JohnA lifeBlog

Design Your Morning with Pantone Coffee Cups

This is the kind of thing that just tickles my inner Illustrator n00b. I love design, but suck at it, so hey, I can at least be a poseur, right?

Wait a second… strike that, reverse it… thank you.

I have a number of things I need to write about, so I’m going to pop in a movie and get to it. I’ll be posting an update about my Costco situation, commenting on the Government “Free Block of Cheese” DTV Converter Program, how cool DropBox is, and finally mention that it’s my fifth anniversary of the great move west, so start shopping for some wooden gifts.

So, I’m beta testing the 2-dot-oh release of the coolest Mac app ever, and as a fellow software developer, I was saddened to receive this message after I sent my latest comments:

—– Transcript of session follows —–
procmail: Quota exceeded while writing “/var/mail/bugs”
550 5.0.0 bugs… Can’t create output

Reporting-MTA: dns; delicious-monster.com
Arrival-Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:58:05 -0600

Final-Recipient: RFC822; librarybugs@delicious-monster.com
X-Actual-Recipient: RFC822; bugs@delicious-monster.com
Action: failed
Status: 5.3.0
Diagnostic-Code: X-Unix; 73
Last-Attempt-Date: Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:58:05 -0600
—

I know that the last thing I would ever want my fellow developers to receive was a “YOU FAIL, PLEASE TRY AGAIN” message. Thankfully I have the preferred e-mail address for their lead developer, and I forwarded my comments to him directly.

Again, this is a testimony to the fact that writing AWESOME software really is hard. Beta tests and all… I mean, if it were easy, we’d just all buy it off the shelf at Best Buy using some kind of coupon…

Update!: And no, this isn’t a gratuitous name drop. I already run a top internet site, kthxbai, so I don’t need anymore recognition. I just wanted to share my understanding with another awesome development shop.

According to the definitive compete.com analytics service, I am in charge of the 8,342nd most popular web site in the entire US, among the top 1 million sites they track on a daily basis. Oh, and this stat doesn’t reflect the hundreds of merchants who map to our server cluster using their own domain names.

And yes, I do it all from my Macbook… although there are much smarter developers responsible for some of the core pieces of our über-awesome architecture.

Google acts all noble, but when you apply, no PhD, no entry.

Given my experience and resume, I have to wonder how much talent they are excluding.

Lonliness and boredom suck.

I went and saw Juno and Charlie Wilson’s War today, great movies. Juno is the most heartwarming and honest movie I have seen in years.  Take your current “dating prospect”, and you’ll totally score afterwards.  I then went next door and played Star Trek: TNG pinball for (literally) 2 hours on $0.50.  Aside from the 12 or so free games I landed, my high score came in 3rd place at 1,418,887,500 points. I was going to take a phone cam pic, but then I realized that there are like 2 people who would appreciate my nerdiness.  Anyhoo, go me.  I am in love with this new strip mall.  It’s like my perfect Saturday full-day excursion spot.  It is perfect for theater hopping (3 movies in one day FTW!), they have Coke Zero on tap, and there is an old school arcade next door… Hell, I even earned 44 tickets playing classic skee ball with all my leftover tokens.  I decided to celebrate by purchasing a “Pirate’s Eye” eyepatch, and a single-serving “Hot Dog Gummy” with my tickets.  Jealous much?

At the direction of my older bro, I have been trying to hook into the GTD lifestyle.  Given the 30 minute drive each way, I listened to David’s book both ways.  I’m actually having a really hard time getting into the GTD groove, as my life doesn’t seem to fit the model that well.  I mean, I don’t really worry about stuff, and my days are pretty much decided for me.  I am not really more than a make & move widgets guy it would seem.   And even though I have a clean desk and a brand new matching filing cabinet, nobody has commented on my “transformation.”

Part of my “clean up the stuff in my life” tour has been to sell my old DVD collection.  I have (had?) around 600 DVDs, around 100 of them I had never even opened.  In that spirit I have sold around $1,200 worth of them so far, and at the same time, have been treating myself to an abundance of Hi-Def movies… according to Delicious Library, I now own 54 movies in either Blu-Ray or HD-DVD formats.  Go me.

I am more lonely than ever, and this holiday season has done nothing but make things worse.  I COMPLETELY lost it on Christmas Eve, and tried calling everyone, but nobody answered.  Sadly, the only person I was able to connect with was my therapist, and although I don’t fully recall the conversation, I’m fairly confident that I told her to go fuck herself, or some variation thereof.

Assuming we get our new datacenter shit in place in the next week or two, I am planning to go to Houston / NOLA for 2 weeks or so.  At this point, it’s looking more like end of Jan / beginning of Feb, which works out nicely, since that is peak “show me your tits” season.  For some reason, my family still has this romanticized idea of Mardi Gras.  Might as well indulge them.

I really don’t want to go back to work on a normal schedule tomorrow.  But alas, the someday / maybe folder is still just that… someday / maybe.

I miss all of you.  And I hope that we all have a 2008 that reminds us that 2007 is so far in the past.

All my hope is with you, friends,

J

Ok, Apple, I am officially tired of your latest rip-off from Vista… a kernel panic every fscking day in my video driver.

Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0×14e03ac8
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.driver.AppleIntelGMAX3100(5.1.8)@0×7af000->0×867fff
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport(1.5)@0×7a1000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.4)@0×60d000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(1.5)@0×621000

I simply cannot count how many times this “advanced OS” has crashed on a friggin’ video driver.

It’s not like you have to support hundreds of drivers… just fix the ones on your OWN SHIPPING HARDWARE.

Writing an enterprise e-commerce platform is seriously difficult work.

Just ask Yahoo! Stores, Costco, or Toys R Us…

Thankfully, our stats show that we had around 3 specific incidents yesterday, lasting a total of around 8 minutes, where load times were unacceptable. At no time were merchants unable to take orders, though.

Not bragging, but just reminding people that there is more to e-commerce than just a couple of PHP pages.

I am SOOO tired of woot.com crashing.  I mean, who do they hire for their sysadmins?  They have no clue how to hyper-scale, and whenever a media event hits their servers, they crash.  I mean, not gracefully… they crash to the point where they almost brag on their static content… “If you can see this image, our servers haven’t crashed yet.”

I am curious… how on EARTH could any serious e-commerce operation be “happy” with that kind of performance.  But what do I know?  I just work for a company who processes over $500 million per year in e-commerce revenue…