Quickie roundup

• Starting today, we're on DST, so a one-hour shift in the work sked. Yaiks.


• Last weekend, we were off to Taal Vista Lodge in Tagaytay for the Tech University, a two-day company event. The first day started off with an "Amazing Race"-style tech challenge -- a battle of wits to solve real-world cases in 30 minutes or less. At stake: a 4GB iPod nano for each group member (five per group, two categories, SMB and enterprise). Unfortunately, we didn't win, so there goes the nano. :P


• Sunday was capped with a teambuilding activity, complete with a motivational talk by APO Jim Paredes (something about creativity -- I didn't get to go through that one straight on, had to chow on the sumptuous buffet breakfast at the Cafe-on-the-ridge, heh).


• Got sick on purpose yesterday, so I could be with Peng and Gab at home. I really needed that. Tiyo Paeng was raging, so we snuggled in bed, and went through three "American Tail" DVDs (Gab's current fave). Didn't catch the endings, though, as I dozed off a few times in between.


• Question: you're a system admin in a big-time government installation, handling a fairly large environment, when you come across a problem of the mail queue backing up because of multiple incoming connections (in the thousands), half of which are spam. The spam don't get through, of course, but still you face the problem of the growing queue, so what do you do?


• I'm getting the hang of Firefox 2.0. The del.icio.us bookmarks extension by Yahoo! is constantly nagging me about uninstalling the Google Browser Sync extension, though. I also saved some precious screen real estate, with the chrome settling on less than 100 pixels or so of the top part. Coolness.


• Gone blog reading again, when the case load was low. I'm totally hooked on Google Reader. Stand-alone RSS readers are so overrated, but I still find them useful for offline reading so I still keep one at hand: why, Feedreader, of course.


• On to more Lifehacking, I'm using Password Safe to, er, keep my passwords safe. I used to keep a GPG-encrypted and signed text file for that, but then after 50 or so accounts (including 10 something just for work -- talk about single-sign-on!), it got a bit tedious. Thanks, Bruce Schneir!