Dave's Workshop - Workbench July 22nd

Workbench

Week of July 22^nd - 28^th 2001

Sunday

I can just get a post in today if I make it short. Busy day today, but I managed to get a couple of things accomplished (well started anyway). We had lunch with Kara's mom, then dinner with her dad. Tomorrow is dinner with my parents. In between I did a little cleaning and played with the computer some.

Stuff I'm looking into... StarOffice, which I'm using to write this with; Steel Panthers: Word At War, a computer wargame; and The Phantom Edit, downloaded with the aid of my trusty (so far) cable modem. News on all of the above soon. No time now or it will be tomorrow.

Monday

Normal Monday today. A couple users forgot their passwords over the weekend, Exchange mailboxes over the limit, normal Monday stuff. The one annoying thing was that the web development server was down most of the day. Unfortunately, people keep coming to me with web updates and requests. Sometimes I think I've turned into a full time web guy at work with all the new sites people need built. Oh well, I guess that's job security.

So after three+ years I finally got around to installing StarOffice yesterday. I first came into contact with StarOffice when I was working in a small shop where the owner loved Linux. One day StarOffice came bundled with the latest Caldera distribution. It was pretty exiting. The one thing really hurting Linux back then (and maybe still) was the lack of applications. I left shortly afterwards to work for the state. Where I'm at now is a strictly Microsoft shop, so MS Office is the name of the game. But I've always wanted to go back and take a good look at, now Sun's, StarOffice. One thing that really makes it hard for new applications to take hold is peoples tendency to not like change. Sure a program may have a horrible user interface, but once you get to know it and use it you become accustom to it and making the move to something different, better, worse or indifferent, becomes hard. I know this was the case with the Opera web browser for me. Twice I downloaded and installed it, but was frustrated at not knowing where things were and how to configure it. Then finally I decided to give it an honest try. For one week I would only use Opera. If I had a problem I would figure it out and not go running back to IE. By the second day I was comfortable with it. By the end of the week, when I had to test a web page, IE felt funny. Now I wont say Opera never frustrates my, but overall I like it more than IE. I'm sure StarOffice will drive me crazy, just like Word did when I first started using it. Come to think of it, Word still drives me crazy sometimes. And I may find after trying out StarOffice for a while that MS Office is better for me, but I won't know till I try.

Tuesday

Wednesday

We're heading down to Tampa tomorrow afternoon. I don't know if I'll get a post in, well see how busy it is at work. If it was anything like today... Let me put it this way, I was an hour and a half late getting home. We'll be coming back late Saturday, so things will probably pick back up on the site next week.

I've decided (for now) to get a Netgear RO318 cable/DSL router. It's a pretty new model packed with features. Unfortunately, all the products I found had a large amount of negative comments. I understand these types of devices are pretty low end, but the amount of DOAs and flaky units was scary. About half the complaints were about holding for tech support or the lousy quality of people they talked to when they finally got through. With similar Netgear products it was close to a 90% to 10% favorable response which seems to be pretty good compared to the competition, so well see. The price locally is around $250, which is more then I want to spend, but I've seen prices around $160 online.

I still plan on converting an old 486 into a diskless router. Right now though I have a computer just sitting here not able to share high speed Internet access. And hopefully we'll have new computer pretty soon, so something needs to be done now and a hardware router seems to be the easiest solution.

Thursday

Off to Tampa...

Friday

Tampa

Saturday

Tampa

HOME

WORKBENCH

COMPUTERS

HOBBIES

ABOUT

Workbench

Week of July 22^nd - 28^th 2001

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

HOME

WORKBENCH

COMPUTERS

HOBBIES

ABOUT

Workbench

Week of July 22nd - 28th 2001

Sunday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Week of July 22^nd - 28^th 2001