At the beginning of 2008 I mentioned starting Stephen King’s Magnum Opus The Dark Tower.

Sometime in January I finished it. Lee’s comment about not reading past a certain part was definitely good advice.

Great series. I hope that someone from my generation produces something this mind blowing.

Oh, and I’ve got my own Roland poster (thanks to my sister!):

It’s been a while since I’ve had the time to update on the goings-on here in bofehendge.

A lot of these things have gotten casual mentions here and there on the site, but I wanted to make it ‘official’ for no other purpose than me looking back on things in a few years. If you don’t feel like waiting for posts like this to come around, feel free to subscribe to my “life” feed which automagically feeds my links, twittering, and all things memememe.

I’ve got a girlfriend. WTF! She’s 18. She’s country. She can tolerate me. She’s awesome. I have no idea how it happened, and I’m definitely not complaining. =)

I’m working with VMware on a daily basis. Not the typical DBA role (or assistant DBA role), but I’m enjoying it immensely. VMware brings us new challenges, new ways of thinking, and keeps us away from our server room. Before coming back to MSU I had never even used VMware, now I can’t imagine a day in the IT world without it. We have four ESX 3.5 hosts that house production VMs and one VMware server 2.0 beta server that we use internally.

I bought a new bed. The OriginalBed by Tempurpedic, to be specific. I also bought a new frame for the bed and two tempurpedic pillows. I’m dreaming nightly. It’s an unbelievable difference. One day I’ll take down that TOOL poster and not have the bedroom look like a dorm room.

I finished a graduate school class. This one was Organizational Behavior (online)… Management 651. Pretty interesting class, not too challenging. I got a B. Then I met with my advisor about getting my graduate school program changed from an MBA to an MSIS. It’s more in line with my long-term goals.

I survived the first Rothbury Festival. Unbelievable. I haven’t decided if I want to go back next year. The best thing was going into the show with a relatively blank slate on a lot of the bands. I had heard OF bands like Widespread Panic and STS9 but not really listened to them or formed an opinion. Needless to say, I’ve got two new favorites. No complaints at all except for the obligatory gas price rant.

Here’s a video with shots of what the place looked like after dark:

Ask me for pictures. They’re on Facebook if you’re a friend =)

I ordered a laptop. It should be shipping soon. That was today. Here’s the system - I also ordered a gig of RAM and a wireless ergonomic keyboard and mouse. I’m going to make a sincere attempt at the ergo keyboard. My hands need it. I’m eagerly anticipating the arrival… I’ll have a post about my new setup when it’s done.

IBM has a consumability survey out. The survey sums up why IBM continues to fail delivering me information on my ruthless pursuit of actionable content.

From the survey page:

The Consumability Survey, which requires approximately 30 minutes to complete and must be completed in one session, allows you to provide your input based on your experience and priorities for 31 product characteristics.

Are you kidding?

Does anyone else have constant Firefox Crashes? This makes me want to revert back to 2.0… or worse.

Here’s my error report (hopefully none of this is too revealing):

Add-ons: {d10d0bf8-f5b5-c8b4-a8b2-2b9879e08c5d}:0.7.5.5,bettergmail2@ginatrapani.org:0.5,{fce36c1e-58d8-498a-b2a5-66ad1cedebbb}:0.72,{2fa4ed95-0317-4c6a-a74c-5f3e3912c1f9}:2.0.64,{3112ca9c-de6d-4884-a869-9855de68056c}:3.1.20080605W,{e4a8a97b-f2ed-450b-b12d-ee082ba24781}:0.8.20080609.0,{CAFEEFAC-0016-0000-0003-ABCDEFFEDCBA}:6.0.03,{CAFEEFAC-0016-0000-0004-ABCDEFFEDCBA}:6.0.04,{CAFEEFAC-0016-0000-0005-ABCDEFFEDCBA}:6.0.05,{972ce4c6-7e08-4474-a285-3208198ce6fd}:3.0
BuildID: 2008052906
CrashTime: 1214443949
InstallTime: 1214317202
ProductName: Firefox
SecondsSinceLastCrash: 28
StartupTime: 1214443922
Theme: classic/1.0
URL: https://www.google.com/reader/view/?tab=my
UserID: __removed__
Vendor: Mozilla
Version: 3.0

This report also contains technical information about the state of the application when it crashed.

Update: A commenter mentioned it could be RescueTime. No crashes since disabling RescueTime. Yay!

Update #2: - This appears to be FIXED in Firefox 3.0.1! Yay! Running RT once again.

I found Grooveshark via following Derek’s Twitter. I was a Pandora addict, but I had two big complaints about Pandora:

1. Repeating/Duped content (Grooveshark is still guilty of this one)
2. Not what I want to hear, right at that moment

Grooveshark comes in and blows Pandora away on point #2. I don’t want to be too harsh on them, but grooveshark on Twitter asked me for my thoughts.

The Good

• Attractive UI. Very pretty UI. I have a lot of mixed feelings on the site’s usability. That doesn’t mean it isn’t pretty:
  
• Really cool multiple selection and drag.
  

The Bad

• Is it legal? First question almost all of my friends (5-7) that I shared the site with… I still don’t know.
• How do I use it? There’s no real clear call to action for what a user is supposed to do. “Listen to any song in the world for free” isn’t really a clear call to action. It doesn’t let the user know to search, especially when it’s a nonstandard form element. A few of the users I saw with this just clicked the search button.

  

• Style Difference between listen.grooveshark.com and the ‘beta’/other site. Listen.grooveshark is the only site I use regularly. Until the other site is as fluid as listen.grooveshark, I’ll stick with it.
• Dupes. Painful amount of duplicates for popular music. Which one do I listen to?

The Ugly

• Sharing playlists. Not easy enough. Not seamless enough. I still don’t really know how to do it. I had to give my girlfriend my login/password so she could make me some playlists. That’s not good enough.
• Annoying download popup on every login. Enough already! I just want to listen to music.
• Sometimes music just doesn’t play.
  

  Can we have a fault tolerance where if the song doesn’t load in X seconds, go to the next one in the queue?

Overall: I use Grooveshark daily. I recommend it to my friends.

I was about to delete a ton (more on that later) of VMware ESX 3.5 snapshots in our maintenance window. (Did I mention I’m a VMware admin now?)

After some quick Googling, I found Delete all Snapshots which made me hold off on it until I had some more information about our snapshots. This number will just increase daily until they’re committed.

So in order to plead a case with our SAN admin, I’ve got to have some information. How much space is being taken up on our LUN with regards to snapshots?

bash to the rescue!

[root@host LUN] ls -laR | grep delta | awk ‘{ SUM += $5} END { print SUM/1024/1024 }’

(Watch out for apostrophes etc if pasting this.)

Win.

Now to ruin another song due to poor enunciation.

Exhibit A: Timbaland - Apologize (feat. One Republic)

If you want, skip to the chorus around 1:07.

From answers.com:
apologize
(ə-pŏl’ə-jīz’) - To make excuse for or regretful acknowledgment of a fault or offense.

The word is apologize. Not “pologize”. Agh.

Assembla packages SVN hosting, Trac, Wikis, Real Time Chat, Ticketing, and emails on repository commits. “It’s too hard to set up” is usually an excuse to not use SCM tools… but Assembla gets you going quickly. We now use it on BibleShark. Ask me if you want to take a look at our setup on Assembla.

Here’s a screenshot of a commit I did a while back for Google Analytics ga.js update:

RescueTime tracks what application has your focus and for how long. I can’t wait to see this product grow, they got their initial funding by YCombinator.

Here’s a screenshot of a recent RescueTime:

Xobni adds message sender/context, a better search, and email analytics your Outlook.

Here’s a screenshot of the pane it adds to your inbox:

Here’s a screenshot of inbox analytics from Xobni:

Comment if you want an invite, I’ve got a few left.

Got to take a half day at work today. WOO!

My rest included:

• Registered my car (~$135)
• Registered to vote ($free)
• Renewed my driver’s license ($20)
• Paid the electric bill ($97)
• Got Groceries ($30)
• Sent in my measurements for Clayton’s wedding ($30)

$312 total. ARG, but at least I’m not nervous about getting pulled over.

andy@frostbite:~$ uname -a
Linux frostbite 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Tue Feb 12 07:42:25 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux


andy@frostbite:~$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] ” ” i}}’ | sort -rn | head

64 sudo
61 vim
36 mysql
34 ls
33 sed
23 cd
20 cat
19 clear
13 netstat