I’ve been having issues getting motivated on getting back to the gym. Mostly because I’m rather tired after getting back from work, or because I end up working when I get home. I’ve contemplated stepping out at lunch, and hitting the gym, but then I end up skipping lunch, which makes it hard to make any progress on muscle gain.

Well, I took the leap, and I’m now on WordPress 2.5. The admin interface is completely different, you can see a preview in this screencast. It’s going to take a little getting used to, but it looks interesting.

I’ve quite often been called crazy, working until all hours of the day, cracking away to get things done. Trying to explain to people that for me, working 15+ hours a day is easy, and I consider it fun. Not many people get the opportunity to call what they do fun, but I do. Sometimes I rant and grumble about stuff that goes on, but that’s all part of the job.

I stumbled across a post by Chad Perrin titled “Insomnia and Productivity”. He hits the nail on the head as to why working 15+ hours a day is a breeze for me. The 8 at work are a complete mess, I very rarely get any projects completed due to interruptions¹ or I’m constantly in meetings about projects, changes, problems, etc. My ideal working time is after 21:30, and usually runs up until 03:00-04:00. Why? The kiddo is asleep, the wife is preoccupied with games, or medical shows, so I get some time to lock my brain onto a subject.

For example, I have several projects I have to work on to share data between our app, and SalesForce. Quite easy, seeing as I’ve crafted several apps to do it already, but if I try doing it at work, it’d take me about 2 weeks due to interruptions. When I do it at home, it’s done in 4 hours.

So when I get asked why I work so much, and so late… It’s because I’m a system administrator… It’s because I’m a hacker in the original sense of the title. It’s my job… It’s what I enjoy.

Recently I upgraded PAM on my Gentoo server to 0.99. There were a number of warnings that went with it, including details on upgrading some of the files manually (crazy). Details on the upgrade process are on the Gentoo website here. After the build, it recommends running revdep-rebuild to rebuild the dependencies. At that point, I tested to make sure I could still logon to my box, and mail was still operating. I went to bed, and left the server alone.

Sometimes, when taking pictures in poor light, and using high ISOs, the best thing to do is convert to black and white. It gives the effect of grainy film. I’ve got some side-by-sides here.

How badly can MS Word 2007 mess up a blog post? I just found this interesting item in Word 2007 that allows you to publish to a blog. This could be interesting, and allow me to do more writing offline (flights, etc).

I have tried Microsoft LiveWriter a while ago. It seemed interesting, with some promises, but it had some issues I couldn’t get around. So I continued with W.Bloggar for a bit. I’ve not had a chance to get back and retest it since it went live, but last time I checked (beta 2 maybe?) they started bundling it with a bunch of other apps, which forced you to install stuff like Windows Messenger Live, and not giving you the option to opt-out.

This year, I got roped into taking part in NADA 2008. While the prospect of doing yet another conference was not so appealing, the prospect of getting to a new city was interesting. This year, NADA is hosted in San Francisco, so the potential of seeing the Golden Gate Bridge was pretty cool, as well as those hills. After arriving at about 11AM, the first day was spent working on setting the server up in the conference room at the hotel. This was so the DRMs could do testing, and training. Pictures are going here.

Every once in a while, I need to batch add copyright notices, or similar disclaimers to images. Not that I’m that good at photography I need to copyright them, but I feel the need is still there. Adobe Bridge has the ability to append/replace metadata in images (EXIF for JPEGs for example) with additional information. However, figuring out how to make the templates isn’t exactly easy. A quick guide on building a nice quick template can be found here. The basics require the use of Photoshop to set a dummy image with the data you need, and exporting it as a template. Once saved in the right location, Bridge can see the template, and apply to images. Pretty cool.

A new toy to help me with one of my projects for this year. I’ll have some pictures up shortly.

This evenings experiment was steak with mushroom and red wine sauce. Original idea was from Good Housekeeping, but had some tweaks. For example, couldn’t find port, so just went with a red wine. Cut down the amount of mushrooms to just 8oz, because that’s all I could fit in the pan.

I browned the steaks (well, it was one giant slab of steak I cut in half), roughly 2 minutes on each side. Then put the pan, with steaks, in the oven at 375 for about 15 minutes until medium rare. Remember, meat will continue to cook, even after removed from the heat. I took them out the oven, and wrapped the two steaks in foil so I could get the pan back for the rest of the cooking.

I served it with green beans, and bowtie pasta. Some things could be done differently. For example, once cooked in the red wine, you really cannot tell the difference between the different mushrooms, so your garden variety white mushrooms would probably work just fine instead of mixing. Also, the shallots, tasted just like normal onions, if not a little sweeter. They could easily be substituted for a small red onion.

Now all I need to do is cook food when I’m not hungry, so I can take photos of it.