Ramblings of a geek with a few hobbies…
Most of you regular readers already know this, but today was my last day working at LRS. The whole experience of ending employment vividly reminded me of handing in my last Final Exam in college, and getting ready for everything to change the following day. I worked with a lot of great people during the last 8 years there and I wish them well.
Starting tomorrow I will be turning my energy and attention toward my new employer, Interapptive, Inc.! Until then… there’s LOST!
It was reported in the local paper that CWLP has asked the city council to double the water rates in as short as a year and a half to pay for a new water pumping station. They say the current pump is 70 years old and in very bad shape. I’ll take their word for it, but double the rates??
I have a few questions.
1) We are currently building a new power plant, could this wait until that is completed in a few years? How much will repair costs for maintenance on this old pump to keep it going? How much to fix if it dies? In the article they mention skyrocketing steel prices as a motivation for doing the construction now, but can it wait another couple years?
2) This pump has been around for 70 years – it has been getting older every day. Why is it now an emergency, versus say 2 years ago? A 68 year old pump is almost as old as a 70 year old pump.
3) If it just HAS to be done, how about these rate increases being temporary?
Sunday evening I tried redbox for the first time. For those unaware, redbox is a movie rental service centered around large red vending machine-like devices throughout the country. You simply walk up, pick your movie, swipe your debit/credit card and you are given your selected DVD. $1/day. To return it, just go to any other redbox and deposit the dvd into the machine.
It’s simple and it worked. What else can you ask for? While the selection is limited, they did have a decent variety of new releases to choose from. And the best part was not having to have a stupid membership just to rent (why can’t ALL video stores ditch the membership requirement already??)!
To summarize, redbox is good because:
In the words of ebay customers the world over… #1 Seller, A++++++++ Transaction!!
This Thursday marks the beginning of the next season of LOST! It feels like it has been years since the last season ended, so it’ll be good to watch the summary show the night before. If you haven’t been watching the show, it isn’t too late to go rent the previous seasons and get them watched before Thursday….
THIS is good television, folks.
With just over a day to go on the Poll to the right (The TV show ER: Should it stay or should it go?), it’s 8-3 in favor of getting rid of it! Too bad I don’t have any pull on the matter.
This weekend I’m hoping to get version 1.3 of Chef posted on the website. Ana has been running it for a week or so now, so I’ll do a bit more testing and get it released. Among other things I’ll post about later, I made a couple changes to the Recipe Slideshow feature and Ana now finds it as useful as I intended.
Related to Chef, this week I had a long conversation with David about my dread of doing marketing. He gave me a good outline on things I need to do to increase traffic and actually start doing some serious internet marketing, for which I’m very thankful. I’ve made some modifications to the main page, but there will need to be lots more I fear. I would appreciate any comments and suggestions on this topic…
It has been a while since I last mentioned the network that Jay and I have between our houses, so I thought I’d give everyone a little update as well as a quick endorsement of a great piece of software.
First, the network has been up and running pretty much flawlessly for nearly 2 years now. A quick peek at the current statistics shows we’re getting between 48 and 54Mbps over the 1,100 ft wireless connection (one end of the subdivision to the other). Typically it’s between 36 and 48Mbps, so the extra cold weather (low humidity) must be treating the signal well.
We have come to rely on the connection for a few different things. First and foremost we backup data between the two houses on a nightly basis. We each have 250GB mirrored drives setup dedicated to hosting backups so that at any given time both of our backup sets live on 4 hard drives at least. 2 at my house, 2 at his. My backup set contains sourcecode, photos, music, documents and some other random things – with a nightly transfer schedule for everything but the music and photos which I do every week. It looks like right now I have 104GB of stuff on the drives and Jay has 42GB. I don’t think it would be exaggerating to say we have probably transferred several terabytes over this thing, which is pretty darn cool.
In order to handle transferring this amount over the link we turned to a great little piece of software for Windows that implements RSync called DeltaCopy. When one of the schedule transfers is about to take place, it analyzes the data on the source and target machine and transfers only the differences which dramatically reduces the amount of data that goes over the network. There seemed to have been a few quirks to setup the software but it has been running nearly trouble-free for almost a couple years now. Without it, these backups would be a headache. The software is free and works great, so if you need to synchronize data between a couple of computers you may want to check it out.
So backups are the biggest use of the network, but not the only one. Jay has also setup a voip server which has allowed us to have a phone in each of our offices at home to allow quick calls between the houses – something that is very useful when you’d rather not call the other’s house phone and wake everyone up. I think we may add a phone or two to the system soon so I can add one to my basement and Jay to his 1st floor.
Media sharing is pretty nice with this setup too, as both of our collections are just a click away for each other. The last two things (that I can think of right now) we use it for that are pretty nice: computer gaming and a backup internet connection for one another. Since he has dsl and I have cable it is pretty rare (I don’t think it has happened) for both to be down at the same time, allowing a quick flip of a switch to use the other connection.
It took a while to get setup due to some stupidity and assumptions on our part, but has proven to be a very useful tool. When we started it, it just seemed like something to play around with that would be cool, but we have come to depend on it for the things I mentioned here and we now take it for granted.
According to this article, the new movie Cloverfield is considered a low-budget film. At more than $30 Million. Wow.
Earlier this week I received a free copy of Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2008 by being an Action Pack subscriber and completing a short little web tutorial and quiz. I installed it last night and decided to get the Chef code/projects converted so I could start using it.
The usual project conversion wizard popped up as soon as I opened the solution and prompted me to upgrade it to the new VS08 format (still targeting .NET 2.0 though). When the wizard completed, however, I was getting a few compile errors in some of the WinForms designer files (.designer.cs). It was easy enough to fix, the conversion just messed up namespaces during process, which surprised me a little bit.
I haven’t spent much time actually developing in 08 yet, but now that I have Chef converted I’m going to stop using 2005 in favor of it. I’ll report any cool new features I run into.
The Johnson Blog 