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.

Forty-five minutes earlier than I normally leave, I walked out the door, heading for DFW Airport. I had no idea what I was in for. This ice was solid and wet, not like the usual thin dry ice we normally receive. A few pictures can show what the deal was.

This truck was jack-knifed when I first made my attempt up the hill to the main road. He managed get straightened out, but did not move for nearly thirty minutes. He broke out the tire chains, installed them, and tried to drive. He did nothing but spin still, because what I can only assume,  chains must not be very valuable on solid ice. I do not own chains, so I can only go on what I think might happen.

Looking out my front windshield, this is the road. The cars and trucks in front of me, and in the oncoming traffic lane are not moving, oh no, they are at a stand-still too.

This is the same point that I sat at for nearly 1.5 hours, but it was not boring. All the vehicles down the road a bit, were stuck. Some were spinning their tires until they were smoking, yet not making any progress whatsoever.

I did meet a couple of people. I never learned his, or his dogs name, but we chatted for about thirty minutes or so. He made it about a 1/16 mile further up the road than I did, started to spin his tires, and slid back down sideways… quickly I might add. I just knew he was going to hit me. He came about three feet from my car, and stopped. I do not know what stopped his truck from sliding, but I am thankful that it did.

I finally made it home later on, ten hours of work lost, but still alive, so I am not going to complain. In the past seven years, I have never called in, but today I will make an exception.

Obvious observation of the day: solid ice sucks, stay home.

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:

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 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, 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

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 in Cotterville, we still say the word Christmas, and that is what we celebrate also. I would like to encourage you to read the real Christmas story in the Bible. Matthew 1:18-2:23.

• My Wife Carrie




• Jenny




• My Mom Darcy




• Grandma B.




• Sister Desty




• Jessi




• My boy David




• Marie




• Beth Ann




• Christi




• Pam




• Tracey




• Laci




• Jenna




• Todd




• Angela




• Debbie

Thank you all very much again. I am thankful for you all.

Here is Isaac Cotter. He was 8lbs 2oz, so he is a biggin’. Welcome to this world Isaac.