John Borwick’s blog

I’m going to Seattle tomorrow with Lauren. She’s going to the ALA mid-winter conference. I’m going to bum around the city until she’s done, and then the two of us will have a few days to sight-see. I’m really excited that I’m also going to get to see Brian (Ferris) and Amy (Wheeless)!

As I’ve written before, sometimes I have GTD breakthroughs. Today was one of those days.

I ran like 10 errands after work yesterday and today. I did a fair amount at work too, and it doesn’t hurt that I’m going on vacation tomorrow so I reassigned some of my work to others.
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I’ve been working on setting up Kerberos for Fedora Core 6, as a test. Partly I want to learn how Kerberos works.

I went through a Kerberos Infrastructure HOWTO for Fedora, which was helpful.

No one has mentioned, however, that you have to create “principals” (Kerberos accounts) for everything: your servers, for example. Everyone’s been using Kerberos for so long that they don’t document what they know very well.

I just posted my first LinkedIn question:

Familiar or know someone familiar with ITIL or ITSM in a University environment?

I’d like advice about how one might implement ITIL or ITSM best practices in a University environment. I’ve read the ITIL Service Support and Service Delivery books, and I’ve found Gartner Group articles and web sites describing how to implement ITIL and ITSM in a corporate environment. Do you have any experience or know anyone with experience implementing ITIL or ITSM best practices within an educational environment?

Now to see what the LinkedIn response is like…

I just installed a firefox google pagerank extension.

I don’t know too much about PageRank besides the basics (you get ranked higher as you have more links pointing to you and as you are more “honest” about content e.g. your page content isn’t a bunch of random words).

However if I were google I think I’d model pagerank after the Richter scale (for earthquakes), where each additional increment is an order of magnitude increase, aka make pagerank logarithmic.

For a few months now I’ve been using the adblock and platypus extensions for Firefox.

If you are a tech-y person, and you use Firefox, please go install platypus (and the requisite greasemonkey) right now. Platypus lets you instantly create greasemonkey scripts to modify web pages arbitrarily. For example I can click on a page element I want to “erase,” and platypus will create the greasemonkey script to erase that element: for forever, or just until you disable the greasemonkey script.

If you want to keep using platypus I highly recommend going to Tools -> Extensions -> Platypus options and turning on “auto hide,” so Platypus isn’t always bothering you.

Anyways, now I actually like ads because I can use adblock (or platypus in an emergency) to delete the ads. I can even delete javascript ads!

I just beat Tower Blaster! Final score: 39869.

(I’m doing some scheduled maintenance on WFU’s DNS this morning, but my part’s over unless the other work goes horribly wrong. Thus I have time to review my del.icio.us flash game bookmarks.)

There are a lot of (illegally-placed) stickers for this group called “Expedition NC.” They basically look like one of those European country stickers (the oval ones) but say “eX:” and then have the URL at the bottom. I thought maybe they were a club or a coffee shop or something.

Well, so you don’t have to go there yourself: Expedition NC is a church.