03.17.99
Mid week catch up
Mar 17 Wed (06 PM)
Things are going really well at work. I’ve been focusing on a Commerce solution, and have my head just buried in it.
It’s pretty powerful, but as a one man show, there’s a lot of rough edges, and not much help for new users. The mailing list that supports it is pretty active (a digest or two a day…) and the participants have all seemed very helpful and thoughtful. It’s nice to be part of a community, even if it’s something as superficial as using a commerce package.
The package itself, “MiniVend” is pretty cool. It has a ton of options and is really full featured. It can interface with SQL databases, accounting, inventory, all sorts of stuff. Right now, I’m just trying to put a simple demo together, so I’m having to strip out a ton of features out the sample catalog, in order to have something small enough that I can really get my brain wrapped around.
This is all running on Solaris, which I’m new to. There were a couple of Sun boxes at Creative Multimedia, but I never dealt with them. Now I’m having to deal with this one head on, and I’m starting to learn the differences between Solaris and Linux. This is also the first time that I’ve had full time access to a GUI on Unix. It’s… interesting. The mouse is as clunky as you can get, but I’m muddling through it.
I can see why people keep making new GUI’s on the Unix side of things. They suck. Plain and simple, they’re just clunks.
The new Blondie album get’s an 8 from me. Good stuff, all over the map, but nothing that rocks you, except for the live tracks, but that’s cheating. 🙂
I’m out to see my Brother for the first time n a couple of months tonight. I really do miss seeing him, and need to make it more of point to stay in touch. I guess his kids really miss me and Amy as well.
I’ve been working on an entry on music/artists/audiences, but it’s really long. Maybe I’ll have it done tomorrow. Then again, maybe I’ll take the time to figure out why the hell some of these entries won’t stay in the senter of the wondow… :p