Things that really excite me this year so far:

• Ubuntu
• KnoppMyth (Sweet action MythTV!)
• Ruby On Rails
• Asterisk (just bought a Sipura 3000)
• RAGI
• SwitchTower
• Ruby

I had the great opportunity to meet with Jared Smith, Asterisk Guru and author. He was up doing some VOIP consulting for my company. What a cool guy! I had him up to talk to the LUG a few months ago and was impressed with his knowledge and it was good to see him again. He recently switched to ful-time consulting and gets to have all kinds of fun going to uber-geek conventions and the like. I truly am jealous. The good thing is he gave me a copy of his book and even signed it for me.

He spoke of his fun at The O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference. He hob-nobbed with some alpha geeks. We spoke about scripting language integration and I mentioned my Ruby affection. He told me about a talk given at the conference about some sweet ruby Asterisk intergration (ala RAGI) and some real cool news about Rails / Asterisk intergration. Dang fine!

After some Googling it turns out my hero for this week is Joe Heitzeburg. His talks is entitled “Ruby on Rails with Asterisk.”

Sweet article here.

Phoenix

It’s all done - no going back now. I’ve accepted a job down in the Phoenix area. I gave my employer 4 weeks notice to help finish up a big project I’ve been involved with here at Flying J Communications. I’ve been with FJC a little over 3 years and it’s been a great experience for me, but it’s time to move on.

(Anyone wanna buy a sweet house?)

Apollo

My new job is actually with the Apollo Group, the parent company of The University of Phoenix. It was recently ranked #36 in Computerworld’s top 100 places to work in IT in the US, and one of only 2 companies on the list in Arizona. (No companies in Utah even made the list)

Google

Now that the cat’s out of the bag and it’s official that I’m moving to Phoenix I can relate my Google story:

I had heard from my dad the Google would be moving to Phoenix, so on a whim back in November I sent my resume off to Google. I hardly expected to hear back from this PhD-ridden, uber-tech company. To my surprise, a few weeks later, a nice HR lady emailed me back asking me if I would be available for a phone interview. I replied back that I’d be open for anytime they wanted to call me. An interview was scheduled and immediately (and ironically) Googled “google interview experience.” A flood of hits came back about nightmare-ish and grilling interviews with people who were smarter that you’d ever hoped to be given 300 years of intense schooling.

I had no idea how true this was. The position at Google was for a Unix Systems Administrator, so I studied up on all the things I thought would be asked. I was nerve-wracked and sweating by the time I wandered out to my car for the interview. (My car is the only real place for some privacy when I’m at work) The HR lady was on the phone first. She verified some personal info and then transfered me to an interview technician that know sysadmin inside and out. He was very friendly, but as time went on the questions got harder and more difficult. I got the impression that if you don’t know the answer they want to see if you could figure it out. I didn’t know a few of the questions, but felt good in the fact that I did figure out the answer to most of them after some analysis. After everything was said and done this interview lasted 1.5 hours. Whew!

Even though I think I did OK on on the first interview, I wasn’t expecting another call from them. Sure enough another email came from the HR lady and I was set for my 2nd interview. (To Be Continued…)

Some Ubuntu folks are proposing a .Mac-like service for use across multiple Ubuntu computers. I’m all for it.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Ubuntu%2eMac

I’d like to see others run with this idea too. Maybe a general .Mac-like service for any OS.

Do you need any more of a reason to install an alternate brower on your desktop? Do you have to be hit over the head?
http://www.internetnews.com/security/article.php/3374931

After seeing an article over at PCMag.com about using network-manager with Breezy, I thought I’ve give it a try. It looks sweet and all, but I ran into one big snag.

El Problemo: because of my network config at work and at home the local DNS caching issue / bind9 dependancy was a deal-breaker for me. That is untill I ran across WildBill’s Blog entry. He repackaged network-manager without the bind9 dependancy and Wa-hoo! it works now!

Thanks WildBill.

I attended the Utah Geek Dinner last night and it was really a great event. Dr. Windley’s presentation was food for thought and I got a chance to meet a few geeks in person. I sat across from Pete Ashdown the head honcho at Xmission (and who is running for State Senate against Sen. Hatch — good luck Pete!) and right next to Erik Anderson of Busybox and uClibc fame.

After the meeting, while I was driving home, I came up with a new idea. Ok - so it isn’t really new… just putting some ideas together to form something new: Social Podcasting (spodcasting?)

Brief Summary: The podcast topics and questions will be submitted and voted upon before hand (think digg.com) This podcast will have a website where you can submit topics to discuss or people to interview and then underneath that topic/interview you can submit specific questions to be discussed or asked. All these elements can be voted on and the most popular topics/interviews will be picked for the next podcast with the most popular specific questions to be discussed or asked.

A great post I ran across from Duane Johnson:

http://inquirylabs.com/blog/?p=20

Can’t wait to give it a shot.

It really doesn’t matter what OS you prefer. Linux or Mac fanboy? Tride and true Windows dude? However you slice it, Firefox has emerged as the best all-around browser for any OS.

1.5 is out with a slew of updates and new features. Grab it now.

Hooray!

My shipment of 50 free Ubuntu CDs came in tonight!
(30 PC CDs, 10 64-bit CDs and 5 Mac CDs)
Let the evangelism begin.