The guy couldn’t even get his team past round 1 in the playoffs against Golden State!!!  Oh yeah so the Mavs had a great regular season whoopeee…it’s about the MOST VALUABLE PLAYER…and without Dirk put in any other starter of his stature from any other team on the NBA and they’d still have the same record…Put Dirk on any other team in the NBA and would that team improve?!? HECK NO!(well maybe if it was the Lakers)

Steve Nash should not have been passed up for his 3rd MVP in a row…what do I scream? NBA Politics and Mark Cuban’s pocket book…Mark has been lobbying for Dirk to have MVP for the past 12 months…and it looks like advertising and marketing has paid off…because SKILL sure as heck hasn’t.

After crippling my network with a mal-configured VLAN setup, I decided I needed better product documentation, the .pdf file from HP is lacking, quite lacking actually, and that is hard to say about a 500 page .pdf under normal circumstances. But alas, HP document writers left a LOT out of this and I suspect it is because they expect you to pay for some formal training on the product, which is GREAT if you have the extra $$ lay’n around.

So…I pound the web and can find very little info…so I guess the next deal is to try and locate a ‘missing manual’ somewhere…Borders didn’t have one when I looked on Monday. Perhaps Amazon does.

After deciding not to pay $2000 per year for a license for Follett’s Library software, I went searching around the web for an Open Source alternative and stumbled upon Koha.

Koha is a FULL featured library cataloging system used in many public libraries and schools. So I went about the process of installing it. Written in perl it required a load of perl modules as dependencies for all of the various scripts that it utilizes for MARC records and Z39.50 lookup for bibliographical information. These are a hooch to get installed.

I tried Ubuntu first as that was what was on my desktop at the time. FAILURE due to unmatched/supported/found dependencies. So I tried Ubuntu Server, and eventually with a lot of searching and hacking on perl packages managed to get in installed and semi-functional. Z39.50 searching failed to work which is the juiciest function of the software in my humble opinion.

So, onto my Debian Sarge server I went, and wow…installation was much breezier…when CPAN complained about the modules I was attempting to install, apt-get was friendly enough to allow me to grab the packages aptly(pun intended). So, I now had a working install, I needed my Follett MARC21 records massaged and imported. This is where the great guys at LibLime come in. They took my exported Follett records and did all off the massaging necessary to import them into Koha and did the import for me as well, and ensured all of the records were accurate(KUDOS!).

Next, I go to show the librarian how to use the system, and what do you know…a required field (barcode) is in-accessible…well that was a configuration issue where I simply had to go and tell the software NOT to auto-magically create barcodes for each new item(some might actually want that feature, but we already had barcodes printed up). So after configuring that field properly VOILA, a LOVELY Library Cataloging System. Again, the installation procedure is NOT well documented, NOT simple, and NOT for the faint of heart. If you know extremely little about Linux either learn a lot in a short time or attempt to install on a Windows utilizing the Windows’ version.

Something worth noting is that the free support mailing list is very active and you can expect answers to questions the same day normally!

But YEAH BABY!!! Is all I can say and it was a tough matchup in game 5. Nash should be getting MVP again this year but I’m betting some political crap(like Kobe being on Defense 1st team? you’re kidding right?) will prevent him from a WELL DESERVED 3rd MVP title in a row. That along with the Mav’s team owner likely trying to buy the vote for Dirk who is trying to squeak by Golden State in Round 1…

I’m not too happy about the Suns having to play San Antonio…but rest assured that whichever team wins, will be the NBA champs this year…

I hope it’s my Suns, but I’m prepared for the worst.

Today schools, both private and public, are struggling, yes with weeping and gnashing of teeth, to find funding for CORE subject areas, and for other important curriculum such as music and art and technology.

Thankfully it no longer costs $2000 to get the latest and greatest workstation. For $600 or less you can have a full blown workstation that will do EVERYTHING required of students in a typical school environment, inclusive of video/sound/photo editing, software development, and multimedia streaming.

K12LTSP is a solution that coupled with hardware grants from FreeGeek can turn old pc’s that can NOT perform the functions listed above, into workstations that CAN. WoW! “How much would that cost?”, you might ask. Nothing, free other than the time to set it up. Convert an existing server or receive one via a grant from FreeGeek with diskless workstations and voila!

Yes, there is a learning curve, but there is a wonderfully active support group accessible via e-mail and the web that can help you with nearly any problems you would encounter.

Portland Adventist Academy, Kelso-Longview Elementary School, Hoodview Junior Academy and Upper Columbia Academy all use K12LTSP to varying degrees.

The explosion of Open Source Software(OSS) in the past 10 years has made the cost of owning a computer with a vast assortment of applications incredibly affordable. I ask, what can be done in a classroom setting with proprietary software that can’t be done with Open Source Software?