Well, Wednesday night finds my clan in Columbus Ohio. The day was spent traveling though the woodlands of upstate New York
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Well, the Universe has presented us with a new adventure. I have accepted a new Technology Director position in Arizona and will be leaving New England on the 24th.

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Although my background has been extensively commercial software such as Microsoft Windows (XP, 2000/03, Active Directory) CITRIX, Novell, Lotus etc., for the last two years I have done more and more with Open Source software when building infrastructure.

As the various projects mature, they bring an amazing amount of stable, feature rich services to the enterprise.

If you are interested in some of the best projects out there, check out these slide shows and information from eWEEK.

In our current endeavors we are using the following from the eWEEK list:

• Apache
• Firefox
• Perl
• PHP
• VNC
• Webmin
• OpenOffice
• MySQL
• SAMBA
• OpenSSH & SSL

And probably the most exciting, are currently developing IP phone systems (VOIP) around Asterisk!

All good stuff and I encourage you to check it out.

Someone asked me today what I meant… I guess I did not really explain it anywhere!
I was a History major in college and being Irish and Danish on my father’s side and fascinated by early Scandinavian and Celtic history the Viking part came naturally.

As a technologist I find myself trying hard not to invent the wheel. Being on the cutting edge rather than on the bleeding edge allows me to adopt the processes and procedures that have been proven to work for other people. I typically take those ideas and model them in ways that make sense to my own clients. So there is the Tekno part.

Its very similar to the shared art and culture of the Norse and Celts. They seem to have adopted many aspects of each others work , modified it and made it their own. Each with their own defined style.

So, that seems workable, dosent it? I mean the Subtitle “Electric Norseman” well, that’s just a play on one of my favorite movies staring Robert Redford… can you guess which one? 😉

The folks at MassCUE ( Massachusetts Computer Using Educators) have posted an extremely interesting video outlining just how the world is changing around technology.

This clip reaches into every corner of our culture so even if you are not “into” education, you need to take a look at the dramatic statistics they have put together. It is staggering…

Topher ran out the email statistics on our work system a couple weeks ago and I just ran across them again. They were interesting so I thought I would post them here.

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Our Email statistics for the week of March 15th, 2007

Total Mail Received by our Gateway: 30,804
Rejected at Gateway : 18,259
Passed Through Layer 1 : 12,545

Identified as SPAM: 1,341
Identified as Viruses : 125
FQDN and Time Check Failures : 2,195
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* Total Email Delivered to Users: 8,045

Remember, these statistics are for one week only and show that 74% of
our Mail is bogus. This appears to be a 18% increase in SPAM/Virus
traffic since last Fall. (2006)

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Our email system (including the Anti-Virus and Anti-Spam components) is constructed completely from free Open Source software. Our users report on average less than 2 (two) pieces of SPAM a week in their inbox.  Very Cool!

Jess is out in New York this weekend as the guest of honor at UBCON.

Last night she was up at the Falls and sent me a couple of pics form her camera. Even though they are not great (phone cam + night + wind + size = poor) you can still get an idea about how much water is involved… amazing!

I put together a page to showcase some of the PowerPoint/Impress slides shows that I have developed for local and national presentations.

These can be found HERE or you can go to Resources>Presentations page.

Enjoy!

I just put up a new page which includes links to some of my technology articles that have been reprinted on the web. I also tossed in a couple of links to articles by other people where I was interviewed or presented.

So, if you are using a Mac and need Visio to do diagrams and charts, where does an old Windows user turn?

That is an excellent question! I have been using and am thrilled with OmniGraffle Pro from The Omni Group. It is simple, robust and so darn easy to use. They have free downloads and discounts for educational users and others. the software was well worth the purchase price.

I am creating my first process flowcharts with it and have found that it has everything I need and the interface is so much cleaner and easy to use than Visio ever was.

I am going to try a couple more of their programs just to see how they work for me!