stormdog | (no subject)

I am apparently becoming more lefty in my old age, as my newly rebuilt workhorse Eeyore now has not only Firefox, but also Thunderbird and Open Office as well.

Firefox I'm old friends with, but I'm definitely coming to know and love Thunderbird as well. When I got my system up and running today, I originally tried the Mozilla project's integrated suite, Mozilla 1.7, and I will admit that I was dissappointed. I liked the idea of an integrated suite of programs, MS Office style, and liked what I read about the built in HTML editing tools. However, the options for mail filtering were very much lacking compared to Pegasus Mail, my old client, and I quickly decided that I was going to go back to it if I didn't have the ability to do auto-forwarding of emails based on filter criteria.

But, though I expected the options to be the same on Thunderbird, I figured I'd uninstall Mozilla and give the bird a chance. After a few growing pains (where are my old IMAP folders!! If this thing corrupted my server I'm gonna- Oh. There they are. I just have to 'subscribe' to them.), I've settled happily in with my new mail client and have already configured even more mail filtering rules than I had in Pegasus. As much as I love old-school software, the modern conveniences of Thunderbird and the way the interface just feels 'smoother' than Pegasus pleases me. I definitely like the program, and I like even more that, after about a week now, I can finally pick up my email again.

Open Office I don't have much of an opinion on yet. I never used the Office utilities much anyway on my home machines, so I doubt I'll have that much to with them in the future either. All I know is that it seems to have no trouble with my existing Excel spreadsheets that I've been balancing my bank account with and that I feel good about using open source software.

Next thing you know I'll be running naked through the streets of Redmond, Washington shouting "Information wants to be free!"

Beyond that, I used the downtime while waiting for my install to finish on Eeyore (and there was a lot of it. My 2000 install disk was bad and the other disc I had with just the install files was not installable. I finally had to install 98 and piggyback to 2000. I'll spare you the pain of trying to get SATA drives to work in the 2000 install process and other miscellanous unforeseen problems that always seem to pop up during these things) to work on Alphawolf. After finding some really good information online (http://www.petri.co.il/: check it out, it's fabulous!) I finally installed DNS and got it up and running as a domain controller. I'd been trying to get to that since my move and it feels great to have finally got it done.

And, having finished that at about the same time as the rebuild, I added Eeyore in to my new domain and pointed it to Alphawolf for DNS resolution. Though this has the side-effect of making Eeyore dependant on Alphawolf for internet access, that shouldn't be an issue once I have all of my production software moved over to Alpha. Then I can finally decomission Weasel, my current server, and use it as a test box for updates to Alphawolf. Once again, I almost feel like I know what I'm doing.

I need to go over to my parent's house shortly to return the external hard drive my dad lent me for backup. I'm just going to wait until Final Fantasy XI is at the patching stage. (Yes, I'm installing it again. I hope I'll actually use it this time, though I won't hold my breath. I'd like to be able to play online with my brother and his girlfriend, but I never seem to have the time to devote.

Other than that, I am fairly sure I'm coming down with whatever