Friday Five: Work

1. Where do you currently work?
Universal Networks

2. How many other jobs have you had and where?
None or several, depending on how you look at it. I've always been self employed, but I've been focusing less on consulting lately and more on journalism at OfB, so I guess you could almost say I've switched jobs. Unfortunately, I have to keep doing consulting for the moment though, at least until the ad market picks up.

3. What do you like best about your job?
That's a difficult question. I enjoy the interaction and response to commentary I post and I also enjoy seeing a completed consulting project. However, I think I definately enjoy the interaction, along with the flexibility I have, the most.

4. What do you like least about your job?
Not being able to completely devote my time to journalistic pursuits.

5. What is your dream job?
I think my dream job would be a position involved in apologetics. I love the apologetics and comparative religion field and it would be great to get to devote my time to that. I'd also enjoy working in renewal movements in the mainline Christian denominations… I bet that shocked some of you, huh? I guess I'm drawn to the areas where scriptural analysis, discussion, and defense are at the core of the job.

In particular, one of my dreams would be to spend time creating a reference that contained concise reports on the top few hundred religions, denominations, cults, and sects. There are lots of guides to all of these things, but there really isn't an exhaustive listing of all of these groups in one easy to find place. Most resources pick “favorites” or just the top few, and I'd love to see a resource so that when the average Christian (or anyone for that matter) wanted to know who a 'Whatchamacallit' was, they could just flip open a book. Maybe I'll talk more about this in another journal entry sometime…

The Creative Penguin

Art is a critical part of any operating system's GUI these days. With that in mind, I spent some time doing an interview with the creative minds behind the Crystal icon theme. Primarily, Crystal is the default icon set of KDE, however Crystal icons have also wound their way into a Mac OS X icon set, a Windows XP icon set, a WindowBlinds theme, and more. The amazing popularity of this theme catapulted Everaldo Coelho from an unknown GNU/Linux user to one of the premier computer icon/graphic artists in the industry. Coelho, with assistance from veteran KDE artist Torsten Rahn, has continued to improve Crystal; a project they discuss in the interview that you can find here.

The Comments of Tired Tim

And, this week, an unexpected task took up a bunch of time. As mentioned previously, I run two mailing lists (with the help of my co-administrators) - ChristianSource FSLUG and OfB-Talk. Well, last week rumblings were going on that another one of my favorite lists - KDE-Cafe - was on the chopping block, since the KDE Project no longer wanted to be associated with it. So, Tink (the list admin) accepted an offer to bring it over to OfB.biz's server. That took some work, but the worst was still to come.

This week this server was upgrades to use suExec, which, among other things, made Mailman get a lot less friendly URL out of the box. So, I compiled a new version of Mailman (a tedious project!), and finally was able to get it going last night. So anyway, while these two list events weren't exactly connected, they both ate up time that should have been devoted elsewhere. Oh well.

Hopefully this next week I'll get more of my todo list done rather than unscheduled tasks…

LinuxDailyNews Launched, Survives Slashdotting

What a day. Less than two weeks after we set the master plan in motion, LinuxDailyNews went live - a collaboration between Open for Business, Linux and Main, DesktopLinux.com, LinuxDevices.com, and KernelTrap.org. We had over 26,000 unique visitors, totaling well over 200,000 hits within the first 18 hours.

Most of that traffic came from Slashdot, and thanks to the excellent crew at Hosting Matters during the first 30 minutes after /.'s posting, we were unable to fulfill only five requests. So yes, LDN survived Slashdotting - on its very first day.