While there are a number of reasons for the switch, the #1 reason was I wasn’t happy coding all day. I never wanted to be a code monkey, and working from home only made the position more isolating and dull.

In my first two days of employment at Tremont I’ve had the satisfaction of fixing 2 printers, 1 sound card, improving e-mail for 3 users, installing new software for over half a dozen users, fixing a long standing issue with the antivirus server, and probably some other tasks I’m forgetting.

While watching installation progress bars isn’t exactly a party, the gratification from making someone’s life easier with 10 minutes of work is incredibly satisfying. As a programmer, I could spend days hacking up an ugly solution to a difficult problem and never have time to do things right. Removing spyware may be boring and kind of suck, but the user’s reaction when their computer runs 100x faster makes it all worth it.

To be honest this new job isn’t entirely a demotion. I would never have taken it if I thought all of my days would be spent running Windows Update and upgrading Office. Hopefully in the near future you’ll see me blogging about:

• A Linux Gateway/Firewall/VPN solution
• Replacing Exchange with anything else!
• Migrating from Internet Explorer to Firefox
• Using Linux file servers
• Setting up some Linux workstations

And my ultimate goal:
Migrating 500 computers from Windows to Linux.

I’ll keep you posted.

Update: I’ve moved my blog to a personal site!

First of all SchoolWorks is school administration software (or SIS) built using:

• ASP.NET 2.0 (in Windows using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005)
• PostgreSQL (thanks to Npgsql)
• Crystal Reports (great for report designers, abhorrent for developers)

We also used the following support tools:

• Bugzilla
• Subversion and TortoiseSVN
• PgAdmin III

While Visual Studio and ASP.NET can be frustrating at times, the only part of SchoolWorks that I avoid like the plague is working with Crystal Reports.

Recently I’ve been trying to build SchoolWorks using Mono on Linux. I’ve successfully built Mono (libgdiplus + mono + mcs + xsp) on my personal Debian Etch, but I haven’t gotten much of SchoolWorks to compile yet.

The first missing feature was Decimal.TryParse which we use a lot in SchoolWorks. I submitted (my very first!) patch to the mono-devel mailing list in hopes of getting support for Decimal.TryParse added.

I’ll try to keep posting my progress as it should be interesting to SchoolWorks users as well as .NET/Mono developers.

I also found a local Linux User Group, Linux User Group of Peoria, which I’m pretty excited about.  I’ve subscribed to their mailing list, and will probably attend their upcoming meeting on July 3rd.

Anyone from the Peoria area who stumbles across this post should feel free to contact me or leave a comment if there’s some event a new-to-Peoria IT consultant shouldn’t miss.

There is no such thing as a $400 computer for businesses.

Home users might be able to get away buying a piece of junk Dell Dimension. Dimensions come with tons of useless software and last approximately 2 years.

Businesses should worry about TCO. This means budgeting $150-$350 for Microsoft Office (unless you can use OpenOffice.org), and getting the business class model such as the Optiplex from Dell.

If you get lucky, you may be able to get a business class desktop for $600-$800, but I usually budget $1,100 because you should never base business decisions on luck.

• Fixing a leak in our water main (thanks Dwayne Gibbs!)
• Fixing our stove’s electrical outlet (thanks Josh Stuber!)
• Rewiring all 3 phone jacks (I don’t know how they ever could have worked… tons of wires were switched and/or cut.)
• Spending 4 hours on the phone with SBC/at&t to sign up for phone/DSL, find out they lost my DSL order, and try to sign up for free dial-up while I wait for DSL. Moral of the story: I hate SBC/att.
• Called the police because two people were fighting in a huge SUV in front of our house late at night.
• Visited Tremont Turkey Festival for about 30 minutes. Just as boring and expensive as I remember it.

Sam and I have also found a few great restaraunts already: Haddad’s, One World (of course), Taste of Thai, and a couple of Mexican and Chinese take-out places I can’t remember.
Now I’m trying to get back to work. I’m working from home and using dial-up until DSL gets here. I can see why Google is interested in getting people broadband connections. Using the Internet is frustrating and nearly pointless with a dialup connection.

I’m still sorting through lots of e-mail, but I’m eager to get back to work.