Birds in ruins
Here are some birds in the ruins of Alcatraz. Note the cute little baby. Photo courtesy of Loyal Reader Number One.
Well, my boss is back and things are pretty much back to normal at work. Which is both good and bad. It’s been nice being in charge, but it’s also nice not to be in charge anymore.
Good weekend. Remember all those things I needed to do? I did manage to add chlorine to the pool and even swim for a little while. Otherwise, pretty much nothing got done from that list. Loyal Reader Number Two and I spent a couple hours Saturday morning helping a ward member move, and then Loyal Reader Number Four and I bought a pavilion for the deck and she, LRN2, and I put it together on Saturday afternoon. We’re delighted to have it and hope to make the deck a little more hospitable in warm weather.
Which we’re getting this week. It’s supposed to be in the low hundreds pretty much every day this week, and it’s only going down to the mid-sixties at night. Not so cool.
I noticed last night that I had forgotten to turn Larry’s Samba server back on when I updated the operating system. It turned out to take about three hours to get it working again. When I tried to turn the server on, I discovered that the configuration tool had disappeared from the menus. Searched around for it on the Interweb and discovered how to launch it from the command line, which I did. It appeared to work until I tried to save the configuration, at which time it gave an error message and didn’t set anything up. I tried for quite a while to make that work, including trying to manually set up Samba’s password file, but none of that worked. During my deep web searches, I learned about a tool called Swat, which is a web-based Samba server configuration program. I downloaded it and spent about an hour getting it to work. During one of my numerous web searches on the subject, I discovered that it comes configured to not work. You have to go into its configuration file and set a flag to enable it. Now why do you suppose the people who made this tool would assume people would download and install it but not want to run it?
Anyway. I finally got Swat working and then had to search around in its documentation for how to get it to set up a Samba server. It was extremely non-obvious, of course, but I finally got it working properly. The really frustrating thing is that Samba configuration was simple, straightforward, and reliable two versions ago, but it’s a nightmare now. This is causing me to have serious second thoughts about using Linux, I must say. It’s a constant uphill hike.
Anyway. It’s working now and things are once again fine. Except that I don’t have Cron jobs updating Larry’s software on a regular basis. And I don’t have the HRVA’s email set up either. Maybe those two items will be a little easier to get working. But I doubt it.
I’ve been reading a couple of books about starting a company. The first is titled, “You Need to be a Little Crazy,” by Barry J. Moltz. Moltz is apparently a Zen Buddhist (or Zen Buddhist wannabe) who has started three failed companies and now writes books about how to start companies. It has some interesting moments but also is a little heavy on both trite and discouraging comments.
The second book is called “How to Start a Business in California,” by the editors of Entrepreneur Magazine. It was written this year and appears to have some pretty solid information on navigating California’s unique requirements, along with some basic how-to and why-to stuff for potential entrepreneurs. There’s also a CD-ROM (which I haven’t looked at) containing a bunch (199, to be exact) of forms. I expect to find this book a little more useful than the first, but I can’t say I haven’t gotten anything out of the other.
Still need to come up with task lists for both the web side and the gaming side of the business. Not to mention getting WaterLogger online. There’s plenty of Business to do.
I also want to start doing a little swimming a few times a week before it gets too cold to get into the pool. I could enjoy a little aquatic exercise. I’m thinking Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, with a possible Friday bonus. Strong like bull!
Past time for bed. See you tomorrow.