As you probably guessed, life has been busy again. Well, I use life in the loosest possible terms. Those of you that know me will know I don't really have a life.

It's mainly work that's been occupying me. The last few weeks have just been one long series of issues ranging from cluster node castouts, mail problems, routing problems, dhcp server issues and switch failures. There hasn't really been a day in the last couple of weeks where everything has run smoothly. As soon as one problem was resolved, something else went tits up. Hopefully tomorrow most things will be resolved, although I'm still expecting issues with one implementation of microsoft's fucked up DHCP services.

On the development side of my work, I'm currently looking into collaboration software and possible solutions to test. So far it would appear that there are two, maybe three solutions worth looking at. Just hope I get time to put some evaluations together before someone decides that exchange/outlook is the way to go. If there is one thing about my work I dislike, its having to argue against the endless stream of utter bullshit and crappy software being pumped out of microsoft. Anyone with half a brain and some slight technical knowledge can see that its nothing short of extortion, for less than stable beta code that you pay through the nose to implement and support. I wish more people in the industry would wake up, smell the coffee and just say no to this bollocks. Ok. rant over I guess, for now at least.

As usual, there isn't really much happening in my life outside work. I have managed to get out a few times in the last couple of weeks, although these forays into the real world usually involve a bar, lots of alcohol and a football match.

Damn I need a holiday.

So, the Eagles lost 24 to 21. Sorry Jacek, I told ya me supporting them would be the kiss of death. In all fairness, if they'd managed the clock better they might have took to overtime at least. Way too sloppy with the clock if you ask me. Then again, what do I know...I'm a brit...

Been another long break since I added anything here. Couple of reasons for that, one is that I haven't had much to say. The other reason is that work has been pretty chaotic just lately and my sleep pattern has been so screwed it beyond funny. On the upside, its keepin me off the beer which is never a bad thing.

So whys work chaotic. Well, after a pretty quiet year last year this year looks like being a busy one. I started the upgrade process to move from netware 6 to 6.5 last month and all was going well until I upgraded a 2 node cluster. Since the upgrade on node has been getting kicked out on a daily basis. Whats makin fixing this so hard is the fact that the node only gets kicked out after about 20-24 hours. This means that each time I make a chage I've got to wait a day before I know if its fixed or not. After two weeks, I'm not really any closer to a solution. Although I've manage to eliminate a lot of things, theres still a lot of other things it might be.

One the new technology front, I was down in London to see a Novell presentation on Open Enterprise Server at the end of January. Looking pretty impressive and managed to snag myself a copy of beta 5. We're developing a good relationship with our account manger and premium support engineer now and I think for the future of netware in our business this can only be a good thing. As for linux, I've installed the Novell Linux desktop on my laptop and am wrting this update on that machine. So far I'm impressed, although its still not quite as easy as windows to install an configure additional software, I think a lot of that is down to my lack of knowledge of the OS.

On the personal front, my exam schedule has taken a hit and I'm about 3 months behind where I wanted to be at this moment. Once I got my workload sorted out I'll fix that. It just means that I'm going to have to work harder and devote more of my spare time to study. Shouldn't be too much of a problem, its not like I have much of a social life anyways. I'm still livin in the same place, although I thought I might have to move this year. I've been here three years now and am quite settled. Moving again is one thing I don't want to have to do for a while.

That's about as much time as I have right now. I'm just waiting for the kick off of SuperBowl XXXIX. I'm not really supporting either of the teams, but as I have no connections with New England, but a couple of friends in Philly (Hi Jacek) I guess I shold really support the Eagles. There you go, theres the kiss of death for sure.