Sick, or One Year and Keep Running
Well, yes, it's Novemeber, time for me to catch some cold. So I stay at home instead of been in office, take pills, drink a lot of hot tea with lemon (I hate tea with anything but water!!!) and... keep working.
I am trying to set up MySQL authorization/authentication with PAM and NSS. There'll definitely be an article on this, as I couldn't find enough information on this. There is a bunch of HowTo's available, and the task doesn't seem to be too hard, but I have problems with it now. Either those howtos aren't enough up-do-date or pill made me dumb.
I didn't tell you the best part yet. I didn't tell you anything good at all, actually. This site is one year old now! I ordered hosting from BlueHost.com on Nov, 20 last year. Now I have my VPS and I was busy moving the blog here from BlueHost and transferring the domain to GoDaddy, so it could have been unavailable for some time. Also, I missed November, 19 when I promised you to report about the first month of non-freelancing. This article would follow today later.
Right now I am accepting congrats. :)
This year shown me that I can be interesting, that I have things to write about (hope, next year will give more such things), that I can get a PR4 for a new domain, and hit the Reddit's top. There are things to remember, definitely.
Thank you for been with me all this time.
How Many Freelancers Does It Take To Change A Light Bulb?
I am a huge fan of that “how many somebodys does it take to change a light bulb” stuff. I'm sure, everyone knows this one already, but still it's one of the my favoutive:
Q: How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Only one, but it takes a long time, and the light bulb has to really want to change.
I am planning to launch a website with lots of such stuff both in Russian and English. Someday. I've even registered a domain name for that. Unfortunatelly, I rarely have enought free time.
What I want to do now is a little contest.
You may have noticed already that there are now Links section in my sidebar. This should be soon changed. And one of those links could be yours forever absoulutely for free.
Just win my little contest.
See the title of this post? Sure, you do. I still do not have any answer to this question in my collection. That's awful, isn't it?
So, the person, who would propose the answer I'd love most, will get a link to his site in my sidebar. Forever and ever and ever.
Long Time Away, or Who Is Vanessa Hudgens?
Well, not actually away. Just didn't have much time to post. I had to pass two more exams to continue my education at University, and had pretty much work to do (soon to announce that project here, just waiting for my client to register domain name and rent a server), so I was pretty busy with all that. And there are also great changes in my private life (not too inspiring, but I'm trying to be optimistic), so I should confess, it was a hard time.
Anyway, I'm here now with lots of thing to tell you about. Be prepared for plenty of posts here. Here comes a brief summary of what is coming next.
Gone Ubuntu
I've been a die-hard Gentoo geek for 2 something years, but... Yes, you see it. :)
I'd probably never change my distro, but there were several things that made me think of it first and forced me to try a bunch of them later. I've seen FreeBSD in action and was amazed. I ruined my Gentoo system and had to get working system ASAP, so I've chosen the best available distro. The best available, not the best distro. I'm not too satisfied with Ubuntu.
I got CentOS 5.0 DVD and I'll try it in some near future.
Gone subversion
I didn't need any version control system for ages, but finally I've grown out of just everyday backups. I need to track work done, I need to know what exactly and when did I change in my code, I need to put milestones and track bugs. The latter is too much for SVN on it's own, but trac perfectly fits my current requirements. I even think of running trac in my sandbox and giving my clients access to it, but I don't know how to limit access for different users and afraid that tracking tickets could take too much time.
Gone single
Alas. Love ins't enough to stay together. We tried hard, she even kept trying when I gave up, but still there were too much thing we couldn't take over. Odd feeling, you know. You work so hard to be able to rent an apartment that would be a place for two of you, and suddenly you don't need it all and you don't know what to do with all of it.
Anyway, you're great, Annie, and I those 6 months were just wonderful.
Almost get employed
East is East and West is West, and I'm damned for freelance forever and ever, but I found a forum post about that vacancy and decided to try it out. My experience is more than sufficient for that work. I could become tech support engineer at local web hosting company, but they decided to hire a student (yes, I'm student, too, but I've got my last year in University, while he's second or third year one) with smaller experience, smaller ambitions and smaller salary.
I don't blame them, I'd do the same if I were them. And it's not the right job for me. Although I could do a lot for that company, they don't really need that right now, so they did the right thing.
Bud, God! It was in the middle of August, when it was hot like Hell and they do have an air conditioning in their office!
Got to give my code away
It was the first time when I had to stop working on a project to take a more important one and needed to prepare my code for other developer. Interesting experience and definitely I'm going to share it. Later.
Vanessa Hudgens
Who the heck's Vanessa Hudgens?
I love that guy!
Well, quite a pretty lot of posts today.
Roger Glover. I love him, really. As a musician, of course, but even more – as a great guy. He's probably the most charismatic of my favourite musicians (who are numerous, believe me, one day I'll make a list). He's kind, nice, fun, I love him most of all Purple dudes. I'm terribly sad about missing his autograph session a couple years ago in Nizhni Novgorod.
Why am I telling you all this? Because I am:
- Listening his records all the night.
- Got to his site and found biography there. Hi describes different stages of his life including band and artists he was listening to at those moments. Like that:
Smoke On The Water (1973) becomes one of the biggest hits of the decade. The band starts to disintigrate but manages a final album, Who Do We Think We Are (1973), containing the single Woman From Tokyo (1973). RG and Ian Gillan leave the band, for different reasons, to be replaced by Glenn Hughes and David Coverdale respectively. Buys his first house in Iver, Bucks. In a state of physical and emotional exhaustion, finds himself returning from the last Deep Purple tour to find that Nazareth are high in the charts with his production of the single Broken Down Angel (1973), taken from the album Razamanaz (1973) - the first of three albums they will make together, the next two being Loud'N'Proud (1974) and Rampant (1975). Listening to Stevie Wonder, Taj Mahal, Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, Van Morrison, Traffic, Free. Supremes, John Lennon, Edgar Winter, George Harrison, Walter Carlos, Mountain, Paul Simon, Chicago, etc.
And what is he listening to during 2003–2004?
Listeining to his iPod
Love him
José González and Pleasure From Work
Interesting and challenging work is always a great pleasure for a creative person, but this post is not about it.
Tonight I finally found a suitable solution to reimplement search at TorrentMan.com. I took almost two weeks and was lot of fun, disappointment, coffee and slepless nights, but it was worth all of those.
While testing this new search functionality, I accidentally came across a record by José González, which I haven't heard yet. It's something called Australian Tour EP and I've only heard two songs from eight listed there.
Really exciting, I do love José. He's so... out of here. And out of time. He plays his guitar and his voice and our souls like noone in 2000's plays. I'm not even sure that any 60's psycho or folk band ever could play like that, though there's some bit of Dylan-like melancholy in his songs. His Veneer (2003) was the very first our (mine, and Anjuta's) “record just for two of us”, something that made us feel the same, think the same and be two parts of something bigger... Wonderful feeling.
Have you ever got such pleasant surprises from your work?
Wow, I've Been Noticed!
It's always great to feel that you do something useful and/or interesting to others. Exciting. I felt this when my 7 Rules Of Successful Freelancer hit reddit's top. I feel (not as strong as with reddit) this every time my articles get into dzone's top. But what's the most exciting are real people, who say I'm interesting (and giving backlinks, yes).
Recently I was invited to some campaign and interviewed for the first time. Joel Badinas left a comment in this blog inviting me to his Blogger's Corner Campaign. If you want to participate, you could leave a comment there or mail Joel.
I don't know if this is useful for me (well, backilnk is always good, but how good it really is?). I just like to be noticed. Especially by a colleague. Well, almost a colleague. Joel is programmer, too. But he's too blogger sometimes, and his blogs are a bit too Google-friendly, but still could be interesting.
Whoa, 22!
I am 22 now (time to update about page). I turned into it on Monday morning (feels like a bad sign, Monday morning rarely bring good things).
Feeling old? No. Felt when turned 20 and 21, but 22 feels like “my” age. I wonder what would it feel like next year.
Thanks everyone for congratulations, I do really appreciate that. People started congratulate me two days before birthday and I'm still receiving emails. Really nice to receive so much attention. But there are things much better than lots of attention.
Like spending the whole day with The Woman. One and only. Love you, babe. Thanks for everything.
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