Ross came off the farm like many of that era, and became a skilled carpenter, a project superintendent and founded and operated his on commercial contracting firm, Ross Sparks Builders, that has built and continues to build many of the commercial and institutional buildings throughout Arkansas. He supervised the construction of many landmark buildings in Little Rock including early sections of the Children’s Hospital, the second phase of the Doctors Building, The Sears Store, a renovation of the Historic Capital Hotel, the Farm Bureau Building, sections of the Little Rock National Air Port and numerous buildings on the Little Rock Air Force Base.

Respected by employees, vendors and subcontractors alike, Ross was a man of his word, and a man of high standards with a bent toward hard work. It was said by many who worked for him that after you worked a day for Ross Sparks you felt in your bones you had put in a hard day of work. You could always see progress from one day to the next on his projects. All who worked for and under Ross respected his skilled and confident way of moving a job forward, and how he taught them to be better equipped to do their work. The highest compliment Ross felt he ever received came from his former boss, mentor and fellow contractor, Nick Howell, who when asked to give a reference for Ross said. “There is nothing that Ross cannot build”.

Ross was devoted to his Christian faith, and a member of Life Line Baptist Church in southwest Little Rock for 48 years where he served as a Deacon and Youth Sunday School Teacher. He served on the Board of Directors of the Ozark Conference Center a Christian Conference and Youth Camp ministry. After his retirement he volunteered to supervise the renovation and construction of the Conference facility near Morrilton, AR.
He served his country honorably in the U.S. Army doing a tour of duty during the Korean Conflict stationed around Seoul, South Korea. Ross was a member of the Jones STABS Deer Hunting Club and enjoyed his annual hunts with friends and family. He liked to tinker and just loved to build things. He built two homes, a family, a business and a life filled with joy and good will.

Ross was admired for being a kind, compassionate and generous man. He could always be counted on by co- workers and employees who found themselves short and needed a little help to get them to payday. He took the proverb to cast your bread upon the waters literally, and generously gave to seven and even to eight. Once a homeless man wandered off the street on to a job site, and asked if anyone could help him out. Without hesitating Ross pulled out a twenty dollar bill and gave it to the man and wished him well.
Ross was also a kind and loving husband to his wife of 62 years and a loving father and grandfather to his two sons and four grandsons. He leaves to his sons and grandsons a legacy that truly affirms that the glory of sons is their fathers. He leaves a legacy of integrity and honesty in business, compassion and generosity to mankind, and love and kindness to friends and family.

Ross is survived by his wife Barbra Ann, his two sons Albert Bruce Sparks , and Bryan Keith Sparks (Pamela), four grandsons, Albert Bruce Sparks Jr. of Houston, TX, Keegan Ross Sparks, James Collin Sparks, and Bryan Kenley Sparks all of Little Rock, his sister Maxine Creel of Pearl Mississippi, and a beloved extended family. He was preceded in death by his parents, three brothers, and two sisters.

The family wishes to express its sincere gratitude to Ross’ special care giver Brenda Aldridge and the team of doctors and nurses at the VA Little Rock and North Little Rock who gave great care to him during his last days.

—

Papa, I will miss you tremendously. You gave me my first truck, helped teach me how to hunt, fish, ride a four-wheeler, and have a good work ethic. I can now only imagine the time you are having, illness free, in the presence of Almighty God. I will never forget you. The large crowd that showed up for your Funeral says something about your person.

We love you.

I use it everyday within the walls of my house. Internally, Cotterville would not function without it. Linux runs unseen by anyone but myself. I have three virtual computers setup and running, controlling everything. This webserver hosting my website is running on Linux within a virtual computer.

So what is Linux. I found a great video that explains it, and it is pretty thorough.

Try it, you might like it. You might be surprised just how innovative it is, and just how much Windows and Mac constantly have to play catch-up normally.

Afterwards, he was bouncing off the walls in the store, on the way home, and in the bath. Here is what I am talking about.

As I write this, I can still hear him bouncing in his bed, and talking. He will pass out soon, and probably wake up in the morning still going 100 mph, until the sugar wears off.

We met a family from Australia there, and also a couple from Argentina. My boys had their picture taken with Wild Bill Hickok, a lawman and gunfighter. He look stunningly good for being 174 years old too. Isaac was scared-to-death, so he had momma there to help out.

It was a fun day. You should visit too.

This video was taken after the balloon drop had taken place (1100pm) and hats and horns had been given out (1130pm).

We are looking forward to this same thing next New Years Eve too. I hope to make this an annual tradition.

The Problem (in my eyes)

When I see this (right) I can not help but think of the outrageous cost that mid-sized school districts have paid for this software/hardware, where the total cost of ownership (TCO) is substantially higher than any other software/hardware options. There is no benefit to using Windows over other operating systems like Linux. I have found that one of the main reasons that public and non-profit organizations choose to use very expensive software systems like Windows, is because:

Microsoft has a very loud marketing team, and can easily throw around money (possibly the main reason).

1. The IT administrators have never heard of Linux/Unix systems, and yet they still call themselves IT admins.
2. Admin have deliberately chosen not to learn systems like Linux, because it is different than they are used too. I would normally call this laziness, with some exceptions, or
3. The control lust has the admin(s) resisting change to anything that is not an in-house system when it comes to email or other collaboration options.

Solutions
If I am going to point out the problem, I have to have a viable solution. One of my favorite online and print journalist, and K12 school IT administrator Shawn Powers, has taken on, and successfully converted his Michigan K12 school institution into an open source/Apps school, saving hundreds of thousands of tax payer dollars per year.

Email
My first idea is for email. In my experience, Microsoft Exchange 2010 is one of the most expensive, and most unreliable email systems I have had the unfortunate opportunity to use. I am was a student at the University of Texas at Arlington, and this education institution, and the entire University of Texas system, has chosen to use Microsoft Exchange too. This is a bit of a different situation, being an institution that biannually paid high tuition rates to teach students. This network of schools uses Exchange as part of a software as a service, or SaaS, and even as a hosted service, we, as students, professors, and administrators constantly see service outages.

One alternative to the $4,000* price tag for a single copy of Microsoft Exchange Enterprise Edition (required for more than 10 email users), is Google Apps Education Edition. Google Apps Education Edition gives all of the enterprise features that Exchange offers, plus reliability, and NONE of the cost that a single license of Exchange cost, which many are required for an email server cluster. My former school district that I grew up in recently converted to Google Apps for their email and document system, and it has been a huge success.

New Computers
The next solution that can save thousands of dollars for schools is by re-purposing old computer hardware, so new, usually expensive computers do not have to be purchased every couple of years. By using a thin-client computing model, this old hardware can continue to be reliably used. The easiest method of this is by using a Linux Terminal Service Project (LTSP) model of computing. This saves money on the per-terminal license that Windows requires, it also saves on the new hardware cost that is required by new Windows software in order to run. Old hardware can be revived, and used for years to come, saving more money that the school can invest in other areas of teaching. Existing hardware that had been used to operate resource intensive Windows server software can be re-purposed as a “thin-server” for the thin-client network.

I have personally experimented with a LTSP thin-client network, and have been very surprised at how easy it was to setup and maintain. Once the main server is setup, everything is controlled by that single server, or server cluster. Updates, software installations, modifications, problems can all be resolved by making changes to the LTSP server, committing the change (easy-to-do), and then issuing a reboot command to restart computers on the network. As each computer restarts, it automatically downloads the latest operating system image, including all updates, modifications, etc, and the computer is up-to-date.

Office Suite
For the Microsoft Office alternative, there is OpenOffice.org LibreOffice.org, or Google Docs. These is a fully featured office productivity suite, that contains all of the components that would be needed. Both of these are both free as in cost, with minimal retraining for the staff. They both include a document editor, presentation editor, and spreadsheet editor. This would be a perfect fill in for the very expensive Microsoft Office program ($150* per license of Student and Home Edition).

Conclusion
Just by making changes like these listed, some school districts have reported cost savings of $400,000 per year in hardware purchasing, and software licenses. This is an incredible amount of money that could be used elsewhere in a school environment. It all comes down to making the most of every dime that a school income has, which as most know, is not very many. I hope these are some good ideas that someone in a school environment could consider.

* price from Microsoft on 30-May-2010

Updated 01-April-2012

One time saving trick I have been using for a long while now is using simple bash scripts to complete tasks. Running two different flavors of Linux has tought me a lot. I have been a Debian/Ubuntu user for a while, and recently started using CentOS. Both of these have the Linux kernel at heart, but work in different ways.

I have two scripts I put together to make updating quick and easy. The first part is the script for the Debian based APT system, and the latter will be for the Red Hat based RPM system.

APT

Okay, lets start. The first script will work for pretty much any Debian (.deb) based system, and it goes like this: Open a text editor of your choice – Vim, Emacs, gedit, etc, and enter in this string of commands.

apt-get update
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade -y
apt-get autoremove -y
apt-get autoclean

Now why did I do two apt-get update’s instead of one. If you were to get an error, APT will tell you that you can fix the problem by running “apt-get update” again. To knock out that message from the start, I just go ahead and update twice, it can’t hurt anything. I added in a “-y” to automatically answer yes to questions where a [Y/n] is required to continue on the process. Now save it as filename.sh, I use update.sh so I can find this script among the others I have laying around on my hard drive. Be sure to have the .sh on the end, since this is a script. Now we are going to run it using a terminal like this.

sudo bash update.sh

You have to have the sudo at the beginning of the command because an update is considered an administrative task, and running this bash script without sudo will lead you to many errors. You will see the script run line-by-line until it is finished. Here is the result of that very simple shell script you just ran:

RPM

On an RPM Linux system like Red Hat or CentOS, the script is a bit different, shorter number of commands, takes longer, but it accomplishes the same goal. You again want to open your text editor or choice and write these lines:

yum clean all
yum check update
yum update -y
yum clean all -y

Yum clean all — dumps the current cache of information so you have a clean slate to start with.
Yum check-update — scans the defined repositories for the latest software to download.
Yum update — as it says, updates the system to the latest files and programs.
Yum clean all -y — cleans up all the files once more.

You will run these as root, or you can use the sudo bash update.sh if you have sudo installed already, or have the system run automatically as a cron job. The RPM updates run differently than APT system updates do, and are known to take much longer, a lot longer actually. Here is what I see when I run sudo bash update.sh on my CentOS Linux computer:

Like I said before, RPM based Linux systems do take a considerably long amount of time to complete, compared to a Debian based system like Ubuntu. Once these scripts are completed, you will have a  fully updated system*, and can continue on with what you were doing.

This is a very very simple script. You can add or subtract from this if you want. I happen to use this script on this webserver, and have to remove the chattr immutable flags I have set on many many files to keep them protected from any type of change whatsoever, with out consent.

I have had no issue using these commands to do my quick system updates for more than a year now, and it saves time.

Side note — I have heard a few people say before that using the tack y (-y) during an update, or clean is dangerous. I am not going to say otherwise, but I have seen, and used this without any issue before. I guess you will have to decide whether to use it or not “at your own risk” as I have heard it said.

* – depending on if no errors occur because of files being locked using chattr, or for any other reason.

Here is the progress he has made so far.

The train system is up and running and currently being used for carrying freight, and a few passengers. It is running like a well oiled machine.
Welcome to Rug Town as it has been named.

Who likes receiving email that is so hard to read, you pretty much do not and delete it? I can not stand receiving those types of email. I have come to treat my email accounts just like I do my snail mail box. I read the important messages, and delete the junk.

I have certain standards/rules I expect email that arrives in my inbox to have and follow. Here they are.

Is it to the point?

I get tired of email that arrives and has been written to talk about nothing at first, and attempts to transition to a main point and fails. Thinking about this, if I were to receive regular mail in my mailbox like this, it would immediately be thrown into the trash can. So people, when you write an email, just get to the point.

Is it poorly written?

This is one of the most irritating issues when it comes to email. “How r u 2day?” Has the English language been beaten down to the level of stupid? I do not have a busy inbox, with only receiving about fifty to seventy-five emails per day, but atleast half have this gibberish language at its core. Now I am not an expert in writing, but I do expect an email to not be written in text speak. Wut do U thnk?

Is it an advertisement?

SPAM! Nothing else to say here.

How was it written?

My automatic response to email that was written poorly, does not get to the point, written as a reactionary response, written out of anger, or just boring usually get deleted without being read, or without being completely read. Colors in email are a bad thing to me. I do not like reading email that was written in bright colors like YELLOW, or has a bright background color also. What is wrong with you people that do this? Come on, a little mercy here.

Attachments?

I received an email this past week that had 8MB of attachments embedded within it. This caused some issues in Firefox3 and caused all of my swap and RAM to be completely consumed, basically locking up my entire system. Have you received one of those emails from your family or friends that has a video attached? When I see an email that says it has a 25MB file attached, I delete it immediately. Send me a link to YouTube, Vimeo, etc for video, Picasaweb, Live, etc for images, and so on, you get the point I am sure.

Was it digitally signed?

To satisfy the geek in me, a digitally signed email will almost always be read. I sign all of my email using the PGP key on my PGP page. That adds a little credibility to an email in my personal opinion.