small triumphs
Every now and then, you get asked to do something that is relatively trivial for you, but you know for sure would boggle 95% of the people around you, and take hours or days for someone else to do.
These things are not usually really matters of leet skill or anything – just happening to know the right combination of things at the right time.
The specific case: someone here needed to set up a vmware linux server running on Windows with a static IP address. This needed knowledge of Windows networking, Linux networking, configuring the Netgear router, and configuring VMware.
It wouldn’t have challenged any decent sysadmin – but it certainly was going to challenge the java developers, architects, and management folk around here. It took me about 5 minutes – very satisfying indeed 
p.s. I will blog more. I promise. But I want a better blog server (this one sucks in several ways), and a better offline blogging tool (I find palm blogging a pain, I want to be able to add pictures, and I need to upgrade the blog server first, or find a tool that actually works with the tiki’s broken xml-rpc)
The shiny new laptop I’m getting might help – it’s a ThinkPad? X60
reviewed here – hopefully it’ll be make me mad keen on blogging from the train/cafe/laundromat. But probably not…