Personal News of Note

The toothbrush building business is not worth talking about other then to say I'd like to get out of it.

As many other head coaches can probably attest to, leading a vaulting club can suck up every spare hour and brain cell you're willing to give it. Which most of the time is a good thing. This winter has been a little hard on my club as we lost our longeur back in December and have just recently found a new parent that seems up to the task.

In other news of note that you might find interesting:

• I've given up on Microsoft products on my desktop(s) and have successfully made the switch to Ubuntu Linux, OpenOffice.org, etc.. I just am not willing to shell out the bucks to upgrade my Microsoft products when good free [both as in speech and beer] alternatives exist.
  
• Still haven't taken the plunge into either emacs or vi. I seem to be stuck on gedit (a tabbed word pad clone with nice syntax highlighting).
  
• Heavily using both Firefox and Thunderbird. Thunderbird in particular did a relatively good job moving from Win2k to Ubuntu. In Firefox I'm also running the Yahoo Toolbar. I tried the Google tool bar but it seemed a bit invasive.
  
• I'm currently subscribed to nearly 50 podcasts and on average listen to about eight hours a day (~500Mb). [One of the few upsides to the toothbrush factory is that I can listen to my ear buds as I keep the machines fed and running.] On my ToDo list is to post an edited list of what I'm listening to on my blog.
  
• I've been hacking together a customized set of bash scripts, initially based on BashPodder, to download podcasts and burn them to CDs. I want to put a multiuser PHP front end on the system and start a little podcasts on CD by snail mail service.
  
• I've put together a nice little podcasting setup (Behringer 802 mixer, MXL 990 mike w/ shock mount, cool home brew goose neck mike stand, iRiver recorder). However I don't seem to have time to record / produce the kind of programs I want.
  
• I've got a couple of different blogs going including "TomS Words of Wisdom" and "CascadeVaulters.org". And I try to keep them more or less up to date. One of my sources of materials is e-mail replys to friends and family, like this one.
  
• The Geek Jeep is coming up on 350k miles. Like most elderly jeeps it leaks, currently both power steering and engine oil, though neither at critical rates.
  

Let me know if you find this interesting or not by e-mailing or better yet by leaving a comment.