Simple Talk Exchange Article from Standalone Sysadmin

I wanted to put out a link to a great article written by Matt from Standalone Sysadmin that he wrote for Simple Talk Exchange: http://www.simple-talk.com/exchange/exchange-articles/a-sysadmins-guide-to-change-management/

It gives some great advise on "Change Management".

An update in the world of AJ

All, sorry for the extreme delay in getting anything new out. With the holidays, hanging out with friends, and plain old laziness I hadn't spent the time on here that I had been. Right now I am laying on the couch watching the OSU vs Texas Fiesta Bowl so I thought I'd take a few minutes and throw out a couple things.

1) Are puppies are now 4 weeks old. We are looking for good homes for them and will be starting to let them go next week since they've already began eating solid puppy foods. If you or anyone you know might be interested take a look at some of the pics I have of them at www.aj-l.net and shoot me a reply or an email if you'd like to see them in person.

2) I've moved to a new position / department at my employer. I am now working in a "Managed Services" department. Basically I will be involved with the engineering, deployment, and repair of phone systems being sold by my employer.

3) I am working on another blog. It will be primarily technical based focusing on networking, telco, and Linux. It's still in the basic stages and not yet at the point for the public but I will keep all posted once I get it out there.

Hope you all had a good Christmas and New Years. As usual I found myself on New Years Eve somewhat intoxicated.

Financial Crisis Explanation

My good friend Matt over at Standalone Sysadmin brought this video to my attention today. We both thought it was a very good overview of what has caused a lot of the financial trouble we are in. Plus the guy draws pictures :)

Take a look when you get time and let me know what you think. Lasts just over six minutes.

Emma Puppies Update

Puppies are doing really well. They've almost doubled in size since born eleven days ago.

A particular teacher's view of Linux in our schools

I was quickly looking through some of my daily readers and found an interesting tidbit of a letter written from a teacher to the founder of Helios on Slashdot .


"Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. ... This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older version of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them..."

Here is a direct link to the original blog on Helios

Not at all surprising, but definitely sad. I agree that the child doesn't need to be handing out the CD's in fashion that might disrupt class. But this teacher needs to catch up a bit on things in this world.

I don't believe every teacher needs to know how to use Linux at this point. But I do believe that if a teacher doesn't know much about it they prob. need to leave it up to someone that does to explain it to them before they go off the handle like that.

Pics of Emma with full litter

Thought I'd throw some pics up of the whole crew together :)

Emma's New Puppies!

Well I got an exciting call today at work after just hanging up with an angry customer. Emma had started having her puppies! By the time I got home at about 17:00 after leaving work early and stopping at the store she had four puppies and unfortunately lost one of them. Below is a pic:










It is 18:36 right now and she is on her way of having her 5th one so I'd better get back to my fatherly duties of watching Toni do all the work and I sit and drink a beer while petting Emma :)

>Update 22:47: Well the 5th one came out fine. Toni believes there are more though and it's been a couple hours since the last one. We called the 24x7 vet line and since there has been no after-birth it looks like we'll be taking Emma to the vet tomorrow to induce labor if needed.

>Update 00:15: She has had a 6th pup that is healthy.

>Update: 07:30: Emma is doing well and so are the pups. But she appears to still have at least one more in her and she has not had it yet. We called the 24x7 vet line early in the morning and they recommended we go ahead and bring her in to induce labor on her to get the last one out and to check her over. I'll be leaving work at about 9:30 and Toni and I will be taking her over to the vet.

>Update - 11:25: All was good at the vets office. What we think is that there was still some afterbirth inside of her so he gave Emma a shot to help pass that. Other then that we have a great mom in good health with five pups all in good health. Now the next adventure of caring for all these puppies as they get bigger :) I'll post up some more pics this evening.