Fun day. A gas main broke on Austin st., just a block away from the office. I noticed when the lights started flickering and the UPS showed power fluctuations. It took more than an hour for ConEd to get on the scene and repair the damage so we took down the servers and sent everyone home early (6pm!). I’m hoping tomorrow will be uneventful..
Putting in some time at Dad’s office this week, now that I’m Stateside again. Among the many software related issues I’m dealing with, I’m finally upgrading to Firefox 2 (thanks to FrontMotion) and rolling out Thunderbird (thanks to ZettaServe) for the first time. Still not giving out IMAP access, but switching from Outlook or Outlook Express to Thunderbird is a huge step towards easily moving a user to a new machine and brining all their mail along for the ride. Now if I could just get some freaking ADMs so I could automagically configure their email accounts without going over to their machine…
A large part of my job here at ICAR has been wrestling with various so-called content management systems (CMS). In an effort to build various applications I’ve been evaluating many popular opensource CMS projects and I’ve run into the same basic problem with just about all of them: I don’t want a blog, I want content management. They all claim to be flexible systems with all the latest doodads but in the end, they’re just glorified blogs. Case in point, almost every system sets itself up as a blog out of the box, and, in general, that’s the most complete part of the system. Other areas are sorely lacking.
I’m going to Rome tomorrow for Christmas break. Why Rome? Winter is underway and it’s pretty cold here now, averaging in the low 30s most days. Europe has fairly cold winters and traveling can be less than pleasant so heading south is the best option. From what I ready, my best choices were either Spain or Italy so I opted for Italy. As much as I’d like to put what’s left of my Spanish to a test, it’ll have to wait for another day.
Speaking of Christmas, our holiday party was this past Wednesday. It was held in a restaurant of sorts, but with a twist. It was actually an old factory which had been converted into an event hall. On this particular evening it was a “dinner spectacle” and with good reason — it was actually a carnival complete with juggling, gymnastics and “high wire” acts, fire breathing, knife throwing, and silly animal tricks!
It was lots of fun and I got to meet a lot of people from BIG whom I hadn’t had the occasion to meet yet.
Anyways, I’ll be gone until the new year, so there most likely won’t be any updates until then. I just hope I don’t run out of storage for my cameras!
So I’ve been here in Basel for a little over a month now. Five weeks and a day to be exact. Pretty crazy, actually. This project has been in the works for something like a year and a half and now here I am sitting in my apartment in Switzerland! Wild.