Conversation between me and our Exchange guy:
Me: “You need to test the mail server with fake accounts first. Send a bunch of emails with huge attachments, and keep send/receiving as you fail over to the DRP site and fail back here. If it works okay, then we can move on to real users.”
Exchange guy: “Come on, that’s not a real world test. We need to use real users.”
Me: “Why?”
Exchange guy: “It’s like government crash testing. When they crash test cars, they don’t build a fake car and use it. They use real cars to get real results.”
Me: “Yeah, but they use fake people, and you should too.”
Not much to say there – some winds and rain, but not much more than a typical South Florida afternoon thunderstorm. I left work around 2pm yesterday and encountered a squall on the highway, but that was about the worst of it. I spotted some down tree branches on the way in to work, and that was it.
(Yes, it’s 6:54am and I already have my computer booted up in the office. I’m a freak.)
The first rain bands have just started moving ashore, but they’re not strong. The beach hotels a couple of blocks away are still easy to see from our balcony.
It looks like Tropical Storm Ernesto is still bearing down directly on Miami. The chart hasn’t changed much from yesterday, other than the strength dying down:
I needed gas yesterday – more of a coincidence than hurricane preparation – and got a disturbing surprise. Everybody’s making a run on gas, since they remember the stations running out last year. I got in a 30-car line for gas yesterday on the way home from work at the station with the shortest line, and they were out of everything but premium. On the way in to work this morning, the few stations I passed were out of gas. Ouch. Both of our cars are full now, so we shouldn’t have any problems.
Erika went grocery shopping yesterday, but we ran out of paper towels last night so I headed over to Publix for more. (Paper towels are very, very important in our house. Probably more so than water.) Both of the Publix stores on South Beach were a total zoo, but I noticed as I was going through the checkout line that most of the other people weren’t buying water either. Everybody was doing their normal grocery shop, just right before the storm. Hamburger, feta cheese, fresh bread, etc – not exactly the kinds of things you’d expect people to be buying with an approaching storm.
There’s a voluntary evacuation on Miami Beach, but we’ll ride it out since our condo building is so sturdy. We’ll park the cars in the multi-story parking garage this afternoon – there’s no charge during tropical storms – and veg out with little Ernie. Ernie the dog, not Ernesto the storm. Well, that too, but I wouldn’t give nicknames to storms.
I’m hoping I can leave work around lunchtime today. I’d rather get settled in before the rains hit.
Here we go again. Quick geography lesson: in the map below, I live at “2 AM Wed”:
This will be the fourth hurricane we’ve been through since we moved down to Miami a year ago – Katrina, Rita and Wilma were the first three last year. Katrina and Rita were both dinky Category 1′s when they blew through Miami. Wilma was a rough Category 3, and most of the area lost power for a couple of weeks, but in Miami Beach we had it easy. I read through my Hurricane Wilma blog entries and had a few chuckles.
My preparations this year mainly consisted of prepping my Macbook Pro to use my Cingular 8125 PocketPC phone as a modem. If my Atlantic Broadband cable modem goes out, I’ll still be able to use the handheld to surf and whatnot. I still have to get my VPN working on the Mac, though.
Miami Beach definitely takes a more laid-back attitude about hurricane preparations because the buildings are so damned solid. Our condo is solid concrete. I can’t hang stuff on the interior walls without a major trip to the toolbox because even the interior walls are concrete. The windows are the weakest link, of course – it’s an old building with louvered windows for better ventilation. Better ventilation means leaky.
This will be my first hurricane as the overall company DBA (instead of just the data warehouse DBA) and today’s agenda will be chock full o’ role swap talk. Well, that and we’ve got a new Windows engineer starting, so it’ll be good for him to see our preparations.
Amazon just announced EC2, their rent-a-datacenter plan. You build a custom virtual machine using their tools, and upload it to them. Then you can turn on that virtual machine anytime you want for a whopping ten cents per hour.
It gets even better – if you have scalability needs, like if your site suddenly becomes hugely popular, then you can turn on more machines. You just get billed ten cents per hour per machine.
There’s other costs for storage and bandwidth, but the bottom line is that the cost for a startup ebusiness just got dirt cheap. Implement your idea in a virtual machine, and you’ll be able to handle obscene growth without forking over huge money right away. You don’t have to have a lot of money tied up in a datacenter, don’t have to hire a huge infrastructure staff, etc.
This makes it even easier for your average geek to build a business without the overhead involved with finding and funding staff. It’s awesome. It’s amazing. And it works on a Mac. Gotta love that.
Why is it that so many computer tasks race from 0% done to 99% done quickly, and then hang at 99% for a longer amount of time than the first 99% took?
This particular offender is an IBM firmware update on my development database server, but this kind of thing happens all the time. Odd.
All of a sudden, I “get it” – why Apple users are so concerned about speed.
I’ve been installing Ethereal since my last blog entry this morning a few hours ago. Ethereal is not available in binary form for OSX, and you have to compile it from the source code. This is literally taking hours, and I have a heck of a fast Macbook Pro. I can’t imagine how slow this would have been on the previous generation of Powerbooks, and now all of a sudden I understand why people would be so excited about the upcoming 64-bit Macbooks and any other way they can find to get More Speed.
Typical Windows users, even network admins, so rarely compile anything from the source because everything’s available in binary out-of-the-box. This, on the other hand, takes quite a while.
Heck, if I’d have known it was going to take this long, I’d have taken my Apple home last night and kicked it off before I went to bed!
