Everyone has gone home. Jared called a few minutes ago to let us know he’d arrived safely and uneventfully in Denver. The coeds, Ashlyn and Maren (a now correct spelling of her name), are back in Rexburg at BYU-Idaho. They all helped put up a couple of Christmas Trees yesterday and get them decorated. Their good work deserved a picture and immortalization on my blog! It’s now just Nina, Bradica (the dog), and me at home. It is very quiet in the house! Even though none of the kids make very much noise, their presence is missed.

I drove Jared down to Salt Lake to the airport. The roads on the way down were wet with some slick spots in the passing lane. By the time I came back, the roads were mostly dry with just a few wet spots. Moving at the speed limit was not problem. Jared was at the gate in plenty of time, particularly since his flight was delayed by about a half hour. Nina drove the girls the opposite direction to Rexburg. She left about an hour and a half after Jared and I left and we both got back home within a half hour of each other. It sure was nice to have the kids around the house for a few days.

Coming back I listened to a couple of podcasts. The first, titled Core Values from BloggerCon III was interesting for the first 45 minutes before the session lost its focus. Dave Winer, one of the luminaries and responsible for the Scripting News blog, talked for a couple of minutes about web logs and links in these blogs. He was pretty adamant that whenever anything from any other source on the web is referenced, it must be linked. I haven’t been very good about that, so I’ll try to repent and make sure that anyone reading this can go to the source to find out if there is anything else interesting there.

The second podcast was also from itconversations.com and is part of a regular series called The Gillmore Gang. Steve Gillmor gets a group of folks together, either in person or on the phone, and they talk about current information technology topics. This particular podcast focused mainly on Sun, the impending open sourcing of Solaris 10, and Sun’s future direction. It was an interesting discussion and I’ll be watching to see what really happens over the next couple of years. Sun, in my opinion, has been impacted the most severely by the Linux revolution. They definitely have to resurrect themselves Phoenix fashion and become a new company. The discussion featured Jonathan Schwarts from Sun Microsystems who was certainly an able representative of the company. One other regular participant on The Gillmor Gang is Doc Searls, a Senior Editor at Linux Journal (and also runs the IT Garage blog). I’ve been fortunate to have been acquainted with Doc Searls for a couple of years. I met him on a Linux Lunacy cruise put on by Neil Bauman at Geek Cruises and have had a couple of conversations since then with him. He’s definitely worth listening to in the Linux world.

So, the ride home from the airport was time well spent as I caught up on a few interesting things in my work-a-day and play-away world. Besides that, it gives me ample opportunity to put those all-important "links" in my blog!

I’ve started building a new web server that will eventually replace my current web server. That box will become the development server, and I’ll be able to retire two computers from the home network. I’ve decided to build the new server using SuSE Linux. It’s a whole lot more stable than Red Hat’s Fedora distribution and much easier to install and configure. I’m hoping that everything will be ready to migrate into production by the end of the year. It’s time to revamp the whole web server process. This time I’ll put up a couple of virtual web servers so that I can serve up more than one web page and eventually segue into podcasting as well. Updates on the progress to follow. Meanwhile, the evening is about finished and I’ve got a couple of work items to catch up on before heading to bed. It’s back to work tomorrow….