All I can say at this moment, is “finally”. I was about 2 weeks away from tossing the iPhone and scoring a Crackberry.
Push email is what I need the MOST in a phone, and the iPhone wasn’t cutting the mustard, until maybe sometime in the really near future that we aren’t allowed to know at this point, but the teaser seems to be enough.
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Since I linked to Grayson’s site in the past, I thought I would also link to Dane’s site, just in case you need a photo fix.
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My second son was born on Jan 23rd. I am so happy that I have cried. Good thing I stopped. Mother and baby are doing fine, all is well. Bless all those who have sent their congratualtions, and thank you to my internal support system. You know who you are.
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You can see the pics at: http://graysonsanders.wordpress.com.
I know many of you were waiting for this 
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A brand new baby boy was brought to us on June 21st at 19:52 PDT. A first for both of us, we managed to have a beatiful, bouncing baby boy at 8 pounds, 14 ounces. This has been the most taxing and rewarding week of my life. I only hope it continues to be this very truly awesome. I will probably be starting a family and friends blog for photos of the baby very soon.
Thanks to all those wishing us well. And before another person asks, no, he doesn’t have a name yet, as we would like to have him help out with that particular part of the process.
This will probably be about it for the public side of this part of my life as I start posting elsewhere about that particular facet.
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I have noticed in the past year while working on FeedLounge, that I just cannot keep up with my old reading list. This may sound crazy, but I am down to actually reading about 12-15 feeds, and skimming a couple dozen more. The rest are lost to my feature development, and just simple testing of the server and the new features.
Just a random though to start my morning…
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Alex had pointed me in the direction of the Skyroll On Wheels, and with my recent flurry of consulting travel, I decided to pick one up and try it out.
Having now tripped it around the coutry 5 times now, I would have to say this is the bag to have if you are a light traveler. It is small, light, well-designed, and mostly well built. The only problem I have had with mine is that the wheels seemed to not be perfectly aligned, so it does not stand up perfectly straight.
The garment bag that wraps around the case does well with 3 changes of clothes, but not much more. If the clip straps were longer, I believe it could handle it, and it would still not have a problem with being carry-on size. I may need to ‘customize’ mine for that purpose. I also like the top loading compartment, great for the toiletries you need to carry.
If you need a small, lightweight carry on suitcase, and you are a light traveler, this is the suitcase for you.
Overall, I would give this bag a A-/B+, but only from the wheel alignment issue. I have now received 4 compliments on my bag from stewardesses on various flights. It looks very small compared to other carry-on bags (the reason they looked at it in the first place), and then the integrated garment bag closes the deal . If you are looking to try and pick up a stewardess, this is the closest thing to a baby in the park 
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Just installed my new Dell UltraSharp 2405FPW LCD monitor, and I must say wow! It seems huge compared to the 2001 I was using. With the 1900×1200 resolution (as well as 24″ of viewable space), I will be able to see more windows at the same time, to attempt to quench my thirst for information.
The brightness was extremely high, and when I went to change it, the initial setting was 50%. 100% brightness seems to light up the entire room! I set it down around 20, as that seems to work well for me in normal office lighting.
As a bonus, it has a 9-in-1 flash card reader built into the side. Very handy.
Probably won’t have more to say on this unless it breaks, or someone buys me a 30 inch Cinema display as an incremental upgrade. I would recommend this to anyone who has the space. And if you are in the tech industry, you cannot afford to go without in screen, chair, or desk. Those are the basics of comfort and safety in your job.
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I am heading home today, and will return home late tonight to begin the second FeedLounge migration. Seems that we just did this last week, but it was actually almost 2 months ago. Wow.
The first migration was such a smashing success that we are going to be leaving the poor old alpha server melting down in a small pool of its own solder, and moving on to our own rack in a colo closer to home. Busy holiday weekend for the FeedLounge crew.
After stopping the server tonight, it goes down for one final backup, rsyncing that over to the new server. We will also be adding the DNS changes, so that the new servers are ready to go once we finish the install.
Then it is off to the colo in the morning, with a small truckload of hardware. Cabling and installation (don’t forget the cable ties) should take about 4-6 hours, and then we can stop and have a snack (dinner?).
After all the connectivity is sorted out, then it will be a sit down root-fest, making sure all the configuration is correct, nagios is all set up, etc.
Then for the test run. Start up the daemon to start working the queue, trying to catch up on the feed backlog (making sure to time it to get a feel for the new hardware).
Need to remember to take as many pictures as necessary to document the adventure, so I can share with everyone the joy that is a colo move.
Previous experience (moving the apache.org colo) tells me estimates are an impossibility to get right. One thing I did learn though: a smaller crew, or at least small crews focused on single tasks, get the job done faster than a big crew (too much concensus decision making).
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Overheard in a phone conversation:
You can have 2 user ids, but you cannot have the same user id twice!
Obviously talking about some database constraint, but trying to explain that constraint to an end user is, well, less than successful.
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I guess the lack of sleep on the plane allowed me to sleep fairly well in the hotel room. I managed very near 12 hours, with only 3-4 wakeups in the middle. Maybe sleep deprivation is a necessary thing for my while I travel. I guess it will need more testing to find out.
One thing is sure, I am definetly not eating well enough when I am on the road. I need to go out and pick up some vitamins, to keep the old immune system healthy.
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Took the red-eye out to St. Louis this morning, because I figured not getting good sleep in a hotel room is the same as not getting good sleep on a plane. The jury is still out on which is worse…
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Spent most of the week out here in Denver with Alex, and got some of our ’strategic planning’ done. Didn’t code as much as I had planned, but sometimes you have to have a little fun. Downtown Denver is clean and nice, I would actually consider moving here, and either living in some sort of industrial loft downtown, or somewhere up in the mountains.
Since most of the servers for the beta are here now, I have to get cracking and get all the software installed and tested, then installed in the colo. More on that later next week.
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Just had quesadillas for breakfast. Jolly good. If any of you out there have a Costco membership, and they carry the raw, ready-to-cook tortillas, buy them now! They are the next best thing to Mary Zubiate living next door and making them from scratch on a daily basis. Those were the best refried beans in the world… Good memories.
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It seems my body is adjusting to the 3-4 hours of sleep I am getting every night. Since we set a date for the alpha launch of FeedLounge, my days have been filled with getting the work done for my clients, and the evenings, nights, and weekends have been filled with non-stop coding, testing, bug fixing, and deployment. I even threw in my own wedding for good measure, just to see if I could keep up. Oh yeah, and let’s landscape the house and have the wedding there… You can see that my TODO list has been long for quite a while.
It seems as if my coffee maker is set up for retirement in the next few weeks, as I have been drinking 2 pots a day for the last 2 months. I may have to upgrade it to one of those fancy cup-at-a-time units. Any suggestions?
From a personal perspective, the alpha testing is going quite well. Our crack team of testers is finding the bugs, and we are trying to knock them down within 48 hours, although on occastion that has not been the case. The server seems extremely stable, and I have learned to start weening myself from my ‘command and control’ center of 6 terminal windows open to the server. I can imagine this is what it feels like when you get your first baby. You are afraid to move your eyes away for one second, lest something bad happen! Team morale is still quite high, and we are chipping away at the feature list for the beta. The outrageously overwhelming response from the community for an application like this is also pushing us just a bit more as well. For all the beta testers that signed up, hold tight, we are making progress. And to the alpha testers, thanks for keeping vigilant with the bug reports and feedback.
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When I bought my tractor last summer, I didn’t want to say anything until I had actually used it. Now that I have put 80 hours on my new John Deere 4310, I wanted to just let the world know how it has performed. While I do have a bias toward loving it, and have dreamed of owning one all of my life, I will try to be fair and balanced in my review.
After moving away from the city last year, Amanda and I bought a nice little place in Rough and Ready, CA, just outside Grass Valley. The view is beautiful, on a hilltop overlooking the town of Penn Valley. The lot is 5.3 acres (the smallest in the 8 parcel subdivision), with half of the land fairly level and half rolling off the side of the hill. The house is situated on the level part, not quite backing the hillside, so we could put in a nice little backyard. Since we are getting married, we had decided to spend the money landscaping the backyard and have the wedding at the house. That is coming up on May 21st, I am happy to share. The upside was that nothing was done as far as landscaping, the down side was that nothing was down as far as landscaping. Since all of our soil is hard clay, we were going to be importing quite a bit of topsoil/sand/etc to make our land arable. We also wanted to do a bit of terra forming, and thus the excuse to get the tractor was born.
Tractor- 4310 4WD with hydrostatic drive and top-and-tilt option for full automatic 3 point hitch adjustment
Front-end Loader (420)
Box Scraper (Woods 4×2)
Rock Rake
Tiller
Backhoe (47)
The tractor is set up very well ergonomically, and the push button four wheel drive is a godsend. You don’t want to be in 4WD when making a tight turn (or else the turn won’t be so tight and you will be buying new tires more often than necessary), but you do need it when pulling a full load with the scraper, for instance.
With the hydrostatic drive, you hardly ever use the brakes, since letting off of the directional pedal (separate pedals for forward and reverse) will slow the tractor down immediately. No coasting to a stop anymore. This is very useful to increase cycle times, such as moving a lot of material with the front-end loader.
The rest of the controls are in easy reach, and the seat and steering wheel are fully adjustable. It even has cruise control, for those times when you want a constant speed (just tilling for me).
I chose the 32hp size to make sure that I had enough power and weight to do the jobs that I needed to have done. I think the salesman is correct: “You will never regret getting a bigger tractror”. If I had gone with the residential size tractors, I would have ended up with a glorified lawn mower on my property, because it takes the full weight of the tractor (3000 pounds) to move any of the soil from its position on this property.
The backhoe was an absolute must have for the amount of landscaping that we had to do. With it, digging holes for 5 gallon, 15 gallon, and 24 inch box trees was an easy task, even with the 50% clay/50% granite mix of the soil. We made sure to dig all of the holes double oversized, so that we could put good soil back into the holes, to help the tree out health-wise. Since we planted 3 dozen trees, and the tractor still only has 80 hours on it, the investment was well worth it. Keep in mind that a backhoe attachment for any tractor will be the most expensive thing you buy. That is the reason most people don’t get it. But it is worth every penny. The other day, my 82 year old neighbor asked if I could come down and remove two dead trees. “No problem” I said, and headed down the road. He met me out in his little orchard, and in 5-6 minutes, I had removed both trees, and filled the holes back in. One tree came out with the very first bucket! Needless to say, my neighbor now loves me to death, and it only cost me 15 minutes to keep up the neighborly relations. I tend to refuse payment for any tractor work that I do for neighbors, with two exceptions: repayment in things like refueling and washing it, and barter for something else. Cash doesn’t need to trade hands because I enjoy playing (working) on it so much.
With the hydrostatic drive and the 3 speed transmission, the gearing is just not low enough for the hillside that I live on. I think it is set up perfectly for flat land, but the hills are just too much. Consequently, if there is nothing I can do to lower the gear ratios, I would buy a standard transmission if I were to do it again.
The parking brake light is hooked to a switch that is activated by the brake pedals. This light goes on and off at its own whim, and seems to not work, even though I have attempted to fix it several times. It only bothers me for two reasons, one that the tractor is new and shouldn’t have any problems like this, and two, anyone else who uses the tractor thinks that the brake is on, and spends minutes trying to figure out how to turn it off.
The scaper model that I bought is one size too big for the tractor, so the 3 point hitch is always trying to re-raise it when the tractor is just sitting with the scraper lifted in the air. Although this is non-optimal, the extra weight of the larger model is necessary for the tough clay soil here, so I would leave this as-is.
The tractor seems a bit top-heavy on the hillside, moreso than I would like. I don’t know what I could do to compensate for this (I believe that the tires are already loaded with water). I guess I just have to learn to live with it. A wider stance would have been great, but I don’t think you will find an option for that in this portion of the market.
Switching implements between the 3 point hitch and the backhoe is a genuine pain-in-the-ass. I have started to look around for things that need finishing with the current implement before I consider switching. I really wish this could be made easier, but I think the fact that the backhoe really needs to attach to the tractor frame for strength is going to keep this particular problem from being completely solved.
I noted that the size was a good thing, well it is also a bad thing. In certain instances, I really wish I had a larger tractor (lifting that 1500 pound boulder, digging up that 1500 pound boudler, etc). This is really more of an inconvenience than anything else, but just remember to size the tractor for the largest job that you need to do, not just the average job.
Overall, I am happy with my purchase and use of the tractor. I tend to use it almost every weekend for one thing or another around the house. It is too big to mow the lawn, but I can live with that I would also say that you will not be disappointed with the purchase of a John Deere 4310, just keep in mind what I said about transmission selection. That is the one thing that I really would change if I could. If you have any questions about the tractor, please don’t hesitate to post a comment here on the site, and I will answer as soon as possible.
Note to self, don’t post 2 pictures side-by-side in HTML. It looks a bit funky.
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I spent Saturday morning piling up dead manzanita from the yard, forming 3 piles to burn into oblivion (didn’t want to spend the $200 to rent the chipper again). I started the first pile of with a little diesel, and it looked like it was starting fine, and then in about 30 seconds the entire pile is consumed in a huge bright flame. This stuff burns hot! Within about 15 minutes the pile was small enough that it looked like it needed to be pushed together to finish burning, but I couldn’t get close enough to actually touch anything it was so hot.
So, out comes the tractor. I had it ready on the side with a bucket full of dirt, and also 3 lengths of garden hose at the ready for prevention of destroying the neighborhood. I jumped on the tractor, and using the scraper, I was able to back into the pile and push it together, but it was still to hot to stick around for more than a few seconds.
After about 30 minutes, the pile was small enough that I wasn’t worried about eyeballing it all the time, so I set off pile number 2. This was the biggest pile (about 8 feet around and high), and within 30 seconds, I had 30 foot flames shooting out. I had to stand back about 25 yards to get away from the furnace blast the pile was putting out, and I grabbed the Treo 650 out of my pocket, thinking I could take a couple of pictures to pass the time. The only picture I am posting is one where I make it look like the tractor is on fire. I thought it looked kinda cool, but I do apologize for the grainy pic (the Treo’s camera is not that great).
Here it is: 
I also took a 30 second video with the camcorder, but it was not interesting, unless you like fire as much as I do. Destruction is totally cool, and calming as well (at least for me).
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We didn’t talk much about it, but our Apache ‘infrathon’ made some press. The infrathon was an in-person meeting of the Apache Infrastructure Team under the guise of switching data center locations. We also (they mostly) did some coding projects to help move the infrastructure along, and quite a bit of socializing as well. The article can be found here: Zen and the art of Apache Maintenance. I am the tallest one in the picture (mostly due to the hat). Erik Abele is as tall as I am if I take the hat off
I enjoyed it immensely from putting names with faces first, actually doing the move second, and seeing a huge colo third. I have worked with most of the team at least once, since I am/was [fairly] local, and I was the necessary ‘remote hands’. After the colo move went off with just a few hitches, we headed back to Brian’s house where we did the socializing/drinking part of the infrathon. I convinced Sander Striker to help me out with a small Apache problem, and he brought in the big guns, mod_rewrite. Needless to say, everything under the sun can be done in mod_rewrite, and I was expecting to have to get dirty and write a C module. Thank you very much Sander for the help. It was greatly appreciated.
I left that Saturday night to head back home, and didn’t make it back to the colo the next day due to some work issues that came up. I wish the Infrastructure team well, and would like to thank each and every one for the work that they do every day to keep [service here] on *.apache.org working. Cheers to you, guys!
I will be going back to install more hardware that wasn’t available at the time of the infrathon, but most everything did get done.
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Colorado cracks down on left lane dawdling. Freaking finally. Now if only we could convince California to do the same.
And up the speed limit while we’re at it. We need more population control!
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