Frazzled

This week has been one big overload of frazzlehood so far. Jane's had a big corporate training event she had to work on - she spent two days (plus Monday evening) in Quincy, and yesterday she had to drive down to Connecticut in the snow to do an event in Farmington, staying overnight. She'll be back today sometime.

Besides having a decent amount of work to do, I've been doing all the David-care as well. Yesterday, I distracted him from the lack of Mommy by taking him from daycare right to do some supply shopping at BJ's, then to my bowling league, and finally into a quick videoconference with my parents when we got home. After all that, he only had about 45 minutes or so before bedtime. Not enough time for stress.

Today was a little rougher - he woke up asking for her and I had to ease him back to the present. She'll pick him up at school today if her return schedule permits.

The small magazine publisher I bailed out of a crisis around Thanksgiving has proven to be a deadbeat of the worst sort. So I informed her yesterday that the equipment that was left with me for recovery purposes (and the data within) would be considered forfeit if I didn't hear from her with plans to pay me by tomorrow. The gear isn't worth what she owes me, but it's stuff she needs. Moral: always have a signed contract when you walk into a crisis situation. If I had one, I'd be able to get the money a lot easier. Fortunately, my other customers aren't such a problem.

Both my favorite SMB Linux distros are rapidly approaching new releases. SME Server (which I use at the office) has released the first beta of version 6.5 - the first new release in about a year since becoming a community project. It now fixes a few bugs, integrates Spamassassin 3.02, and migrates to the Red Hat Linux 9 codebase from the former 7.3 codebase. This is being done in preparation for an eventual move to either Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Centos (the community version of RHEL), and also to get ready for the commercial move to Lycoris as the vendor.

The other product is ClarkConnect - the version I use at home. They've had version 3.0 in beta for several months now, and just released the RC yesterday. Depending on what Lycoris does with SME commercially, this is the best way right now to get a commercially supported and developed Linux for small business. Plus they've got some neat goodies in the works for 3.x, starting with groupware integration. Cool stuff.

I've got both in my possession, and I'm going to install them into Virtual PC sessions for testing. I'm especially curious as to how SME has progressed - a lot of things broke with 6.01.