Catching up

I've been swamped of late and been unable to pay attention to this blog much. This quarter school has been intense. I've had lots of great ideas floating around that I wanted to blog, but I've never gotten them written down. I could use Jott, but I was hoping to make more substantial postings than 30 seconds allows.

Ubuntu Hardy Heron
I've almost switched 100% to Ubuntu, as I've posted before. There are a few applications that I run in a virtual Windows XP, but I'm loving linux. The OS is fast, stable and free. Recently (in terms of blog posting) I upgraded from version 7.10 to 8.04. I had all these great things I wanted to write about the upgrade process; but I can sum them up in just a few words - it was easy and seamless. As a newb, I was thrown by the fact that my kernel was upgraded at the same time, but I quickly figured that one out.

OpenOffice 2.4 was great, as it has enhanced support for Microsoft's XML document format, but I removed Firefox 3 beta 5 because prime time just wasn't ready for it. Developers haven't made compatible versions of lots of the plugins that I've come to rely on in my browser.

One of the funny things, as I was discussing this upgrade with my college room mate, one of my linux resources, I was upgrading to 8.04 from 7.10 and he was upgrading from 6.06 to 7.10!

Business School
This quarter has been very challenging from a time management perspective. Our two classes are almost entirely based on preparing case studies as a group, which is a big change from the previous quarters. It's take us most of the quarter to really figure out how to work effectively and we are still struggling somewhat. Its taken lots of really late nights (or early mornings, depending on your point of view) to get the work done.

Last week, my kids asked when I was going to eat dinner with them again (I wasn't there). My youngest had been keeping track, accurately, no less of how many dinners I'd missed because I was at school or working on case study with my group. Three more weeks and this quarter will be over.

Soccer Coaching
Yes, I'm coaching soccer again. This season is super low key - 5 kindergarteners playing 3 on 3 soccer. The goal here is to have fun and teaching the basics. I think I've been successful at that and I've been having fun too. I'm glad I was able to work this into my schedule and I think so was my youngest, too.

I can't promise much, but I'll try to keep up on this blog a little more. Maybe they'll be short quick posts, but I'll keep you in the loop!