Dan found a spider and gave it some food. Hope you like bugs!

The time has come to move TPI forward.  After trying Eclipse, .NET, Excel, and Access as user interfaces for a data entry system, I have decided to use Drupal.  Why?

On July 13th, 2010, Jen and I embarked on a trip to Kenya with Shalom Christian Missions.  I never anticipated how the trip would affect me, or what I would encounter when I got there.

I'm working in near Pittsburgh this week, and I went to the nearby Raccoon Creek State Park.  My hike was about 3.5 miles, and included a great forest walk and a mineral spring.  I took a few pictures with my phone, take a look.

Yesterday, Jen and I got our day started off right with a hike.

The dental company my mom works for, Gold Dental, recently received an email warning them that another company was registering GoldDentalLab as their "Internet Keyword." Internet Keywords are similar to domain names, but lack strict regulation and can cause confusion (ICANN).  There is nothing to be concerned about from these emails, they are simply protection rackets for something that needs no protecting.

Upgraded the web server to CentOS 5.5. To test it, I used my local virtual version and upgraded it successfully. Next, I made a backup of the live site in case things went south. Finally, I issued the nail-biting "yum update" command, and the even scarier "reboot" command. Within two minutes I was running the latest and greatest CentOS.

I may have given up on Facebook, but I still like to share what I'm up to with others.  Get a free account at twitter.com, and follow JohnWoltman.  It's like your Facebook wall, except it's like the old Facebook wall that was good, and not the sucky new one.  Get an account.  Do it now!

What, you may ask, is a document management system?  A document management system, or DMS, is, essentially, a high-tech file server.  You can open documents like reports, pictures, or spreadsheets from it, and you can save those same documents back to it.  In this aspect, it is the same as a Windows CIFS share, a UNIX NFS mount, or a WebDAV folder.  Where it differs is also where it becomes interesting.

Let me be frank: the way we manage documents at my office is horrible. We have a central file server, but some people don't like to use it, while others tend to abuse it.  It's a real mess with long email chains of Word and Excel files being sent back and forth, and no one really knowing where or what the final version of any given document is.  Since we're a small company we don't have a lot of time to solving the problem with anything home-brewed.