Blog

Two surprises about my blog yesterday: First, I did a search on Google for “blog aspx” and my page came up fifth. Whoa. Wasn’t expecting that. I mean, if you search for Brent Ozar then I come up fast, and I know I get tons of hits from search engines, but that one was odd.

The second surprise was that somebody actually caught me via that same search, and emailed me asking if I’d share the code for my .NET blog. I’m thinking no, because that’s the reason I was searching Google yesterday: there’s got to be a decent blog solution for .NET people who run their own web servers. Still looking. I want the ability to update my blog via e-mail, basically.

The weather couldn’t be better: it’s a crisp, cool day, I have the windows open, and the turtles are sitting on their little patio basking in the heat of their lamp. Houston is a wonderful place. Steve & friends are coming down this weekend for the Rockets home opener. Life is good.

I love this place. Sitting in the Galleria Starbucks again, as I do half the week, and the baristas are so sweet. They’re thinking about keeping the lobby open 24 hours (the drive-through is already 24-hour) and I can’t wait. I’d be here at 4am every morning after I took Erika to work.

Even better, at the moment, they’re playing “This Charming Man” by the Smiths. Wow. Couldn’t get better than that, unless the place was empty and I could sing along at the top of my lungs. Wonder what old Moz is up to these days, anyway.

Well, I’ve had my LG VX10 for a few days now, and I can give a better opinion on it. (This is the new phone I got from Verizon to replace the junky Motorola T720.) The user interface is phenomenal – very easy, very intuitive, and very fast. It definitely responds a lot faster than the T720 did. The voice quality is passable, but not as good as the T720 or my old Kyocera SmartPhone 6035. The holster design is absolutely horrendous: I challenge any human being to get the phone loose with a single hand while the phone is clipped upright to your belt. It can’t be done. The only way to do it is to hang the holster upside down, so your antenna points to the floor, and that way you can pop it loose after some struggling. It might look like the phone would pop out on its own, but believe me, it ain’t going anywhere.

My next quest: finding a reasonably priced USB data cable for it. The serial one is on Ebay for $17, but I’d rather have USB just to make it easier to switch between machines.

Even more fun with ServersAlive. One thing led to another, and I ended up spending the evening building pie charts and dynamically filtered ServersAlive templates. Beats watching the CSI rerun, even though the female hockey player is a hottie on that episode. The results are here. Oh, and I finally let slip that I’m building a web-based help desk system to integrate with SA. (sigh) I tried to keep it to myself, I just couldn’t. I’m so excited about it!

In related news, I’m tickled pink that Rob got voted off Survivor. Sure, he was fit, and he helped them win a lot of challenges, but he was a pain in the rear to listen to. I can’t imagine how annoying he must be in person. Eeek.

Fun with ServersAlive. ServersAlive is a slick server monitoring program that lets you know when servers or services are down. One of the users asked if there was a way to visually represent disk space checks, and I knew I just had to code it. The results are online here, along with a tutorial on how to do it yourself. Basically just sticking it in the blog so that it gets Googled, but if you’d like to see the status of my network, I guess you might find it interesting.

Well, that didn’t take long. Mandrake 9 installed extremely quickly, detected my video card & network card, and then kept exploding after I logged in. Restarted the system twice, still couldn’t shake the segfault blues, so I’m downloading RedHat 9 now. Like Scarlett said, tomorrow is another day.

Never let it be said that I’m not open minded. I’m giving Linux yet another chance. I picked up a Gigabyte dual-CPU motherboard last weekend from Directron, and before I set it up as my new web/sql server, I figured I’d throw Mandrake 9 on there and see how she works. The hardware is pretty straightforward (dual-P3, Geforce2 Pro video card, Intel dual-port network card, US Robotics modem) and already worked with the default install CD’s for Win2k Server and .Net Web Server Edition, so I’ll see how Linux handles it.

A bit of history – over the years, I’ve tried Linux at least ten times, and I’ve never had a distro work with the devices in my systems. I don’t use esoteric gear, but it’s always been a struggle. My last effort was about six months ago, when I tried to get Red Hat 7 on my Thinkpad T21. No matter what, I couldn’t get my wireless network card or the integrated 10/100 card to work. People suggested I recompile the kernel to get those to work. Riiiight.

I got tempted this time because I was surfing through SourceForge looking at groupware tools for a work project, and realized that there was some stuff on there that could easily replace Exchange for my home use. One thought led to another, and I decided that I could make the jump and convert my web pages and mail system over to Linux fairly easily. I’d have to rewrite a few things like this database-driven blog, but since Dreamweaver MX has PHP support built in, it just might not be that bad.

I still wouldn’t switch to Linux on the desktop yet – I’ll still use VMware for that. I’d actually rather switch to Mac OS X on the desktop before I switched to Linux.

Steer clear of the Motorola T720 cell phone. Just returned mine to Verizon after two horrible weeks. The thing kept changing ring styles on its own – going from vibrate to singing “You have an incoming call” to feminine bell chimes to no alert at all. After I missed two calls in a row because it decided to keep quiet, I called up Verizon and told them to take this phone and shove it. The sales rep I’d been working with, Stacy (at the Verizon shop on 59 across from the Compaq Center) was an absolute sweetheart. I can’t say enough good things about the Verizon service and their staff. Anyway, I ordered a new LG VX10 because they didn’t have it stocked in the store yet, so I’m sans cell phone for the next week or two. No biggie.

Turtles are not maintenance-free. Just got done cleaning their tank – two hours of schlepping dirty water over to the bathroom, schlepping clean water back in, cleaning the filter, rebuilding their little ramp so they can walk up out of the water easier, and what’s the first thing they do? The very first thing? You got it, they lay a big old log. Ingrates.

Seriously, they’re so adorable. Fred still loves climbing up my leg, up my chest, up my neck, and perching himself up on top of my head. I gotta get Erika to take a picture of that one of these days.

Saw CSI:Miami for the first time last night. I’m a big fan of CSI (well, relatively big fan, I still haven’t bought a CSI shirt – yet) and I always liked David Caruso on NYPD Blue. Sure enough, I enjoyed CSI: Miami – Caruso played his character almost like Mulder on the X-Files.

I just love Randy Travis. Sounds odd, I know, because I’m not a big country music listener by any means. I can sing along with that guy for hours. I’ve got a goofball voice with a somewhat low range, and there’s not a lot of people I can sing along with. Darius Rucker of Hootie & The Blowfish is the only other guy I can think of, but he has an upper range too, and I can’t touch that.