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First week of self-employment
Now that I've been self-employed for almost a week (Monday was my last day at my job), I feel like my life has changed a bit. There was nothing wrong with my old company or my old job, except that it just wasn't for me. Prior to taking the job, I spent 5.5 years self-employed, so I really got used to the freedom and being my own boss. I feel like I'm back in control of my work as I have a schedule for one of my projects (or will soon) which will let me figure out when I need to work really hard and when I can work at a normal pace. In the world of software, most projects have schedules which helps in planning a workload. In the world of IT, there may be projects with schedules, but there always will be things that have to get done immediately (someone can't get to a server or a computer doesn't work; you can't schedule those things in or delay fixing them).
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Review: Eye-Fi Explore X2
My 3 year old son loves playing with our digital camera which is fine, but I'm afraid that he's going to accidentally delete pictures. I've tried giving him an old camera, but he wants to use the camera that mommy and daddy use. There are really only a few ways to prevent accidental erasure of the pictures. First, download all pictures immediately after taking them. This is a bit impractical. Second, put in a second memory card that he can use. A bit impractical and he likes to see the pictures we take. The last option is the Eye-Fi series of SD cards.
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A stab at another VPS
Several weeks ago, the VPS (virtual private server) that I use to host my blog and Web site went down for more than 6 hours. The service, like most VPS services, has a 99%+ uptime guarantee. Well, the uptime guarantee is kind of useless as the site is still down and the few bucks credit I got aren't really worth much. Their support folks didn't get back to me until the end of the outage and then gave some excuse that they were short staffed. By the time the site had come back up, I had already signed up with another VPS and restored my site (I have scripts on the VPS that backup nightly and then everyday, my Mac syncs down the backups). The whole setup process takes me about 2 hours as my VPS isn't all that complicated.
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My new office
Yesterday, my wife asked if I wanted to come with her to pick up our son that was spending the day at my parents. I asked her what time and she said that she'd leave around 4pm. Hmmm, I had a 4 pm meeting. I said "sure", but she'd have to drive. 4 pm came around, I got on my phone call, turned on my Sprint MiFi, switched my Mac over to the MiFi's network and was all set.