Current Projects


What's the Big News?
The big news is that I'm writing blogs again.  I got my CSS2 (web page style sheets) worked out.  I'm trying to catch up on various personal projects that I've neglected for years.

A quick recap of events since last February:
Things went rapidly downhill at my last job; necessitating long hours to the point where I had little time for anything outside of work.  Active Directory had been installed on a 4 Gigabyte hard drive (by a previous employee) and when I turned-on the Windows automatic updates it quickly filled up.  The print server was on the same machine as the network authentication.  It took me weeks of rebuilding Active Directory from scratch after multiple failed attempts at repartitioning without reformatting.  The whole time I kept the facilities running while I rebuilt the authentication server.  After tackling Active Directory, we had a series of minor hardware failures on our old database server.  Realizing that our database server would not last another year, I began the job of porting Oracle from Solaris to Linux.  I actually completed and documented the whole procedure except for final testing and switching-over before I took my present position.

Yes, I have a new job.  After working incredibly long hours and hoping for relief at my old job; I received a glowing review from my immediate supervisor which was shortly followed by the bad news that conditions would not be improving:  in fact, the office that I was using was going to have to be vacated and the new space that was available for me would have made my job even more difficult.

Under those circumstances, I had no choice but to look for new work.

Without taking a single day to rest between jobs, I started working at the Bothell campus of the University of Washington last September, and I've been working between 40 and 45 hours per week ever since.

I have been able to straighten rooms at home that had been unstraightened for years, organize my books and music, go through some of my old clothing and discard what I would no longer wear.  Plus, I've had time to read some of the computer books and magazines I had collected for years.

Finally, I've had time to cook and throw a few parties again.


What's new or updated on Alwanza?
I finally have time to read the f** manual!  I'm well on my way to being as well versed with CSS2 as I was with CSS1.  I remade the style sheet for this page and it works in Firefox, old Netscape, Opera, and IE, Konqueror, and Monday I'll check it out in Safari.

There are a few more recipes on my How To Pages.


What hi-tech projects am I working on?
I have been surprising myself at work with the relative ease of the projects.  I've had time to read the documentation for my projects.  I've discovered that documentation makes more sense to me than it used to.


What else is going on in my life?
I'm still bicycle-commuting, but the distance is much shorter.  Even bicycling 5 times per week does not equal the milage I used to cover in 3 days at my old job.  I need to be doing more exercise because I've started to gain back some of the weight I dropped.


Any nature observances of interest?
The ducks have started neck-bobbing early this year.