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  • Lottery!

    Yeah to winning $150!

  • Virtual Host Beast

    Last fall I priced out a machine to host virtual machines for a coworker of mine. Well, all the pieces finally arrived, and last night we put it together.

    Holy cow, talk about a beastly machine, so much so in fact, that it is called esx-beast. The case, with the hot swap SATA hard drive bays is quite a nice touch too. Watching all those LEDs blink in unison when configured in a RAID5 was quite a treat to watch.

    The megaRAID card functioned flawlessly too, which is a good thing. ESX found it without any problems, and he now has 500 GB of redundant usable space. If I had money, and didn’t have a functioning machine myself, I would definitely look at getting a similar box.

  • Links 4/11

    • Apartment Therapy – Chicago
    • Most Expensive Sandwich?

      London’s most expensive sandwich went on sale at Selfridges today and at £85 and 2,000 Calories it promised to lighten pockets and expand waistlines.

    • Florida County Puts Up Resident’s Data—So glad to see that the government is with the times, as usual. From the article:

      The Social Security numbers, driver’s license information and bank account details belonging to potentially millions of current and former residents of Florida’s Broward County are available to anyone on the Internet because sensitive information has not been redacted from public records being posted on the county’s Web site.

    • Playing with Road Signs—Take your SUV back to detroit!
    • Build Your Own Rack

  • Expensive Advertising

    While some software loads, I thought I’d share my thoughts on some advertising I received in the mail today.  On the outside, it looked like a magazine offer for Urban Trends magazine.  I’ve been keeping up on some design stuff lately, so I thought I’d open it up and give it a look.  Opening up the sample magazine (~6 pages), gave me nothing but Mercury Milan ads.  Then I found the DVD. 

    Yes, it came with a DVD.  It was also plastered with Milan ads on it.  Oh great, they got me to open up there junk mail, basically because they lied to me, and now they expect me to actually consider this car?!  In addition to the magazine and DVD there was a letter, a piece of paper in the shape of sunglasses proclaiming their website, and a comment card.

    The upside, on the letter, there’s a “rebate” for a $50 american express card, but you have to test drive the car.  I don’t want to test drive the car, I have no desire (but the $50 may get me if I have extra time).  The only thing I think of when I hear Mercury is cars that are identical to Ford’s (because they are, the Milan is a Fusion), and that HORRIBLE actress they have for their SUV ads.  In no way shape or form would you find me in a Milan, unless I was renting a car.

    And wasting who knows how much money on this advertisement to make Mercury appear “hip” to the “urban crowd” is definitely not well spent money.

  • Links 4/6

    • New Alton Brown Show!

      “Feasting on Asphalt,” which features Brown driving across the country by motorcycle to take a look at food on the American road today. It premieres at 9 p.m. July 19.

    • “FireWire”—Ads on page may be Not Safe For Work (NSFW).
    • Incredibly Hot New Chili

      The Naga registered a Scoville heat unit of 876,000. The record holder is a Red Savina Habanero with a rating of 577,000.

    • Dictionary on your iPod

  • Links 4/5

    • Apple Boot Camp

      Boot Camp lets you install Windows XP without moving your Mac data, though you will need to bring your own copy to the table, as Apple Computer does not sell or support Microsoft Windows. Boot Camp will burn a CD of all the required drivers for Windows so you don’t have to scrounge around the Internet looking for them.

    • Traffic Cameras Increase Accidents and Profits

      Upon installation, the cameras caused an immediate 40 percent increase in rear-end collisions from 53 in 1999 to 74 in 2000. Overall accidents were up between 25 percent and 41 percent from 107 in 1999 to 134 in 2001 and 151 in 2002.

  • Free Virtualization

    Well, Microsoft has finally bowed to VMWare’s free Server product.  You can finally download Virtual Server R2 Enterprise Edition for free.  It’s great that VMWare has forced this upon Microsoft.  However, there are still a few key differences.  The free version of VMWare Server is actually a “beta” version, while Microsoft’s Virtual Server is the final build, and safe for production use (unless it’s running on XP). 

    This is great news for enterprise environments none-the-less, especially with the new licensing scheme for Windows 2003 products.  Basically, if you have enterprise resources, you’re incredibly stupid not to be running some sort of virtualization, be it in production or not.  You save too much money on the hardware (one machine now can host X number of virtual machines) and software end (one Windows 2003 license can be used on the host and up to four virtual machines, and the virtualizing software is free).

    I personally can’t wait until hardware based virtualization technology becomes more main-stream, that’s when the huge performance increases will come.

  • Birthday Trip

    So, for those of you that don’t read the comments, I pointed out that Erin was essentially kidnapping me for the weekend.  She basically wouldn’t tell me where we were going, or what we were doing, just that I was driving because of my far superior gas mileage. 

    Turns out we went to Cedarburg, WI, where we ended up going on a winery tour, wine tasting, dinner, and then stayed in a bed and breakfast.  It was actually quite a bit of fun.

    Unfortunately, since it was daylight savings time, we forgot to sping ahead Saturday night, and then missed the breakfast.  However, to make up for it, I got these awesome camera phone pictures while waiting for the winery tour.  I honestly can’t believe I didn’t purchase the book.  I mean, George and Laura in their under-roos?  Oh, and make sure you include Reagan too!

  • Happy Birthday!

    To me!

  • It’s Official