Last weekend we went to LinuxFest NorthWest 2008 in Bellingham, WA. It was a great time, we handed out a bunch of Tee-Shirts, met a lot of good people, and saw some interesting presentations. I even spoke with around half a dozen potential summer interns.

So you've put about 200 man hours into your configuration system this year. It's good. There are a number of things you'd change about it, but you're at a point that it's running rather smoothly. All of a sudden, there's this great new system that comes out. All of your problems are solved! It promises to slice, dice, and give you an infinite amount of differing system class configurations, with a new web 2.0 way to group systems.

DONT DO IT! YOU HAVE TOO MUCH TO LIVE FOR!

Seriously here, it's just hard to learn how to say "this is done" and move on. For me, it lays in these four areas:

Linda & I have spent the past 5 days in Seattle, looking at houses and touring datacenters. I've posted some of my peanut gallery comments about the Seattle datacenter scene:

• http://mhalligan.livejournal.com/15407.html
  
• http://mhalligan.livejournal.com/15763.html
  
• http://mhalligan.livejournal.com/15166.html
  

Shiiiiiiiiiiny. It's a physically attractive server, and while this feature may not add any 9s to your uptime percentage, it will certainly attracted oohs and ahhs at the datacenter. Beauty isn't just skin-deep with this server. Crack open the top (which you do by pushing down on a spring-loaded tab, then pulling up on it) and you'll remember what a well-engineered chassis looks like. It's been a long time, huh?

We haven't tested much with this server yet. However, it took us 5 minutes to get the LOM working, and another 2-3 minutes later, we had a java console for a fully functional, multi-session remote KVM. We had problems getting our mouse to work under OSX, but beyond that, it was awesome.

I stumbled upon Gliffy.com, a web-based Visio clone today, and was quite impressed.

The good:

- 100% web based
- Good layout
- Intuitive user interface
- Worked in Firefox 1.5.0.4 under OSX 10.4.7 without crashing once. Very few flash-based applets seem to be able to make that claim!
- Has all of the basic functionality to insure that casual users can easily throw away Visio.
- Awesome potential

The bad:

- No snap to grid
- Couldn't group text objects with other text objects for alignment
- Scrolling with my scroll-wheel was not an option

BitPusher has a personal colocation offering that we provide to friends & colleagues. We usually charge $75 per month per 1U server. We're offering a special rate for LOPSA members, however. $55/month, with no setup. More information is available at http://www.bitpusher.com/lopsacolo.php . E-mail mhalligan@bitpusher.com to get signed up.

If you don't like talking to people, especially in person, or to strangers who are not even remotely technical, then get out now.

Sometimes, I feel like I've been consulting since the womb. In practicality, every FTE position I've had, I've really just been
a consultant who happened to have health insurance, and worthless stock options. It's a way of life, that isn't for everybody.

We've all heard the stories before. The brother of a colleague's best friend's cousin makes $150 per hour as a consultant, billing out 1500 hours a year, and spending three months per year on a deserted tropical island. Chalk them up urban legends, consulting is a lot more work than full-time employment.