Gekitsuu's Geekery

Nothing like a week off to give you a fresh perspective on your life . It's nice to have some time to get away from the grind of the office and be able to take a look at where you are and where you want to be. I'm fortunate to have a very understanding spouse and some good friends who don't mind having deep conversations. I've also been surprised by some of the people at work who are too understanding to be considered 'just' co-workers. Despite a really bad allergy spell I've managed to get some pretty cool stuff done on my mini-vacation. I've put together a photo-book at lulu.com and I've ordered a test print to see how it looks. If I like the result I'm going to offer photo books of 50 or so fractals for sale through lulu.com. I've also writen a python script that allows me to process fractals in a client-server method so that I can now bring up machines at my house and have them process fractals off the server. This is necessary because I figured out that to rerender the remaining fractals in my collection would be nearly a year (ick). With the 3 machines I've added to the "farm" of servers I should be done in a few months. My wife has gone to visit her grandfather who is in the hospital and I am here alone with our itty bitty dog named "Zoey". This is a double-edged sword in that I have a lot more responsibility than I usually do because my wife takes care of walking Zoey but I also get to spend more time with her than I usually do. Hopefully we'll both survive. I'm about halfway through the Ubuntu Book and it's been a really good read so far. I've only skimmed over the install chapters because for the most part I'm pretty comfortable with installing ubuntu. I've tried out every version since Warty and I've always been pleased with their installer and I prefer it to anaconda. I just read a blog entry about their new init system called Upstart that has me pretty impressed. I have yet to go through the documentation of the system to see how it operates but the fact that they're not afraid to change something that has been in use since the dawn of time shows great ambition in the group and encourages me to help them out. I'm researching ways I can contribute to their effort.