April 3, 2002

I am doing my best to keep these updates coming as often as possible. It takes a lot of work to write so much content for a site like this you know. Take a look at the 2001 Archive page and see how much there is in there. It is out of control. And we didn’t start until part way through the year and I missed huge amounts of time too.

Technical Note: For those of you using browsers like Mozilla, Netscape 6, Internet Explorer or Opera (which constitutes just about all of you – you can’t hide from me because I can read the logs,) you can use the F5 key to force a refresh of a web page. Which means if, for example, you go to Anne’s Bio page and don’t see her latest Bio entry listed but you know that it should be up, try pressing F5 and see if it appears. Web pages get cached on you computer or sometimes on a proxy server to speed up performance but sometimes this can cause you to be looking at old content. Just something to keep in mind.

It is so nice to have the economy picking back up. I think that those of us who work in IT may be some of the first to see things really turning around. In January, I was lucky if I got called once that entire month with someone interested in hiring me. Now, I am on the phone and email everyday with three or four different people talking about jobs here or there. It is quite a relief knowing that you are in demand again. Loopy has definitely noticed since he is now back at work again. I am expecting to be doing a contract at least once this month if not more.

Today is the first day that I have managed to be able to download a copy of the new OpenOffice final release candidate to try out. OpenOffice is replacing StarOffice as SUN’s free competition to Microsoft Office. I have now installed OO twice and so far it is pretty nice. As soon as it is available in final release, I will have a link available so that you can download it as well. OO is well worth the download… MS Office XP compatability and cross platform support for free! Works for me. The download is only 50MB so it isn’t all that bad. The new version runs faster but has a few less features than the old SO 5.2. But some of those features, like a built in web browser and an integrated desktop were more annoying than useful and just made for a larger and slower download and slower load times. This new office should be a bit more responsive.

Eric and I headed up to Newark this morning for a meeting with the VIA Health System of Wayne County. That was very exciting. We had an effective day, though, and are going to be flying down to Hattiesburg, Mississippi coming up in a few weeks. That should be fun. Neither of us have ever been to Mississippi. We will take the opportunity to come back through Washington, DC and pick up my Buick.

My main computer, the one that I am using now, runs Windows 2000 Pro and has slowly been degrading over the last year or so since it has been running. Windows 2000 eventually slows down too much and you have to reinstall it to make everything work again. So, last night I cleaned out the inside of my computer, blew out the dust that has collected, added new memory (I now have 512MB in this machine) and switched from a PCI VooDoo4 to a GeForce2 MX400 (Loopy’s old one – he upgraded to a GeForce4 Ti4400 two days ago.) Then I reinstalled Win2K. It only took three hours or so and the computer is back up and running better than ever now. I am so glad that I have the computer set up in such a way that I am able to easily reinstall because it can end up being quite an ordeal if you don’t have everything ready to do it. It only took me 30 minutes of so to get ready ahead of time. Most of that time was just double checking things to be sure that I wouldn’t lose anything that I needed.

Since I upgraded my computer, I also switched to the newest version of HTML-Kit and am now using Build 292 Beta. I also just noticed that I had left out some of the Horizontal Rules that go on the page. I wish somebody would mention these things. I know that you are all out there looking at the site. Actually, Bob and Nate actually read the site today which is pretty unusual.

Not much real news today. Nothing exciting happening here. Somebody email me or something! Speaking of emailing me, I need people to email me with ideas about what we should be adding to the site. We need more cool stuff for people to come and check out but I do not know what needs to be added. I am open to suggestions.

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