We sold one sofa on craigslist - now it’s time to sell the other.

We’re in the home straight; final testing for the new Novell Cool Blogs.

I’ve been hitting the test system hard in the last week - making suggestions to the Novell team that are making this happen. There are two main updates - the plan is now to use WordPress for the blog infrastucture; second launch is due ‘next week’.

The internal test system looks really great; all Novell branded and look and feel - but with live blog content. All of your favourite features should be there - comments, trackback, pings - as well as some unique blog posts from Novell’s strongest personalities.

I’ll leave it until announcement time so as not to spoil the surprise - but watch out - this is going to be big!

Special kudos to Mr Jared Nyland from Novell’s web team; he’s been awesome.

Ah - a favourite for Powerpointers world over - Harvey balls (or meatballs in Novell parlance) represent the relative impact of various options.

I found a great font with the balls in here - soniacoleman.com -  and some great graphics here.
A sidenote: “Harvey balls” are named after their inventor–Harvey Poppel, a partner in the international consulting firm Booz Allen.

Our application for permanant residence in the US has been approved; in short our Green Cards are in the post.

It’s taken eight months to process - from first paperwork filing to approval. Sounds like a long time - but this is one of the fastest processed applications I’ve known.

Woo! We’ll be celebrating this evening - this removes a lot of risk.

At last - the flood of community content I’ve blogged about for the last month or so is starting to appear.

First out of the gates is Novell OpenAudio - Podcasts for the broad Novell Community.

I’ll not spoil the suprise - but I recorded a series of four podcasts with Erin Quill about a month ago. Watch out for them to show up.

Guy Kawasaki has a great post tonight on Building a Community.

I’m not going to post it here - but take a read.

We’re right in the middle of getting the Novell CoolBlogs kicked off - this is great timely reading.

[Edit: this also got picked up by Robert Scoble; who added 'go visit your community'. My comment back was this was great for well funded evangelists. What I also meant to add was that it also only works if you have clusters of community members in places you go.]

I’m in San Jose all week - working at the RSA Conference.

San Jose is lovely at this time of the year; it’s sunny, warm and friendly. It’s good to be out of the cold of Utah for a few days.

It’s been an interesting few days; there was a PETA demonstration on the corner of Market and San Carlos. Scantily clad girls protesting about the fur trade. Certainly an eyeful for the geeks. Apart from that - press, analyst and general show stuff.

I got another recipe book for Grania for her Birthday: Madhur Jaffrey’s World-of-the-East Vegetarian Cooking

It’s been a great resource; even though it’s over twenty years old! We’ve taken some Persian, Thai and lots of Indian ideas from it.

This weekend (as I am going away for most of the week) I cooked up a batch of veggy curries - ranging from spicy chickpeas to a hot madras. I also did a Goan style fish and banana curry - slightly milder, sweeter and suitable for Aoife. Mmmm.

Well - we’re almost at mid-February - and getting closer to the release of the Novell Cool Blogs.

Hopefully internal testing soon - and live before the end of the month!

I’ve been running a more aggressive anti-spam and anti-virus regime on my inbound mail servers for about six weeks now.

The statistics are interesting; inbound spam outnumbers ‘real email’ or ham by around 2:1.

This means that during any day there are at least twice as many unwanted, spam emails - as opposed to real mail. That’s unwanted bandwidth usage and unwanted costs for me! If I wasn’t filtering and capturing this then I would have to be more alert to unwanted emails and delete them.

I’m also using ClamAV to check for viruses within email attachemens. Typically around a dozen or so viruses attached to mail per day. Captured upfront.