Last post of 2007... also the 4th post of 2007. That's really sad, but this post has been a long time coming.

2007 was interesting.  Scratch that... the last 2-3 years have been quite a ride.

It never ceases to amaze me no matter how much you plan for things in life, they rarely, if ever, turn out the way you expect them to.  Even when you have such astounding omnipresent powers such as myself.  Regardless, I am a firm believer in that everything happens for a reason and those successes and failures in life and how you react to them are what makes you who you are today.

If you would have asked me 3 years ago where I saw myself in 5 years, my first choice would have been on a tropical beach with my wife and a never-ending supply of Ketel One vodka to wash down my morphine / dilaudid cocktails.  Barring that, I would have told you working as a firefighter / paramedic in a metropolitan area.  For reasons that are much too long to go into this post, the latter is not going to happen and I'm O.K. with that.  The former I'm still holding onto though.  I've still got my CA medic license and I will for at least another 2 years and I plan to keep it up after that because it's an area I find fascinating even though I may never work in the EMS field again.

These last years have had some particularly rough low spots and particularly euphoric high spots.  But I'm not one to dwell on the lows of life, but suffice it say that the last half of 2007 has been a sort of turning point in the direction my life.  And when I say "my", I mean my families.  For the first time in a good 5 years, I can see a light at the end of the tunnel we've been traveling down and patterns are starting to form in the chaos of our lives.

It has been amazing watching Sydney grow up in 2007.   I'm almost positive that she is teaching me more things than I will ever be able to teach her.  I'm also keeping a tab of everything I spend on her and when she's old enough, I'm going to invoice her.  I know I'm breaking with thousands of years of parenting traditions, but it's time someone took a stand.  Kids are expensive.

Work has changed.  I got a different job doing .NET development and my skills have grown considerably in the short time at this new position.  Even though I will be the first person to admit, that there is a lot left to learn.  The one thing that is has taken me a bit to realize is that it's not about programming in a language to solve a problem.  It's about communication, good software design, choosing the right tools for the job and knowing how to use those tools.  If you want to be on the top of your game, I don't think there is any room for being a simple programmer anymore.  It's about unit testing, mocking, powershell scripting, continuous integration, agile development, DRY principles, database architecture, T-SQL programming, HTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX and about 40 other acronyms.

I've got a great feeling about 2008 and I'm really looking forward to it.  I've got some big goals that I've set for myself and my family for this coming year and I intend to hit them.  I've also got 116 bookmarks in my del.icio.us account tagged as "blog-topic" so hopefully 2008 will bring a marked decrease in that number, too.

Cheers everyone.

Windows Home Server, I'm calling it off.  It's not you, it's me.   Well... some of it is you.

I tried so hard to love you.  I really wanted it to work out between us, but I can take a hint.  I know when I'm not wanted.  At first, I didn't notice the not-so-subtle blue screens.  I looked the other way at the lost data and the missing devices.  I turned a blind eye to the slow performance and random error messages.  But I started to wonder when you wouldn't let me install my RAID cards so I could use all of my hard drives.  And don't think I didn't notice the subtle crippling of IIS so I can't run websites on multiple domains.  Oh sure... you warned me up front you weren't that type of OS and you didn't like all of that extra hardware.  But all of the OSs say that at first and after a few drinks, I thought I could change your mind.

I guess I need stability in a relationship.  Yes you're very flashy and you made me a lot of promises.  "Hassle free file and folder level mirrored RAID!", you said.  "Automated image backups of all networked computers!", you exclaimed.  "Add and remove drives to your storage pool on a whim!", you seductively proclaimed.  But like a bunch of other 'firsts', performance was lacking and ended prematurely.

Maybe I'm asking too much from you.  The thing is, I was with your older, more mature sister Windows Server 2003 for many years.  No sass from her.  She knows how to keep quiet and not complain.  She served my many files and needs without hesitation all over the house without so much as a peep.  And she can be configured for multiple web sites, FTP, file serving, distributed file systems, SQL server and network based drive imaging.

That's why I'm breaking it off and I'm going back to the sweet loving embrace of Windows Server that I should have never left.  I know over time you'll mature into a productive member of the household, but for now...

I finally got around to updating my Home Theater PC this weekend with a minor hardware upgrade and a switch from Media Center 2005 to Vista Home Premium.

Hardware-wise I went from a Pentium D915 to a Pentium E2160 (newer CPU based on the Core Microarchitecture but marketed under the Pentium name).  Runs way cooler and performs much better, which is what I'm going for.  While I did this I also switched from the (loud) retail CPU cooler to the dead silent Zalman CNPS 8000 cooler which makes about a 1000% difference in noise when the system is running hot.

Here are some notes on the whole process:

1) I've got a Mitsubishi 55" rear projector TV that is somewhere around 5-7 years old.  Right around the time where HDTV ready TV's were still a bit of a novelty, but mine does say 1080i support.  I say that because 1080i or 720p or 720i or 576p or 576i would be a nice resolution to display.  So either Vista, or the immature nVidia Vista drivers for the 7600GS or my aging RPTV only seems to want to display 480i and 480p widescreen (which is 720 x 480 resolution in computer land) when connected via the S-Video/Component/HDTV connector of the 7600GS card.  And even convincing the WHQL certified nVidia drivers to get into that mode is a series of arbitrary and not all together logical steps.

2)   While I applaud the new audio stack in Vista and its far superiority over XP's implementation, getting S/PDIF passthrough to work to an external receiver is not as simple as it should be.  Eventually, I had to download the latest drivers directly from Realtek (the latest ones for the motherboard didn't work) and it appears the key to getting this to work is you have to manually disable your speakers from inside the Vista sound control panel to get S/PDIF passthrough working.  I don't know what I didn't see this earlier... I'm mean, its so obviou... oh wait... IT'S NOT.

3) My wife complained about the noise of the DVD drive when a disc was inserted and about 10 seconds after Googling the problem, I realized I should be running Nero DriveSpeed, since you can manually turn the speed of the drive down to 2X, which is enough for DVD movies.

4) There is an excellent post here, which has some great tips for setting up Vista Media Center.

I've been running Windows Vista for awhile now on my main box... maybe 2 months.  So I still consider myself a "Vista Virgin", but I guess that's all relative.  Technically, I'm probably still in the "I've made it to second base with Vista" stage and just like making it to second base for the first time, I'm still learning new and exciting things the more I practice at it.

I'm also a late-comer to Flickr.  I know it's all hip and very Web 2.0, but I resisted for so long, but I finally relented and she was gentle with me.

So how does this all form into a coherent blog post?  I'm not sure, but if there is one thing that people should know about me, it's my loathing of duplicate metadata entry.

The photo management is Vista is far and away above anything in Windows XP allowing full metadata support for photos (tags, comments, camera, etc.).  After some digging, I found that Vista uses the XMP format to edit metadata (developed by Adobe), which provides a great way to search through tags and photos on my Vista media center box hooked to my television.

Alas, I grew tired of duplicating the tags and information to my Flickr account which uses the more popular EXIF format for adding metadata.

So, assuming I wasn't the only person on the great web of world wide information that this was an annoyance for, I loaded up the trusty indexer of the web and found someone else who shared my grief.

This brilliant piece of software is 1) free and 2) does what I want in an intuitive way.

Really... what more could you ask for?  Aside from chisled abs and an uncanny ability to impress women?  And by "you", I mean "you not me", because I obiously need no help in either of these.

Anyone who reads this little electronic corner of the Internet should know my feelings about the French quite clearly.

In case you don't here are 14 quotes that sum them up so they are forever immortalized and clear up any doubt.

1. France is the most civilized country in the world and doesn’t care who knows it.  --John Gunther

2. France is a nation devoted to the false hypothesis on which it then builds marvelously logical structures. --Gore Vidal

3. France has neither winter nor summer nor morals—apart from these drawbacks it is a fine country. --Mark Twain

4. How can anyone govern a nation that has 240 different kinds of cheese? --Charles de Gaulle

5. Dogs smoke in france. --Ozzy Osbourne

6. We always have been, we are, and I hope that we always shall be, detested in France. --Duke of Wellington

7. What I gained by being in France was learning to be better satisfied with my own country. --Samuel Johnson

8. Everything is on such a clear financial basis in France. It is the simplest country to live in. No one makes things complicated by becoming your friend for any obscure reason. If you want people to like you, you have only to spend a little money. --Ernest Hemingway

9. France is the only country where the money falls apart, and you can’t tear the toilet paper. --Billy Wilder

10. They aren’t much at fighting wars anymore. Despite their reputation for fashion, their women have spindly legs. Their music is sappy. But they do know how to whip up a plate of grub. --Mike Royko

11. The French probably invented the very notion of discretion. It’s not that they feel that what you don’t know won’t hurt you; they feel that what you don’t know won’t hurt them. To the French lying is simply talking. --Fran Lebowitz

12. Every Frenchman wants to enjoy one or more privileges; that’s the way he shows his passion for equality. --Charles de Gaulle

13. If the French were really intelligent, they’d speak English. --Wilfrid Sheed

14. Germans with good food. --Fran Lebowitz

Everyone else is making wishlists for the holidays and I know how much people love to buy me things so I am going to facilitate as best as I can.

Granted I'll be adding to these as I find more things that I absolutely cannot live without, but this is a start.

ThinkGeek

Amazon

Again... do not think of yourselves this holiday season.  Be generous.  Open your wallets.  Buy me many things.

It was supposed to be a nice 4 day relaxing Thanksgiving break.  But what started as a simple, "let's clean the house a little" job turned into a "let's rearrange the rooms including moving the 55" TV and surround sound system into another room but the cable runners for the speaker wire in the old room use an industial strength adhesive that rips off paint and plaster from the wall so I have to mud, sand and paint the old room while moving the home theater stuff into the new room which doesn't have an ethernet connection so I have to crawl under the house with the 8" crawl space and the dust and spiders carrying a network cable so media center can access my media server and my wife and baby can be happy because we don't have cable access because cable slowly steals your soul" type job.

On the plus side, I did get to knock several items off of my list of things to do.  I actually feel like I've made a small-yet-significant dent in the grand project of getting our lives back in order.

It's kind of funny how basically for the last 3 years I have put most all of my time and effort into school / ems / paramedicine and now that I have an opportunity to focus my time elsewhere, I realize how neglected my gadget / geek / tech life has become.  Especially a lot of the basics of media organization for the household.

It was fun spending so much time with Sydney despite how sick and pathetic she was.  We'll see how she adjusts going back to daycare tomorrow.  I've got $10 that says she'll be glad to be there.

Also, apparently now my wife is a published photographer.  And there are tons of new pics on Flickr. 

This JEMS article perfectly summaries many of my thoughts on EMS.

Unfortunately it also describes so much of what is wrong with AMR.

Here is what you won't hear in this blog post...

1) I'm sorry I haven't updated
2) I'll update more often
3) Things are busy

You can just assume all of these whenever I post.

Here's a quick recap. 

Sydney is 9 months and 5 days old.

Parenting is... hard, educational, fun, humbling, exhilarating, painful, time-consuming.

We're semi-settled in CA again.

Life is never what you plan... and that's probably a good thing.

The website is "new" ^tm.  I moved from a custom blog engine to DasBlog.  The benefits are ABC-fold.  A) It's .NET compatible B) I can host it on my own server C) I don't have to spend time administering the code / features (see #3 above).

Photos are now on my Flickr stream.

Gwyn's website is done, but it's mainly for her work.  Also running on DasBlog.

Sydney's website is NOT done... so don't visit it yet and see #2.

I've got a looooong list of topics to write about that will Rock Your World ^tm... but again let me refer you to the aforementioned #2.