Well, I did move my cell phone into the 21st century. I moved up to a Droid X. So far, it’s pretty good. There’s been a bit of a learning curve and I really haven’t begun to get into its capabilities and I’m occasionally overwhelmed when it’s not as intuitive as I’d like it to be but I’m getting there. In my perusing of various Droid-related forums, I’ve been less than impressed with their helpfulness. I often find several possible fixes for my problem but invariably they’re written with the assumption that I’m as geeky as they are and I know what the fuck they’re talking about.

No, I don’t soar with the ubergeeks. I don’t think I ever did. I am not awed by technology. I view technology as a set of tools. Tools, by their very nature, exist to be useful, to perform a function and perform it well.

My rules for technology:

1. It must work and perform its intended function.
2. It must simplify tasks.
3. It must be reliable.
4. It must be intuitive (user friendly).
5. It must not cause additional stress.
6. It must not succumb to feature creep. Every feature should be necessary.

What’s annoying me most about my Droids right now is that I haven’t found a good vehicle mounting system for it. A suction cup on the windshield makes it unreachable. A disk mounted atop the dashboard places it too high and in the line of vision. The vent mounts haven’t worked out either. I find them difficult to mount in the vents and they tend to fall out or get in the way. I’m looking into a cup holder mount which might work alright for the truck but not so well for the car since the cup holders are back further. There must be a practical solution for this.

Obviously, this isn’t an OS problem and doesn’t seem to be a BIOS problem either. I’ve tried several utilities on the Universal Boot CD but they’ve all fallen short of the task. Am I stuck with a couple of partial capacity drives?

Lately I’ve been rethinking what I want to do with my network. Do I really need a server to act as a domain controller? I can live with a workgroup. With only a handful of computers, I don’t have a problem with setting up accounts on each comptuer. There are no domain resources other than the shared printer and the print share would still work under a workgroup. Data is on the NAS which is not a domain resource. All the domain controllers really do is provide a centralized place for network accounts and, for the time being, a time server and local DNS. Then again, setting up a Linux server would be interesting as a learning experience. I guess I’ll think on it some more.

I’ve got a Windows box set up to replace the W2K machine. I still need to install a lot of applications and things for ripping tapes and records, scanning slides and stuff. Support for Quicken 2008 ran out last month so I bought the latest version and put it on the new computer. I considered putting Office on it but decided on OpenOffice instead. I’ll learn to work with the differences.

I looked at reviews of other clients but I really didn’t see anything that appealed to me. Most appeared to be much the same as Tweetdeck with multiple columns and such. I don’t want all of my different Twitter stuff separated into different columns. A simple timeline with everything in chronological order is all I want which is what Twhirl gave me and I was able to have both of my Twitter accounts open in separate instances. I’m not an uber-Twitter geek. I don’t really need the app to interface with my Facebook account either. I barely keep up with that as it is.

I ran scans for malware but came up with nothing. I ran HijackThis and saw nothing unusual in its log file. I didn’t find much useful online. Most of what I found seems to be totally irrelevant until I saw something interesting at Microsoft.com. I took a look at Accessibility Options in Control Panel. Under the keyboard tab I noticed that FilterKeys was checked. I unchecked it and the keyboard started responding. I rebooted and it was working fine. I can’t believe how simple it was to fix it. How many months have I had this problem? It would have been nice to have found that before I went to Vincennes last month. I still haven’t gotten that Wifi Radar to work in Linux.

I had acquired a PC that had been intended to be my XP box but I found that the motherboard would only support 1GB of memory. I put a gigabyte in it, loaded XP on it and made it my Windows print server to share my Samsung printer.

The IBM workstation is about ready to be loaded. I’ve got two 160GB SATA drives installed. I began the Linux installation this evening. The entire configuration process may take me a while. I’m not in a hurry and I want to do it right.

I put a drive into a removable shell so it’s ready to put into my old Windows 2000 machine and load XP on it. Once that’s done I’ll need to migrate the data and install the apps. I still need a Windows PC around. I have a few things that I haven’t found suitable Linux equivalents. I’m sure they’re out there but I don’t have the time to research and test them right now.

This blog started out on my FrankenWeb server but in May I noticed that I was no longer able to reach FrankenWeb from outside my LAN. I think it had something to do with some settings in my DSL modem although it had been working fine prior to that. At the time I didn’t feel like messing with it so I moved my FrankenWeb content to my hosted site and reestablish this blog on my WordPress account. FrankenWeb has since been retired.

Since Microsoft was ending its support of Windows 2000 in July, I began to think about migrating to a Linux-based network since upgrading to 2003 or 2008 servers wasn’t going to happen. Not only didn’t I have the money to invest in upgrading to newer operating systems or the necessary hardware, I wasn’t really using Active Directory to its full potential. Actually, about it was providing was authentication to log into the domain. I wasn’t making much use of group policy and I moved the login scripts out of AD into the NETLOGON share because XP wasn’t playing well with the domain login. I decided that a Linux server running Samba could provide the same service, as well as NTP and DNS services.

I’ve been playing around with Linux servers but haven’t implemented it yet. So the Windows 2000 domain controllers are still on line.

As part of the Linux migration, I purchased a Western Digital NAS device and moved the content from my Windows servers to it. Even though the NAS operating system is Linux, it was designed to work in a Windows environment. Nonetheless, I’m able to access it with Linux as a Windows share although it’s a bit slow. I’m considering having user home directories on the yet to be built Linux server and use the NAS for backup and archiving.

I’ve set up several computers as Linux servers but I haven’t made the time to configure the for the tasks I want them to due. I have a nice IBM workstation that will be the next incarnation of the Linux server. I’m not sure when I’ll get around to it, probably when the domain controllers finally die. I’m amazed that they’ve been running for nearly a decade.

This year I’ve been moving towards Linux on the desktop. I semi-retired my Windows 2000 PC and built a new computer which is running Ubuntu 10.04. I’ve got my laptop dual-booted with Ubuntu and Windows XP. The wife’s PC is XP and the grandchildren’s PC is running Linux Mint and XP. I’m trying to encourage them to use Linux.

As the year draws to a close, the Linux migration isn’t making as much progress as I had envisioned. My laptop is sitting on my desk with broken Windows. I need to try and resurrect it but I’m certain I’ll have to wipe the drive completely and start over. If it comes to that, do I want to dual-boot it or have one OS?

This week my wife’s computer got slammed with a particularly nasty bit of malware, the "XP Antispyware 2011" thing. My attempt to clean it off manually made Windows unusable so I did a repair to the OS and the malware was back again. What did the repair do? Go back to the last restore point? I ended up wiping the drive and reinstalling XP. I have it to the point where she can do her Web surfing and email but I still need to install applications. With the grandchildren at the house all weekend, it may be a few days before I get to it.

The HP Kinderputer had a lot of malware infections but I was able to clean the successfully with Malwarebytes. I think I am going to have to set aside time every week for maintenance (updates, malware scans, clean up, whatever).

Needing something to use for my work on my Dell certifications, I resurrected the old Kinderputer and put Windows on that. It’s behaving rather quirky too. I couldn’t get it to join the domain and it’s having problems downloading Microsoft updates. I’m the only one using it so I copied the login script to the Startup Menu so it maps my drives. It sees everything on the network but for some reason when I try to join the domain, it says it can’t find a domain controller. I’m not too worried about it. It’s only a temporary solution until I get the laptop going again. I’ll probably put Linux on this PC anyway.

The 2000 domain controllers are still running fine as is my old 2000 PC which still gets plenty of use. I haven’t had time to do anything with the IBM workstation other than install the basic hardware. I still haven’t installed Linux. I’m not in a big hurry to get it done. When I do it, I want to do it right the first time.

I’ve been working on my Dell certifications this month and they have been kicking my ass more than I had expected. I guess I expected to breeze through them but my ego got knocked back a few pegs. I’m still uncertain as to how these certifications are going to help me with my job. I know that I need them but I don’t see how, exactly, to use them. All of the courses I’ve gone through have dealt with troubleshooting and diagnosis. The "tear down" courses are optional. Do the courses I’ve passed "qualify" me to work on the hardware? Or do they just qualify me to diagnose a problem, call it in and request parts and a technician?

It’s based on Ubuntu 10.10 (64-bit) so it may differ a bit from other versions.  All in all, there are some useful tips in it.