- wednesday 12 07 05 -

Oy vey. Evidently my website has been off the map for a day or two, and I didn't even notice. Sad. Seems to be back up, and I'd suspect that would be a ISP issue rather than a server problem. One of these days I'll be independently wealthy so I can run a real datacenter instead of piling servers in my closet.

If you sense arrogance and self-righteousness in the next bit, you're sensors are working. Finally bit the bullet and joined the marching morons. All the things that make blogs good for web publishing also make it really bad for web publishing - ease of use that lowers the barriers to entry means that anyone and everyone can go to town. It really reminds me of those glory days when Geo-Cities and Yahoo decided that everyone should be able to use flashing text and Bob from Secaucus really had important shit to say about his hamster and three-legged cat. You suddenly have a much higher noise-to-signal ratio - there's a lot of good, interesting, witty, and informative stuff out there, but you have a lot more cruft to sort through to find it. SO, all that said, I'll leave the reader to judge if my contributions are of the former or the latter sort. Click if you dare.

- tuesday 10 18 05 -

And the hermit emerges. Been an ass-kicking couple of months, if I say so myself. Been frantically fighting the good fight as an apostle of Bill and a minion of Mike - patch management can become, um, problematic once you hit the 100 host limit. The good news is I can sleep better at night knowing that for the first time in three years, we have some semblance of security and hardware compliance for my surrogate children. Now we can get down to bidness ...

Having finished the above, I'm now ready to get my bearings on the tech front - been so busy trying to keep my head above water that I haven't had time to even hear buzzwords like SAS, dual-core, and to really get a grip on the magic that is VMWare. All that is changing, and I'm looking at being able to implement a sea change in the networks that I help manage, pushing us into a whole new world of flexible network computing. Seriously exciting stuff, with ramifications for the way that we manage server-based computing that touch every facet of my work. More on that later (like when I get things implemented).

Speaking of hardware, had the exotic experience of firing up Windows task manager and seeing sixteen processors running, with 16GB of RAM floating in there along with them, followed by the exquisite sight of SQL Server 2005 with a pathetic memory limitation of 2 *terabytes* of available RAM. Damn shame. More on that later, once I get permission from the higher powers to dwell on it, but suffice to say I've been feeling a bit loopy on all the new toys at the office.

On other fronts - I finally found the band that I wanted to form back when I was a young, pissed-off wannabe shredder. They go by the handle Avenging Sevenfold, and they are *the* *shit*. Take all the finest moments of Vulgar-era Pantera, Puppets-era Metallica, GNR, Maiden, Testament, and all the other crunchy goodness that I grew up on, slam it down with a couple of bottles of cheap tequila, sweat it all out through a smoke-saturated leather jacket, and then rev it up to 500 mph. Mix in some power-ballad inspired piano, Latin-jazz acoustic ride-outs, and beautifully harmonized vocals that shift from the outer edge of choral to teeth-gritted fury. Wrap it all up in album art inspired by Ralph Steadman, Hunter S. Thompson and Satan, and you've got something that deserves 1000-watts of brain-smashing amplification to fully do it justice. Just a serious kick in the ass that you need to go out and get no later than right now.

Movies and other stuff. I'm going public - I have succumbed to the spell of Lost. The wonder of TV on DVD has yet to lose its fascination for me. Being able to enjoy decent shows without having to hit the mute button every 5 minutes to avoid being rendered sterile and moronic by the advertising blitz is refreshing. We plowed through the first seven seasons of X-Files, moved on to Monk (which admittedly was not exactly the X-Files), and then blew through the first season of Lost. Lost is the first series in a long time that captured my attention and held it, not out of horror that it was actually still being broadcast, but because the cast, scripting, cinematography, and direction just kept on going, and going, and going in the right direction. Characters that you give a damn about, from the first paralyzingly intense 30-minutes of the pilot through the last episode of the season, plot threads that kept you guessing, and some truly stunning set pieces (including the most *there*-feeling depiction of a plane crash and its aftermath that I've ever seen - not photo-realistic, but pushing the intensity and dislocation and shock that people must go through during that sort of life-flashing-before-your-eyes-and-holy-shit-I'm-still-in-one-semi-contiguous-piece event). One of those rare items that proves that "good television" is not always an oxymoron.

On that same front, would recommend Empire Falls for the same reason, although not at the same level. Solid, believable performances by the leads, with a plot that almost doesn't blow it. A nice story that succumbs to an effort to be "relevant" rather than just telling a story. Well worth checking out.

Final note before I ditch on you tonight - if you suffered through the horror that is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy any time in the recent past, do yourself and Douglas Adams a huge favor. Go find your dog-eared, well-worn copy of the book, or if you don't own it already (in-con-theevable!), find a copy at your nearest used bookstore. Read it, and remember the reasons you were willing to take a chance on the movie turning out as something other than another dried-up, soulless turd from the asshole of corporate America.

- friday 08 05 05 -

Shrunk that phat header image by about 50% after I noticed the page was taking forever to load. Not to mention, it's not *that* impressive a header - making it huge just looks wrong.

On other fronts ... movies. I've finally seen The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, and seeing David Hasselhoff squeezing SpongeBob and Patrick between his massive pecs was more than worth the price of admission. It's not the funniest thing you'll ever see, but it's worth an hour-and-a-half of your time. Other movies recently checked out:

• National Treasure - Thoroughly implausible, contrived, and full of bologna, and a totally entertaining movie. Lots of laughs, lots of action, high-falutin' drama, national pride at stake, etc., etc. Well worth checking out, and one of the few that have come out lately that the whole family can sit down and watch together.
• Unleashed, aka Danny the Dog - This is *not* one to take the whole family to, although I watched in a mild sort of horror as several families trailed in to the theater with their toddler-to-9-year-old children in tow. Jet Li, Bob Hoskins, and crew rampage across the screen in one of the more viscerally brutal movies I've seen lately, balanced with a moving parallel story about the return of a lost soul to everyday life. The contrast is shocking, and the net result is that you go from laughing along with Morgan Freeman, Jet Li, and Kerry Condon during their impromptu family's meals to clenching your fists and wanting to start swinging as Li's Danny pulverizes wave after wave of thugs, breaking bones, skulls, and walls with complete disregard for whatever damage he's doing to himself. This is not stylized gun battles and people floating through the air in Gucci leather and Armani ties - this is sweaty, bloody tennis shoes, bare hands, and head-butts in grimy alleys and fighting pits. In a THX-equipped theater, you come out of every fight feeling like it was you up there having your arms dislocated and head smacked into the sheetrock. Hoskins gives a tour-de-force performance that rivals Kingsley in Sexy Beast - a vicious, amoral gangster who keeps a man in a cage under his basement floor, trained as a human pit bull to be sicced on anyone who crosses him. Morgan Freeman plays the only character he's ever played (aside from a short turn as a bad guy in the gawdawful Hard Rain), but like Eastwood, that's all he has to do because he does it so well. An must-see, must-own in all respects, right up to the end.
• Hitch - Just a good old-fashioned hopeless-dweeb-falls-in-love-with-rich-heiress-and-hires-smooth-talking-hipster-to-help-him-get-the-girl movie. Will Smith turns in an effortless performance, mining the natural comedic timing that has made him a multi-zillionaire for yet another run. Eva Mendes provides a lot of irritation, and Kevin James grabs some pretty damn funny moments as the guy who might eventually get his girl, if he can only get over himself. The dance scene is almost as painful to watch as an episode of "Fawlty Towers". Not 100%, but an entertaining movie, despite the trailer's suggestion that Will is just out to get the girls to bed with the guys.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - I *really*, *really*, *really* wanted to love this movie as much as I loved the books. Whenever I want to a laugh until tears come out of my eyes, I pick up any of Douglas Adams' classic quintology (or whatever it has become) and have a bit of Arthur and Marvin roaming about and seeing just how weird the Universe can be. Well, they damn well didn't manage that with this movie. It's a complete shame, because they had the cast (well, most of the cast - Mos Def as Ford just does *not* cut it. I mean, where the hell is, well, *anybody* else to play Ford?), they had the budget, the special effects, everything. There were genuinely funny moments, eye-popping moments, but the whole experience was like getting on the Texas Giant at Six Flags and having them run it with the brakes on at 5 miles per hour. The time between the funny moments and the eye-popping moments was a grinding agony of crap pacing, mashed-up plot, and the horror of whatever Hollywood dillweed did *that* to Marvin. The saddest part of the whole affair was knowing that if Adams hadn't croaked while trying to keep himself healthy, we might have finally seen a big screen version of the book that would end up spawning sequels (I've always wanted to see the rock band that had to play from orbit), and that it would have been *right*. Instead of trying to put a plot behind the damn thing, he'd have just put the book on screen, illogical nuttiness and all. Trying to shoehorn the books into a standard Hollywood flick ... it's just sad. SO, if you must go see it, do it by yourself so you won't force some poor uninitiated soul to hate the books before they've read them, and then go snag a copy of the classic BBC rendition, which despite an apparent budget of about £5, manages more laughs and entertainment value than this 50-million dollar pile of crap.
• Shaun of the Dead - A classic horror movie, full of laughs, screams, and moments to make you squirm. As the end of the world comes down around their ears, Pegg and his video-game addicted slob of a buddy try to make time for one more pint. A well-done take on the zombie genre with a distinctly Brit flavor. Not for the squeamish, but not the full-on assault seen in other recent flicks. Worth checking out if you are a fan.
• Madagascar - The first 30 minutes are just kinda there, and I was pretty sure I didn't give a damn if Ben, Chris, and Dave ever made it out of Manhattan. The penguins were as funny as they looked in the trailers, but the rest of the zoo? Meh. However, once the gang got out and about, things picked up. The lemurs and penguins just about made the movie, balancing out Ben Stiller's Type-A nutcase routine (it gets kinda tiresome). Not a classic, but certainly entertaining, and another one that you can guarantee the kids will sit through.
• Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Ummmm. Hmmmm. Uh. I don't know - I am a pretty big fan of the mighty Depp, but there's a bit too much Michael Jackson in his rendition of Willy Wonka. The sets and design are typically Burton, which means there's lots to enjoy on that front. The Oompa-Loompas as done by Deep Roy are great, and Charlie is well done by Freddie Highmore (who did an excellent job in another Depp-ism, Finding Neverland). Touching, laugh-out-loud funny in spots, but it's just not quite right. Dunno - I'll have to give it another shot at some point.

- saturday 07 09 05 -

Ahhhh. Finally got around to ripping and replacing the murky bruise of a front page that I designed in a fit of pique three years ago. Still working on abstracting the rest of my layout into style sheets - as of right now, I've got about 50 pages of content to go through and manually slide over to the new format. Blecch.

- thursday 06 23 05 -

My, how time flies. Seems like just yesterday I was a young punk with shoulder length hair, hell bent on playing guitar for a living .. I updated my web site, played video games, played guitar, watched movies. Ahh, the good old days. *Cough*.

I have been chastised again for the lack of updates, so we'll have another brain dump here.

Sill working for a living, with some new toys. Very cool stuff, and I'm gonna work on getting upgraded to some bigger toys - this is some extra cool stuff. Got to see a demo of an SQL server with a web store front end getting it's ass kicked on one node of a two node ESX cluster. Flopped the SQL server host to a different physical node, and the perfmon and web order scripts didn't even flicker. All without OS level clustering. Takes a SAN back-end to get to that level, but hey, I've got one of those already. Looking at SQL 2005 on some 64-bit Windows 2003, just 'cause I can. Still waiting to roll up to a current operating system for our desktop arena, while trying to fend off the Forces of Light in their struggle against The Great Satan. I keep telling our local Linux bigot that he's got a prime opportunity to roll out those spankin' fresh free OS images as long as he can make 'em play nice with a perverted LDAP directory service and a meaty beast of a groupware solution.

After a couple of rounds through the mill, ended up rolling out a WAMP solution (as opposed to a LAMP setup) for some internal applications. Think I'll be banging around on a WIMP solution next. (For those who need some PYAITK, W is for Windows, A is for Apache, M is for MySQL, P is for PHP, L is for Linux, and I is for IIS.) The great push for Open Source solutions as a way to save money means it will probably be a career-enhancing move to get familiar with these things. If only I had another 40 hours a week to learn some more shiznit.

Finally managed to get some time to work on my VBScript skills. This black art has finally been dragged out into the light with some very thorough documentation and community contributions. When you roll up the whole WMI / WSH / ADSI / VBScript package, you can basically do *anything* to a Windows system locally, remotely, while you sleep, etc, etc - registry settings, file system management, server configuration, log management - you name it, it can be done with a couple of lines of code. I've barely scratched the surface of the miles long list of things that I've been struggling to manage, but I'm seeing a far off glint of light at the end of the tunnel. Very cool stuff, and yes, I know it's been around forever, but even people who have learned it the hard way point out that Microsoft seemed desperate to obscure this incredibly powerful toolkit until recently.

- friday 03 18 05 -

Good news. Got one of these with a grand total of around 3.5 TERABYTES of disk to play with (sadly, that's some seriously punk-ass capacity these days), gonna get some of these to store a whole lot of pictures on, working on getting another of these to replace some old shit, really digging the idea of some of these just on general principles, and wondering how the hell all this is getting paid for. Oh well, maybe somebody has one of these. Some days, it is good to be a geek.

Movies. Cellular - the wife thought is was total crap, and I'm afraid I'd almost have to agree. Almost - as long as you closed your eyes during the painful holes in the plot, not something that you'd say "Damn, there's two hours of my life I won't ever see again .. ". Garden State - very good, profane, rude, touching, with unaffected performances by the leads. Natalie Portman shows us how to do it again. I, Robot - Will Smith needs to get himself into a serious role so he can use his acting muscles instead of his ever-hardening pectorals. An entertaining flick, but it felt like Will was just going through the motions in spots. Funny, fast-paced, with just enough of Asimov's hard sci-fi core to make you think while you're munching your popcorn. An under-used James Cromwell would be a great centerpiece for a more serious take on Asimov's Three Laws.

Books. Reading this one by this guy. An interesting read - I've been through two of his other books. A couple of tough looks at the changes in the US military between the end of WWII and today. The guy comes off as an arrogant son-of-a-bitch a lot of the time, but looking back over the record, he's probably earned the right to be. An in-depth look at why one guy loved and then left the US Army, and what he thinks needs to be done to keep the US safe. At the very least, whether you agree with him or not, the books present a fascinating look into the military mind and culture of the last half of the 20th century. Recommended.

Another great read - Enemy at the Gates by William Craig. Yes, this is the book that I think they based the movie on, although I suspect that the movie is not entirely aligned with reality. The book is an impressive chronicle of one of the pivotal battles of WWII, with a detailed analysis of the mistakes and successes on each side. I'll report on the movie once I've seen it.

Last thing - if for some unknown reason you haven't rented or bought Band of Brothers, get your ass to Blockbuster or your local video store and get it. An incredibly powerful and moving mini-series about men who lived and died in the hell of WWII. Done with an attention to detail that almost makes you feel like a news crew running along with the soldiers from Normandy to the Austrian Alps. Awe-inspiring.

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