Work

Have been just a wee bit swamped at work lately (but learning some very cool new technologies), so updates have been very sparse...

So, for my two readers, I apologize profusely.

Well, my trip to the 2007 Ottawa Linux Symposium started out auspiciously enough. After 12+ hours of total travel time, including circling above Wisconsin Dells for an hour (due to bad weather in Chicago), hiking back and forth to multiple terminals in the Chicago O'Hara airport because my gate kept switching and waiting for 5+ hours in the Chicago O'Hara airport due to bad weather fouling up the flight schedule, I at last made it into Ottawa at 12 midnight EDT. Only to find out that there had been some confusion with my hotel room and I no longer had a reservation! I guess my "please pity me!" face worked well enough, because the concierge did find me a room which enabled me to get to bed by 1:00 am. Yes!

Let's hope the rest of the week goes better....

The blog updates will be pretty sparse this week since I will be attending the Linux Symposium Conference in Ottawa, Canada.

A nice list of 9 attitudes of highly creative people. As a companion piece, the "How to be a more creative blogger" article.

Thanks to the generosity of our hardware vendors, several of my co-workers and I received free passes to the Spiderman 3 movie. Even though the special effects were pretty good (not mind-blowing, but certainly not disappointing either), I regret to say that the producers of the Spiderman movie franchise badly need to get some decent script writers! (may I humbly suggest the people who penned the X-Men series on the big screen? ) Of course I was happy with the performance of Topher Grace (although I usually am ) and I thought that Thomas Hayden Church did a good job as the Sandman (ironically, Sandman was probably on the screen for a cumulative total of about 15 minutes, but he felt like one of the better fleshed out characters - that pretty much sums up the character development).

To put it mildly, the later part of the previous week, work-wise has been extremely grueling. In between on-call work and getting ready for DST (in which Sun Java so kindly dropped the ball by announcing on Friday that they had screwed up their Java DST patch release), it has pretty much been a non-stop work (with catnaps in between) from Thursday to Sunday. Thankfully, the DST changeover seemed to go pretty smooth in the end (which was nice to see, given all of the hard work that was put in getting machines and applications patched ). So, to make up for the horrendous past couple of days, I decided that I needed something to lift my spirits. After making many trips to the Apple store and returning home empty-handed, thanks partially to my niece who was with me ("What are you waiting for? You deserve it!") and tireless prompting of a few co-workers :-), I finally decided to take the plunge and plop down for a 17" MacBook Pro. I am still in the process of trying to get it configured the way that I want, as well as get all of my needed applications loaded (had to work again, so not much time to spend with the new toy), especially to run the KDE environment side-by-side with the Mac OSX environment (it looks like Fink will do most of what I want). Of course, in the process of trying X11 configured to work the way that I want, I came across some nice tweaks for the regular Terminal application as well: namely to have the focus follow the mouse (just for the Terminal application): just type the following string in a Terminal window (note: this only works in Tiger - 10.4.x): defaults write com.apple.Terminal FocusFollowsMouse -string YES. Note: For the curious (or the disinterested), I have just completed my first work maintenance window on my Mac (using just the Terminal window, which was bearable w/ the additional tweak of letting the focus follow the mouse).

Once again it was time for the annual work golf scramble. Weather-wise, we lucked out and had beautiful day for it (prior to today, the weather had been pretty drizzly and cold). I was on the same team as last year, but, even with a couple of drinks, we couldn't seem to get the flow going and ended up at +2 over par (still a good score for me). One of my team-mates (one of the "good" golfers) was mortally depressed and said that he would have to hang his head in shame for awhile. Which points out one of the few advantages to being a poor golfer - you are usually beside yourself with happiness to get a bogey (i.e. you are not over par by double-digits). There were awesome prizes again this year (including three iPods), but due to my non-existent golf skills, I didn't claim any of them. Of course, there is always next year and miracles still do happen.

On February 25th, probably half of Minneapolis (at least the crowd size at the farewell party sure felt that way - it was packed) said "Goodbye!" to Rex Sorgatz, a very creative person who left Internet Broadcasting to start working at a new startup division at Microsoft.

Thanks to Yope!, I found a nice farewell video over on Minnesota Stories.
Enjoy!

Weellll, I (and my company) managed to survive the three very hectic weeks of 24x7 round the clock Olympics support and now I am off to have a mucho mudslide at Applebees.

Blogging will be somewhat sporadic for the next couple of weeks, since our company will be supporting the 2006 Torino Winter Olympics 24x7. Let the fun begin!

Kare11 did a story on my company regarding our doing the Official Olympics website; it also has a video with an interview with some of our people (no, I am not one of the people ). I am pretty happy with the website. I think it is nicer in some respects than the website that we did for the Athens 2004 games (and I liked that website quite a bit). Even though the hours were (and will be) long, it is still pretty exciting to be able to look at a website that will be viewed by millions of people around the world and know that you had a part in making that happen (I just found the speed skater picture that was one of many pictures that kept me up past 2:00 am in the morning one night, generating the various resolution sizes . Update (02/02/06): There is now a story in the StarTribune about my company's part in the NBCOlympics website.

I took a late lunch today and when I came back there were no parking spots available in either of our parking lots (not even an open space in the "bootleg" parking lot {actually belongs to another company across from us}). I ended up parking in the "second" bootleg parking lot (belongs to another company across from us as well).
I guess this means that 2006 Olympics preparations are in full swing......

I participated for the second year running in our annual work Golf Scramble. This time, I was on a team that consisted of: (2) experienced golfers; (1) so-so golfer and (1) inexperienced golfer (I fell into the last catagory, again ) -- at this point in my (very) young golf career, I think I have golfed maybe five times. The vendor that was golfing with us was kind enough to spring for the golf carts and a couple of rounds of drinks (which ended up improving the golf score - see below). The prizes donated by the vendors were quite nice. There was a Sony PSP (for the longest putt) and an iPod Nano (for the closest to the pin - which I could have won if I wouldn't have pulled my tee shot wide to the right ) We ended up finishing with a score of even par (probably the first and last time that I will ever see that - unless I am golfing with other people again ) - our team really started to pick up steam once my three golf team members had a couple of drinks. Note: You can read about how the first year went here.

Sorry about the lack of updates, but work has been really jumping these past couple of weeks. Hopefully, I'll get back to having a personal life soon .

I am taking the week off from work, so I can get prepared for an upcoming wedding that I am the wedding photographer for. Did I mention that I am not a pro photographer and have never shot a wedding in my life? I think the ultimate goal will be not to screw up too badly (that way the family won't stop speaking to me ).