Bryan Strawser

OK, here’s the news I was teasing about earlier. As you may know, Jon Udell took a job at InfoWorld, as a columnist with an agent provacateur sideline. His mission: to get the content of InfoWorld to start to flow out through weblogs. This was deliberate, I am told, by Steve Gillmor, who hired Jon. Most InfoWorlders don’t know much about weblogs, but the management is curious, probably a bit more than curious. So today, they will take a step down a path that (I think) will eventually turn InfoWorld into a fully-weblog-enabled publication, with their first blog, authored by Jon Udell, of course. Now to a Scripting News reader this is hardly earth-shaking. It means that Jon’s url changed. BFD, right? But now the InfoWorld readers (and reporters, columnists, editors, sales people and management) are going to be reading and hearing about weblogs from one of the best in the techblogger community. What’s next? More InfoWorld weblogs, of course! After that, I’ll take Pat McGovern to lunch and talk about the good old days and the bright future. [Scripting News]

Passion Fruit Tea, a long hot shower, a glance out the window, life is improved.

I’m using NetSaint now to monitor my network and some friend / client machines – pretty good system.  Still have to update to Nagios and install the temperature sensor that I purchased from a local company.  Should be pretty neat when I’m finished.

Need to get the MySQL monitoring portion complete – still have problems getting that module to compile.

Any ideas?

Monitoring Network Services with NetSaint. Like many people, you might not pay as much attention to your car’s fuel gauge as you should. You might only notice the gauge when the gas tank is nearly empty. Some new cars, though, have a nice feature: a dashboard indicator light that reads “Low Fuel” when there is about an eighth of a tank left. This strategy is much better than, say, the “Oil” light; by the time that light comes on, the car is already in trouble. [Linux Magazine]

Social Security should be eliminated.

Anyone with a brain knows that Social Security is a fallback. No one RELIES on SS for retirement (or if they do, they shouldn’t be expecting too much). It’s the backup. The backstop. Without that, THEN what do you propose we do? Our hypothetical Mary invested in what she had available to her…her 401k from work. She didn’t have the money available to her to buy real estate as an investment. She didn’t have the money available to day trade. And even if she had, what if real estate had plummeted? What if she lost it all in an Enron day trade?  [kerri News]

I just upgraded to ORiNOCO this past weekend – got a gold card for my main laptop and an AP-500 off of eBay.  The signal strength is awesome.  I still need to run ethernet and power up to the attic and place the access point there, but the difference is already clearly apparant.  I can be wireless in the upstairs shitter now.

Proxim completes Agere product line acquisition: It’s just plain old business news, but it’s part of a big change ahead for Proxim: Proxim Corporation (Nasdaq: PROX), a leading manufacturer of wireless networking equipment, today completed its previously announced acquisition of Agere Systems’ 802.11 wireless local area networking (WLAN) equipment business, including the award-winning ORiNOCO (R) product line, for $65 million in cash.  [80211b News]

Interesting move by Lyris – for the crazy-ass prices they charge, they should easily have the cash to pull this off.. Their software prices are out of control…

Lyris Acquires SparkLIST. The move consolidates the e-mail ASP with its technology provider, which is looking to expand its list hosting business. [internetnews.com: Internet Advertising Report]

Finally got around to reading this article, via Jeremy’s blog..  Pretty good summary of things..  There are some great comments here regarding various Vodkas and the like.  I’m a scotch guy myself, but I do like a good quality vodka.

K5 Liquor Guide. I’ve been doing a lot of catch-up reading at K5 recently. I found the Liquor Guide to be particularly helpful…. [Jeremy Zawodny’s blog]