hospital junk and system admin

February 22, 2002

Did you notice a change in this site lately? No? Good! A lack of interruption in service is always pleasant when upgrading or changing any system. In this case, jsignal.com is no longer hosted on Yahoo's web servers. It's now on my very own web server, sitting in my apartment. Granted, it's an old Pentium that was thrown out by a hospital, but it runs Red Hat Linux well enough.

The new web server is also running another site I've been working on with my friend Justin: www.cyclend.com. It's progressing more slowly than we'd like, but we both stare at computer screens all day and are not always excited about doing more coding in our free time.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm learning all the skills I require to perform my duties as a systems administrator. Then I look at this Linux box, sitting in my apartment. I set it up from scratch (even the scrounging of parts for it), configured Linux, Apache, MySql, listserver software, and so on. It's been running uninterrupted for 92 days now, though this site was just moved to it this week.

I'm not trying to boast. I have a lot to learn and I am constantly reminded of that fact at work. :) But the fact is, there is no way I could have done all this six months ago when I lived in Grand Forks.

I haven't written in a while. I'd like to believe it's because I've been spending tons of time working on cyclend.com, but that's only part of the reason. So far, my adult life has less stress and fewer interesting things to report than during the ol' college days. I wrote about stress and uncertainty all through college. These days, I'm somewhat bored.