ekmitchell.com, on this Wordpress install. Feel free to wander over there. It’s more work related than this site, so you’ll see stuff there about web development, IT, project management, etc… I’ll reserve this site for personal and family stuff, as well as thoughts on current events, etc…

Looks like the Strib is starting to charge for “premium” content.

I wonder what’s on Bring Me the News…

I’m particularly excited about two projects I have going on at work.

The first project is setting up routers for our two offices using OpenBSD. I’m going to be using pf and ipsecctl in OpenBSD 3.5 to do packet filtering (firewall) and a site-to-site VPN so that computers in both offices are on the same virtual network. I’m very excited about this because it will enable us to do a number of neat things, while remaining very cost effective. See this article for more about it.

The second project is to set up an Asterisk PBX server providing my company with a cutting edge VOIP phone system. I’m immersing myself in all things telephony and looking forward to the day when I make the first “local” call between the Minneapolis and Kansas City offices. That’s going to be very exciting. Here’s the website for Asterisk. I’m probably going to start with the AsteriskNOW distribution.

It still blows my mind what’s possible with free software. These systems are going to be just as good if not better than their commercial/proprietary equivalents, yet my company is going to be saving literally tens of thousands of dollars going this route. It feels good being able to bring solutions like this to the table.

I just upgraded my account at Github to the $7 a month “micro” plan. I have a couple of projects that I’d like to post there, but not have them be public. The micro plan provides 5 private repositories.

For those who haven’t tried Git for version control, I can’t recommend it enough. If you’ve never used version control before, it can be a little much to get your head around, but once you’ve started using it, you’ll never feel right without it.

Check out this webcast for a great introduction to Git.

This is pretty close to the mark.

Another attempt at getting the blog going again. This time with a cleaner theme. I like it so far.

Hopefully when I want to put something down for posterity, I’ll remember to do it here. I’ll probably be doing a Snow Leopard upgrade this weekend, and with that rebuilding my Apache/PHP environment. I’ll be taking the opportunity to document the process at that time. There’s really no site out there that does a good job of it that I’ve found.