December 2006 - Posts
I forgot to do any sort of wrapup around the geek dinner we had a few weeks back with Miguel Castro. Yesterday one of the folks from the INETA Marketing department pinged me and asked for a writeup that could be jammed into the newsletter. Since I already wrote it, I figured I might as well post it here in the off chance that you don't receive and read the INETA newsletters.
"Miguel Castro came to Atlanta and joined us for a great Geek dinner at a local steak house. While the group wasn’t extremely large, we sure were loaded with geeks - five out of the seven attendees were Microsoft MVPs! We all ate, drank, laughed and talked tech. Conversations ranged over Microsoft’s various data access protocols (LINQ, ADO, etc), SharePoint 2007, the latest Xbox 360 games, and TV shows like Battlestar Galactica.
Stay tuned for the next Atlanta Geek Dinner – we’re going to see if we can entice some visiting members of the Visual Studio product team to join us for an orgy of beer and brains."
I'm somehow at the tail end of this thing. I think that everyone I'd pick to tag after I tell my 5 things has already been tapped by someone else. Hmm...
Anyway, here are 5 lesser known things about me. Most of these are pretty old details since I've been detailing pretty much everything about my life since I started blogging in 2003 (at least I think it was 2003).
- It's no secret that I'm fairly comfortable speaking in public in front of audiences of varied size. I've actually got a long history of this. I started in childrens theater where I played the role of Mike T.V. in an Augusta Player's production of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I appeared in something like 6 theater productions through elementary school to high school (I don't remember ages). I moved from theater to the high school policy debate team for my last two years of high school. I frequently won top awards at large state wide competitions for my speaker skills. I also went twice to regional extemporaneous speaking competitions.
- I've worked for several years now with the Atlanta area .NET user groups as an extremely active member and leader. I've got a decently long pedigree of extracurricular group involvement and leadership. In high school I was a member of something like 12 clubs, not that I can remember exactly which ones. I ran one or two of them, including the French Club (I won a $750 scholarship for my high school French prowess). At UGA, I was the Vice President of Resumes/Technology of the Society for Management Information Systems my senior year.
- I gave up my chances of soccer stardom to start my acting career. As a young kid I played on for the Cougars. My first year the team finished second to last. My last year we were in second place. I gave up my acting career to be in the Evans High School Marching Band. I played the flute. Highly embarrassing and a bad decision all around. I gave up the band to join the debate team.
- At some point in all the above kid-oriented activities, I was on the Augusta JCC swim team. I was pretty good too, frequently placing in freestyle and backstroke events.
- I'm almost part of the digital generation. I remember getting our first family PC when I was 7 or 8. My father installed the first 4 color graphics card in it. The external 1X CD-Rom was larger than our VCR. I played a lot of text based games like Zork and the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy (recreated online here!). My first game console was the Sega Genesis (although I have distant memories of Coleco and Atari games, I can't swear I owned those). I personally purchased an Xbox on Nov 18th 2001 (3 days after it came out) and I currently have at the house 2 Xbox 360s, 1 Sony PSP, 1 desktop PC, and 4 laptops (2 are owned by work).
OK. That's 5 things about me. Looking back at that list, it's not very impressive. Mostly it just shows that I'm lame and that I've been lame for quite a while now. No awesome skateboard tricks, no guitar riffs. Oh well.
Now I'm supposed to tap 5 other people. Fine. In an all Canadian theme, let's hear from Rob Zelt, Amanda Murphy, Shane Perran, D'Arcy Lussier, and Wes MacDonald.
Get to work!
I figure since I woke up at 4AM this morning there was a reason. After being on the computer for a couple of hours I found out why. Shawn has continued something called Blog Tag where you tell 5 things no one knows about you. Since I am up early I figured I would do this so I could tag my only friends before other people get to them.
- I collect Microsoft memorabilia such as trinkets, clothing and almost anything that says Microsoft on it, yes I am weird and yes I know some of you might have noticed this.
- I enjoy playing the piano, I am no good at it, but would like to get better at it one day.
- I used to play soccer, in fact some of my friends got me outside last year to play. When I was in high school I was part of the only soccer team to win a Regional Championship in school history.
- I enjoy fixing up houses and if that would pay the bills, I would consider doing it full time. I enjoy computers too much so I would probably do both houses and computers, but I would enjoy either one.
- I don't tell personal information quickly. Just ask my friends, I don't freely give out information. This probably goes to when I was a kid, but I feel more comfortable not saying too much.
Ok good job Shawn that is all you get out of me for today. Next time I will make them all technical. So now I call on Jim Wooley, Dan Attis, Keith Rome, Paul Wilson, and Chris Wallace
I've got a pair of VMWare virtual machines that I work with regularly. One machine is the dev environment for a smart client app. The other machine is the business logic server (web services) for the smart client app. The database machine is actually on a third machine - an actual physical box. Because they have to talk to each other an talk to a physical box on the network, I have both of them set up with bridged networks, which means that they're publicly available and talking to the actual domain controller for DHCP and DNS purposes
Normally I boot these VMs every morning and shut them down every night. However, in that I was in the middle of some testing I just paused both of them and resumed them this morning. Unfortunately, I forgot to resume the server machine until after a few hours of using the client machine. This meant that my client somehow got confused and thought that my server's IP address was in the 192 range rather than the 10.10 range it really is in. I couldn't get the two of them to talk.
To resolve the issue, I tried clearing the DNS cache on the client with an 'ipconfig /flushdns' command. This did not work. I tried clearing the NBT Remote Cache Name table on the client with a 'nbtstat -R' command. This didn't work. What did work was renewing the IP address on the server with a pair of 'ipconfig /release' and 'ipconfig /renew' commands.
Now my machines are happily humming along again.
Did you know that if you are working on a Word document and you want to be able to see one part of the document while editing a completely different section, you can freeze a portion of the document on the screen? You can accomplish this dual view by dragging the little divider bar down from above the scroll bar.
FYI - this trick works in Excel as well. This way you can keep you column headings on the screen while editing detail cells way down the page.
Now you know, and knowing is half the battle
I've passed three Microsoft certs, two of them in these last two weeks. These exams (70-306 (Winforms in VB), 70-315 (Web in C#), and 70-320 (Distributed Apps in C#)) raise my level of certification status from Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP) to Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD).
What does this mean to me? Well, aside from the fact that I was promised a small raise for achieving this goal by December 31st, this certification status really doesn't mean anything. I get to put it on my resume, but since I'm not looking for a job that doesn't help. Since I'm a consultant, I get to put it on my ProQual report (which looks exactly like my resume) which might help me get certain gigs. However, I'm at my current client until at least June and possibly a lot longer. The guy I'm replacing was here for 2 years.
Anyway - YAY! I'm officially certified! <no wise cracks about mental health please!>
I've now got 7 Microsoft certifications, and I've (to date) always passed each exam on the first try. I've got 4 exams from 1998 that say I'm certified in Windows NT 4.0 and 3 from 2006 that say I'm certified to develop .NET 1.1 applications in C# and VB.
This is old, but I've got to blog this to clear the flag in Outlook.
Do you have a Blackberry? Did you know that it can function as a dialup modem for your laptop? My Blackberry is fairly old, and uses GPRS (essentially 33.6 dialup speeds) but newer models use EDGE and UMTS (whatever that is).
Anyway - go here to learn how to user your Blackberry as a USB tethered modem so you can access the Internet from your laptop.
Kim and I have been lighting candles and exchanging gifts recently to celebrate our second Hanukkah together. From Kim I received a pair of shirts, the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Volume 4, and a car charger for my Zune. Kim received a custom printed calender with a ton of our photos on it from Snapfish and a little trinket in that special blue box.
Being sick sucks. Today is my 2nd straight day with 101+ degree fever. Yesterday I woke up not feeling very well. All last week I'd been suffering from some kind of head cold which has apparently been making it's rounds. I managed to stay at work all of 45 minutes before racing home to get back into bed. I took a fist full of over the counter medicine and slept for six hours but I couldn't break my fever. This meant I had to skip my Intellinet holiday party yesterday, which is supposed to be a lot of fun. Tonight, if I can't get better (and it's not looking good) is Kim's company holiday party and I'm probably going to miss that too. Being sick sucks
Get this, Walker County had to close it's schools after more than 1,200 kids called out sick with the flu and strep throat.
When I started with Intellinet, I realized quickly that I needed some external storage as my laptop's piddly little 60Gb drive was rapidly filled with virtual machines. So I went to NewEgg to do some shopping. While I was looking, I kept coming back to the eSATA enclosure and SATA drives. the drives are faster and with the eSATA ports I could triple my throughput to the drive. This is important when copying multi-gigabyte virtual machines around. So I picked up a 2.5" SATA drive, a SATA/USB enclosure, and a PCMCIA card to give me a pair of eSATA ports.
How's the performance? Let's let the graphs speak for themselves.
my SATA drive hooked up to my system via the eSATA port:
my SATA drive hooked up to my laptop via USB 2.0:
my internal IDE harddrive:
The gist of the graphs is that the eSATA connection is on average 67% faster when transferring data and bursts up to 3 times as fast. This sure makes VMs seem responsive.
I've also got some anecdotal evidence. Sebastian at Intellinet was transferring 200 Gb worth of files from his laptop to his external drives. This took 6 hours on the USB 2.0 connected drive and only 1.5 hours on the eSATA connected drive. Of course, he was using a 3.5" model but he has the same brand enclosure and PCMCIA card.
These pretty graphs are courtesy of the HD Tune disk benchmark utility - http://www.hdtune.com/
Sorry for the late notice, but we've had a location change for the Geek Dinner tonight. 5 Seasons was too booked to accommodate our party size so now we'll be eating at Joey D's Oak Room
| What: |
Geek Dinner with Miguel Castro
Geek Dinner with Miguel Castro The reservation is under "Geek Dinner". Just ask for us at the hostess stand. 770-512-7063 |
| When: |
Tuesday, December 12, 2006 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM |
| Where: |
Joey D's Oak Room
1015 Crown Pointe Parkway
Atlanta, GA 30338 USA |
I know that I'm supposed to be studying or writing, but for some reason I couldn't concentrate on any of that yesterday. So rather than rot my brain watching TV all day, I picked up a book. I've been seeing all these commercials for the movie Eragon, and Kim happened to already own the book, so I read through that instead of doing something more constructive. The book was pretty good, especially considering that it was written by a 18 year old kid! However, I came to the realization that the book is only the first of a trilogy of books (a very ambitious project for a 18 year old) while the movie appears to span all of the books. This means I'll have to purchase and read the other books in the set at some point.
Anyway - I give the book a thumbs up in the "I'd rather not study" category.
I've been using Omea Reader and Omea Pro from JetBrains for a while now. It's just been announced that Omea Pro has gone open source and is free! Yippee!
http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/
I've talked about LogMeIn.com before, but now there is an awesome new tool from these same folks (I think) called Hamachi. Hamachi is a zero config VPN that allows you to build a LAN over the internet and through firewalls. You can do file sharing, remote desktop, and more with no effort. Totally awesome! Totally Free!
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