Whew.
Finally upgraded my mail/web system to Red Hat 7.2 beta (Roswell). All filesystems are now ext3 with journalling enabled, with no noticable performance difference (actually, testing by others implied that it should be faster than before). They switched over to using grub as the default boot loader (LILO is still there, for those stuck on it). No major breakage, although it was a bit of a PITA merging the Apache httpd.conf files.
Two new certifications from BrainBench: "Master, Unix Korn Shell Scripting" and "C". I'm relatively impressed; the tests actually seem to work the topic pretty well. In a similar vein, my refamiliarization with PHP spurred me into redoing my online resume. Looks a LOT better than previous incarnations.
An old friend came to town this week on business; haven't seen him in about 7 years, and it was pretty cool catching up on where he's at now, and sort of comparing notes over the last few years. He now has two kids, and a work-from-home (most of the time) job doing Java development for a company in England. Not too shabby, although the tech downturn seems to have hit his company too.
Started refreshing my memory on Java again, writing my usual refresher application: a multi-user chat system. It seems to give a good balance; you need to be able to handle a TCP listener and multiple incoming connections, pass messages back and forth, and keep track of logs. It's a good language workout. I've decided that java.io.* is simply overkill, though. I mean, do you really need that many ways to handle input and output? Yeesh.
Haven't been exercising much lately; life seems to have become very busy. Hopefully we'll get down to a Tae-Kwon Do club sometime next week to see how we like it.