Every once in a while I hop on that rabbit trail known as “the net”. Today’s trail started on twitter. Seeing that I’m a fan of Cali Lewis on GeekBrief.tv, I wondered who she follows. Nosing around, I decided that maybe I should add some more people to follow.
On a whim I put “trader” in the search box, a couple of squirrel revolutions later, and out pops a list with a name I couldn’t pass up — TradingGoddess. Jump to her blog, spin the mouse wheel and out pops the gem below.
Ages and ages ago some friends and I were able to get the lol.com domain and have kept it all these years. A couple of years ago, when advertising started coming back, my business partner John Munsch and I started talking about how we could make it more than just a dead site and an email trap.
A little over a year ago, we brought up a very simple site with a very limited set of jokes. We opened up a gmail account to accept jokes to place on the site, but it was too hard to keep up with the submissions, format them all, and get them live on the site. After the site had been up for a while, it became apparent that there was growth potential and it was worth getting an interactive site up and running.
So for the last year or so John and I have been working to bring our initial vision to life. John has done most of the development for this site, I’ve done most of the IT. We have released version 2.0 of LOL.
We’re proud of our baby. If you have some time stop by and give it a look.
A co-worker dropped in and picked up one of my O’Reilly books and mused outloud about a cover with an alligator on it. It took a little bit of digging, but I finally found The Animal Menagerie, a listing of all the books and their animals.
In case you’re wondering, the book with an alligator is Java Examples in a Nutshell. It’s not one that I have in my personal library. I’m at the point where adding many more books would require an addition on the house.
Well, today I left ChipData. I’m taking a couple of days off, but I’ll start my next
venture Monday. After I’ve been gone a while, I post more information, but I just
wanted people to know I’ll be at a new address starting Monday.
I was searching around on Microsoft’s website looking for security patches
when I happened across this handy article "
Where to Find Microsoft Security Patches". The most interesting part
was learning about the existence of the
Windows Update Corporate Site. It allows you to download the patches for
installation on multiple machines. This could be a huge
time saver.
Well I was surprised on Father’s day on a couple of fronts. The USB Radio
that I mentioned earlier was wrapped and presented as one of my gifts. I
brought it to the office on Monday to give it a whirl. Believe it or not,
it actually works well. The building I’m in is not really conducive to
good radio reception, but I do get several stations. There is a little bit
of background hiss, but I’m hoping to get better reception when we move to a
new location. I may take it home over the weekend and try it there.
The only real gripe I have is with the software. It is your typical GUI
utility from a hardware company. Some cool features are there, it has
terrible art, but the really useful stuff is several revisions away.
I did notice in their README, that they do have an SDK. I’m going to try and
find it and see if I can generate those additional features I want.
It started innocently enough — I wanted a fun book to read during a
soccer tournament in Austin. Not wanting to purchase a new book, I thought
I’d just dip into my son’s Harry Potter collection and see what it was all
about. Not expecting much from the book or that I would have much reading
time, I only took book one.
Book one lasted less than a day. Desperate for more, I took a late night
trip to Target and found the one remaining paperback copy of book two. It was
finished before we got home.
For those of you who don’t know, I get up early,
5:30 am, to get to work. I have about a 30 mile commute each way and the only
way to not spend my entire life on the road is to leave the house by 6:00 am
and leave the office between 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm.
If you haven’t guessed already, following Mr. Potter on his adventures and
going to work early, really don’t mix very well. I didn’t sleep much the
next week having been compelled to finish books three and four. It really
was much more important than sleep.
This long winded explanation, brings me to the gifts. My son presented me
with several of the collectible trinkets (they look like hard gummies) and
a wand that he carved himself. I think he really enjoyed making it and I
know I enjoyed receiving it.
I visited a new Qwest data center near my home with Jim Milo from wirecrossing.com.
This center opened 14 Feb 2001 and is only 10 minutes from my house. I can’t
consider moving servers into it yet, but it would be much closer to my house
than driving 20+ miles to downtown Dallas. Everything is in a n+1 configuration
making it pretty reliable.
