Archive
Great music stored here
I’ve always wondered where electric guitarists keep their stuff…
Oh how true it is
You should subscribe to Indexed if you already haven’t. Here’s one from today.
I got your crazy right here
What do you sell?
Obviously someone needs to think about spacing in the logo…
‘Ashamed’ is a strong word
I previously wrote that I was “ashamed to be a Christian” … and I need to clarify that statement. I saw Jill this morning at church and she mentioned that she has a problem with that statement. She understands what I’m really trying to say, but the statement itself is a bit “harsh” and easily misconstrued.
So I want to clarify what I meant, for the record (and the other couple readers of my blog). 🙂
What I mean is that I’m ashamed of what the label ‘Christian’ means in our society. I’m ashamed of the friggin right-wing religious zealots who have created a stereotype of Christians as single-minded biggoted assholes (pardon my language) who hate anybody who doesn’t look AND think like they do, and do their best to make everyone else share their opinions (otherwise they’re damned, right?).
Jesus taught people to love each other and lend a hand to those less fortunate … he’d do the rest through their hearts and minds. That’s it. It’s not our job to convert the world – it’s His. Our job is to be nice to everyone.
It’s He didn’t teach that we should hate gays. He didn’t say we should never have a drop of alcohol touch our lips. He didn’t tell us that it’s okay to bomb clinics because we disagree with their policies. He didn’t join the Republican Party … or the Dems either.
Jesus said we should all get along (love thy enemies even) and his first miracle was effectively a beer run for a week-long kegger.
Can’t we all just get along?
Happy Fathers Day!
Kaitlyn and I had matching outfits for the day from Maui. 🙂
Great view!
When I was still at TechEd in Orlando last Friday I had the opportunity to see the Space Shuttle lift off. Some of the guys from my office skipped a few sessions on the last day of the conference to head out to the cost for a good view. I didn’t, but I still got to see the show from about 45 miles away.
IT WAS AMAZING. Definitely something burned into my memory for the ages. We saw the craft from shortly after liftoff, through booster separation, and until the then-tiny spec of light disappeared. It was so awesome to actually see the rope of fire coming from the engines.
Here are a couple of pictures courtesy of folks who posted pictures to Flickr that are pretty close to what we saw. Click on each picture to link to the original up at Flickr.
I was probably standing about 50 feet from where this photo was taken, so this is the best example of what we saw during liftoff. This picture was taken after the solid rocket boosters burnt out as the contrail just dies out.
Later in the evening the contrail morphed into an amazing display.
Follow-up to availability
It looks like Microsoft’s main website (www.microsoft.com) has an availability YTD 2007 of 99.83%. So they’ve been offline for about 9 hours so far in this year, or about 90 minutes a month. I wonder when the outages were and what caused them?
Anyway, Anna Liu has a couple posts (here and here) with some stats what it takes to run www.microsoft.com and how much load is put on the infrastructure. Right now they’re running Windows Server 2008 Beta 3 on 80 servers in two datacenters.
I find this kind of stuff really cool. And yes, I am a geek.
Get to the point…
I tend to write long and relatively complicated sentences.
I just violated Scott Adams’ first rule – that wasn’t an interesting opening sentence.
Check out the rest of Scott’s tips, and this could be the day you became a better writer.
Learn how brains organize ideas. Readers comprehend “the boy hit the ball” quicker than “the ball was hit by the boy.” Both sentences mean the same, but it’s easier to imagine the object (the boy) before the action (the hitting). All brains work that way. (Notice I didn’t say, “That is the way all brains work”?)
It all depends…
Omar Shahine wrote a great article entitled Designing for Services Dependencies. If you’re involved in IT at all this is a must read, no matter whether you’re a developer or on the operations side.
If only more developers would understand the dependencies they add into their systems!
Here’s a quick chart that talks about “The Nines”. You’ll hear people talking about wanting to have “five nines” of availability. Good luck with that! 🙂
| Reliability | Downtime / year |
| 99.999% | 5 min |
| 99.99% | 53 min |
| 99.9% | 9 hours |
| 99.8% | 18 hours |
Nathan's Occasional Blog 