I’ll take baby steps

Baby steps. Its all about the size of the step. But the length of the leg may not relate to the step. I was talking with friends about my departure away from so many of the Linux and open source things I’ve done. It seems like with each job, I move further away from this place I used to really enjoy. Now I get to touch Linux a bit but only on servers and its Ubuntu of all things. Well. I’m glad it is the birdlike distribution. But my one friend asked if I was happy away from some of the Linux things.

Lets be honest here. Doing Linux is fun and I enjoy it. Doing it as a primary work objective can have a high suckage factor and I’ve been with so many companies that did it, lived it, and died with it; that I need to be at a place that uses is but is not ruled by it I think. The place I’m at now sees its worth but does not live and die by its mandates. Perhaps I’m lazy and I gravitate toward the actual tools I’ll need to get a thing done. I tried using VMware workstation or player for a day and it was uncomfortable. I wanted to just go home and get my native XP laptop because it seemed more comfortable. Now, no one tells me I “must run X or Y to be cool”. Instead, I just do what I need to do and like its said here before “what I must do”.

I’m thankful for Linux and open source applications still rule my systems. The Mozillas, OpenOffice.org’s, GIMPs, and others that are cross platform make my day easier and more productive. I can live with/out the Office killer apps but I’m there with Office 2007, exchange, etc. I do synchronize Outlook to google calendar and then goosync that to my phone. If you want to share calendars with a mobile phone, here is my way of doing it:

1. sync outlook to google calendar using google’s outlook synchronization tool
2. sync google calendar to Treo with goosync
3. done…

I don’t think I need some terribly complex synchronization factor and instead I just use google calendar as a medium of sorts. I don’t need multiple outlook integration since I use our company’s exchange server for that. I don’t really care about address books and I can manually update the address book server on goosync.

But what about the new job you may ask? Well, its different folks. Its going to take me a bit of time to “wind down” from doing enterprise stuff. This is smaller and has different needs and I’ve been responding to enterprise stuff for awhile now. I need wind down time but I’m already getting closer. I like what I have to do and where its going to take me.