Posts by Brent Ozar

My purchasing philosophy is to either buy the best designed product out there, something that’s going to last ten or twenty years, or else buy the all-out cheapest thing that meets my needs. Everything in between usually involves too many compromises, and I end up wishing I’d saved my money or else I pine for…

Been a long couple of weeks. Ernie’s doing well, but battling a touch of diarrhea. Okay, more than a touch – more like she got pounded with a diarrhea stick, but you get the idea. For three days I’ve been following her around the house with a spray can of Woolite Heavy Traffic carpet cleaner.…

Ernie’s settling into her new home and getting used to the place. Her comfort level is indicated by her newfound confidence in chewing on magazines, which we’ve always kept in a basket in the living room on the floor. That will probably need to change. I’d rather remove the temptation than try to explain to…

I still need to get better photos of our new little family member, but as I was going through my checklist this morning, one of the items was getting the webcam working again. Ernie always wants to climb up in my lap while I’m working, make herself as comfortable as possible, and then fall asleep.…

When a mission-critical server dies at a business, the timeline can best be described using the first thing that a person says when they call your cell phone. It went something like this: Day 1: “I wouldn’t be calling you at 5 AM unless it was really important….” Day 2: “You won’t believe this, but…

Total Commander 6.5 came out yesterday from Ghisler. It’s my favorite Windows shell program – it replaces Windows Explorer, and it’s a lot like the old Norton Commander from the DOS days. I wrote a review of Total Commander a while back when I was writing for HAL-PC Magazine, and I’m an even bigger fan…

Picked up a drafting table last night for $25 off CraigsList, an online classified system. I’ve always wanted one of these: I like to work standing up, and this will let me set my laptop and some papers out in a comfortable way. It’s got tons of character, too – the last guy who had…

When I was in high school in Michigan, we had a black Jeep CJ7. I loved it – I thought it was fun, rambunctious, and laid-back. I remember driving Melinda Scott around in the snow, thinking I was king of the world. A few years ago, when I moved to Texas, I briefly owned a…

Here’s a photo of the decorations. The place looks like a New Year’s celebration. You can’t help but smile in this office.

I came into the office last night to check up on my fantasy football scores (thank you, Priest Holmes, you record-setting devil you) and found that my office had been TP’ed for my upcoming birthday. They did a masterful job, down to hanging TP from the ceiling as streamers. I couldn’t stop laughing for several…

Last week, a few of the programmers got together (it was Lan’s idea) and, uh, “decorated” Julian’s cubicle with aluminum foil, post-it-notes, and balloons. We originally wanted to fill the cubicle with balloons, but we didn’t have quite enough time and got bored after inflating a few hundred balloons. Gallery of Julian’s Birthday Cube That…

Just got back from a week up in Dallas where I had all kinds of fun. We trashed Julian’s cubicle for his birthday, complete with balloons, aluminum foil, and post-it notes. I’ll put together a separate photo gallery of that this weekend. Erika drove up to Dallas and surprised me on Thursday for dinner. She…

You know you’re a geek when find five separate keyboards in a closet, none of which have been hooked up to a computer for any discernable length of time. The big black Toshiba has to be at least six years old. I got it when I was working as a network admin and we got…

After using an Audiovox Thera PocketPC phone for what seems like forever, I’ve ordered matching new phones for Erika and I. The Thera was pretty cool, but it had two strikes against it: it’s friggin’ big, and Verizon no longer lets you use data minutes out of your voice pool. They’re making you pay for…

When I went downstairs this morning to make my second pot of coffee, I opened the kitchen blinds and saw a little creature in distress. This fella got his legs caught in the boards of my back fence overnight, probably while walking along the top, and was stuck. He was still alive, thank goodness, and…

Some blog authors use their blogs as a cross between a public information source as well as a private one: for example, John Dowdell will often make notes in his blog when he wants to save information for a later date, in an easily searchable format, that other people may also find useful. I’m going…

I’m so frustrated that I’ve gotta take a few minutes and vent. I rarely air my work laundry here on the personal site, but at the moment, I’m so angry it just doesn’t even matter anymore. Seven months ago, when our company decided to move development to Java, I found out that my personal laptop…

Wow, about time. The site’s finally moved over to Linux. Ended up using PHP just to get it to go live quicker & smoother – I can always play around with Java on other sites. Besides, I don’t edit the code on this one much now that I use MovableType. Lots of things going on.…