A Lot Going On

I wanted to update those curious persons who contacted me concerning the relatively slow posting of late. Have no fear, I shall be posting more regularly as the week progresses. In no time, I will be back to a more tolerable level of readability.

As to why I have been slow the past two weeks, I have simply been busy with life. Here are a few of the interesting parts…

eMarketing Efforts For An Upcoming Movie

This will be a post of its own someday, perhaps on one of the sites I am working on. Thanks to a post on this blog, I will be putting my eMarketing skills to use in a new arena for me. I will be handling online marketing efforts for a movie to begin filming this summer.

The contract was signed last week, and things are getting underway. This project will likely mean cutting my posting level down a bit until completion rather than ramping it up to the level I had planned on. Then again, you never know—I may have all kinds of things to share based on the experience as it moves along. There will be more on this development in the near future.

Readying Websites For Launch

I have also been busy preparing some websites for launch. Among them are my eMarketing services site, a regional news site, and a blogging careers site (bloggingcareers.com for the curious). The regional news site will, I hope, be a public journalism site if there is enough sustainable interest in the concept.

Additionally, a site is in the works to market a small town with a big imprint on annual state tourism. I have also started research on branding communities and nations. Many small municipal governments have no idea where to begin when it comes to efforts to maximize what resources they have available. I have begun studying various community sites (towns, cities) and a few notable examples of national branding (governments who have eMarketing down to an artform). It is a study I intend to use to help set a business direction for future efforts working in the area of community economic development.

As if all of that weren’t enough, those are the first of more than 30 anticipated sites which will form a network I have been planning for many months now.

Geeking Around With Linux Distros And PC-BSD

There will likely be some upcoming reviews and random thoughts as I try out some more Linux distros. I shall also give the recently released PC-BSD a whirl and see what I think about that.

My goal is to find distros that will encourage or make migrating away from Windows easier for those wanting to do so. I have long been an advocate of Open Source—coupled with my personal business philosophy and love of guerrilla marketing, it is only natural that I continually quest after the best distros to suit different needs.

I have always felt that I wanted to find one perfect distro for my day to day use. I am still looking for it, but there are a few good contenders. In the meantime, I want to familiarize myself with a variety that do certain things really well, allowing me to make credible recommendations based on the needs of those who come to me for help. I also have an interest in developing nations and rural/small town economies. Oh, and while we are talking of interests, I have an interest in education as well—particularly in finding ways to help educators in poor and developing nations and rural or isolated communities around the world.

One way I am trying to focus my efforts is to find three suitable distros for users of the following types: home, business, and educational. By suitable, I mean they are (1) relatively easy to use and update, (2) compatible with a wide range of hardware configurations, (3) stable and mature, (4) can be extended and configured to suit specific needs or run specific applications (mainly for business and educational needs, but also for developers and multimedia artists), (5) is available to run from a Live CD/DVD (with support or plans for supporting booting from portable USB drives).

I think more American schools in particular would benefit from moving to Linux, not only saving money, but creating more educated future users that are interested in IT careers and aware of global issues and communities. Schools around the world are always short of funds, and Open Source is a natural fit for that market. Small to medium sized business owners and entrepreneurs need the same stability and security that big companies do, but do not always have the means to hire in-house staff or pay for expensive maintenance contracts they may not use.

Those are the things that drive my curiosity to play around with various distros. I want to find ones that I personally feel comfortable recommending for each need (home, busienss, education) and would be able and willing to support in some capacity. More importantly, I want to find those distros that meet my criteria and then help out the community that develops it.

I am trying currently trying Mandriva Linux Free after having given Mandriva One a spin (which I recommended in Computer Crack Addicts Recover By Migrating To Linux, For Free). I also had recently come across a tutorial for installing it (mentioned in A Perfect Guide For A Perfect Mandriva Desktop Install), and wanted to follow up on that.

And I am, as I mentioned earlier, wanting to try out PC-BSD. It looks and sounds promising and I want to see for myself. Other Linux distros I intend to try out include Edubuntu (I especially am interested in discovering more about The SchoolTool Project that is integrated with the distro), and the latest Damn Small Linux release.

It is going to be hard for any distro to lure me away from Debian, and I keep going back to it time and time again. I will say this, however—Mandriva Linux Free has been a trouble-free install on two occasions now, and it recognizes NTFS and FAT partitions and allows for their resizing easier than any distro has so far. I’m not a big fan of the whole .rpm side of the family, but I am trying not to let personal bias cloud the fun I have geeking around with any distro.

Gearing Up For Some Woodworking

Last but not least, the last of the cold weather is past I hope. I want to get outside and run some wood across my table saw out in the sunlight. It is time to fire up tools and begin cutting, drilling, routing, sanding, gluing, and staining. I have been planning some projects, checking some wood, sketching ideas, and checking out tools.

I have been drooling over the 12″ and 16″ jointers on the Grizzly Industrial site again. Someday I will have one—if for no other reason than so I can build guitar speaker cabinets.

[Note: One of the reasons I like Grizzly so much is that the President of the company is a fellow guitar player and makes his own guitars. Hence the reason that the company carries guitar making supplies and builds some tools that are considered tops for production by many luthiers.]