Coredump

Originally uploaded by iandexter.

(Yet another “New Year’s resolutions” post.)

1. Life. I will strive to be the best tatay to my two sons and wife. Being away most of the time (and going home only on weekends) is taking its toll in my relationship with them, but I will make up for that. My wife and I will learn cooking together. Even the little one can join in if he wants, but he will be busy with his little brother. I will also continue to be a great kuya to my brother and two sisters, and a good son to Mommy and Daddy. Last year had been a year full of changes, and I had been remiss in my family duties. This year will be different. I will also go back to school.
2. Work. I will brush up on my coding skills (I really ought to review on Perl, and learn Ruby). I also resolve to blog more often, with meatier and substantive posts, not only here but for PTB. I may not be able to take on many side projects, but for those I do get, I will — as always — give the best I have, providing quality and innovation, and going beyond expectations.
3. Play. I have to write some more, and go out more often, and read more books. We will probably travel at the end of the year (when the baby is big enough for that) — nothing grand, just a regular family trip. I will see to it that my collection grows. I have been quite lazy with this the past year, but this year, I intend to double my hoard.

Originally uploaded by iandexter.

(Obligatory “the year that was” post, with your indulgence.)

If I could describe 2006 in one word, that would be “change”.

The year started with me rolling out this Wordpressed blog, from the previous Blogger-hosted one.

The Open Academy’s ICT roadshow kicked off in Northern Luzon. It was a resounding success, which eventually led to the building of an IT bus for Nueva Ecija. I’m proud to say that I was part of this project.

In April, I moved to another company.

We also learned that we’re having a baby. (We’re expecting him this January.)

Here’s yet another addition: I got me Mathilda! Schweet. Also, I moved to my own (vanity) domain.

I went on a blogging rut the next few months after that. (I resolve to change that this year. {More on that in a later post.}) I also took (and passed) the RHCT. I plan to pass the RHCE this year.

The year ended with a bang — well, lots of it. On the night of 30 December 2006, a stray kwitis (small rocket fireworks) exploded among a bunch of fireworks in the Cabanatuan City (my hometown) public market. A large fire engulfed a corner of the public market, as well as a drugstore and a bakery across the street. My wife’s lola has a small RTW store in that same corner. Fortunately, it wasn’t gutted down. The stores beside it didn’t have the same lucky fate. Our families were thankful for the miracle.

• Starting today, we’re on DST, so a one-hour shift in the work sked. Yaiks.
• Last weekend, we were off to Taal Vista Lodge in Tagaytay for the Tech University, a two-day company event. The first day started off with an “Amazing Race”-style tech challenge — a battle of wits to solve real-world cases in 30 minutes or less. At stake: a 4GB iPod nano for each group member (five per group, two categories, SMB and enterprise). Unfortunately, we didn’t win, so there goes the nano.
• Sunday was capped with a teambuilding activity, complete with a motivational talk by APO Jim Paredes (something about creativity — I didn’t get to go through that one straight on, had to chow on the sumptuous buffet breakfast at the Cafe-on-the-ridge, heh).
• Got sick on purpose yesterday, so I could be with Peng and Gab at home. I really needed that. Tiyo Paeng was raging, so we snuggled in bed, and went through three “American Tail” DVDs (Gab’s current fave). Didn’t catch the endings, though, as I dozed off a few times in between.
• Question: you’re a system admin in a big-time government installation, handling a fairly large environment, when you come across a problem of the mail queue backing up because of multiple incoming connections (in the thousands), half of which are spam. The spam don’t get through, of course, but still you face the problem of the growing queue, so what do you do?
• I’m getting the hang of Firefox 2.0. The del.icio.us bookmarks extension by Yahoo! is constantly nagging me about uninstalling the Google Browser Sync extension, though. I also saved some precious screen real estate, with the chrome settling on less than 100 pixels or so of the top part. Coolness.
• Gone blog reading again, when the case load was low. I’m totally hooked on Google Reader. Stand-alone RSS readers are so overrated, but I still find them useful for offline reading so I still keep one at hand: why, Feedreader, of course.
• On to more Lifehacking, I’m using Password Safe to, er, keep my passwords safe. I used to keep a GPG-encrypted and signed text file for that, but then after 50 or so accounts (including 10 something just for work — talk about single-sign-on!), it got a bit tedious. Thanks, Bruce Schneir!

I’m currently blogging offline, using w.bloggar.

I don’t have an internet connection in my apartment in Pasig (and I’m not likely to get one — too expensive and the logistics of applying for a fixed line is such a bother). I usually connect to the internet from work. I still haven’t tried WiFi on Mathilda. I’ll probably do that tomorrow.

I’m thinking about getting PLDT WeRoam or Globe Visibility. I called Visibility, alas, they’re open for corporate accounts only. As for PLDT, I tried several times but got busy tones on their hotline — it’s PLDT, what do you expect? My previous experience with WeRoam in my former workplace was just so-so, but at least I was mobile. I haven’t tried Visibility, but from a former colleague’s experience, it failed miserably, specially in Mindanao. (Not that I’d be going there in the near future, still it tells something about the service. But they have probably improved since that was, what, two months ago.)

For now, I’ll just have to leech from the office connection — just one hour a day, during breaks (heh), to do updates, etc.

Not what you think.

It must be one of those days: just finished another exam — part of a winding-down (I hope) battery of fitness tests here in the workplace — and I barely passed (yay!); caught in the middle of a Debian netinst (heh, they only have the Sarge netinst ISO around here); doing a yum update (Fedora Core 3! How ancient.) on one of my boxes; and, oh, just watched X-Men III: The Last Stand (you know, I have a feeling this isn’t the last of the X-Men franchise {prolly because of that snippet of a scene at the ending? [oops! spoiler alert!]}) with my teammates — it was funny: we didn’t get to reserve seats beforehand so we took the queue and we got seats all right, a freaking column of seats (8C, 9C, 10C, you get the drift…)! — and I must say, take that, Puso ng Samar something!

Whew. Before I leave for home, here’s an interesting piece:

Just a sneaky of Fernando Escora’s work over at Hiraya Gallery.