My beloved server that is hosted in up in Dallas, TX, suffered a nearly fatal injury today.

From looking into the logs at about 4am this morning (central time), Jules went offline.

Jeremy informed me that Hashserver was offline around 1pm or so and I went to log into Jules, he was not reachable. Not SSH nor Ping could find this wayward web serving warrior, he was gone.

I feared the worst, that his motherboard had fried or that he had finally blown-out his one and only hard disk drive or HDD as someone extra nerdy might say.

I called into support, hoping that by some off-chance the hosting company (Sprocket Networks) was having some unscheduled maintenance that had taken this blog and my server Jules offline.

I was greeted by a very friendly voice, who stated his name was Josh. He said he would go and take a look at my server and see what was had occurred.

He called me back relatively quickly and informed me that Jules’ power supply was gone, it had given up the 300W ghost, yes apparently the power supply was only 300W, craziness right?

I inquired about having Jules shipped back to me so that I could get some data off him and put him to rest like the good little server he has been, by which I mean take him down to Goodwill Computers for recycling.

He advised me to open a ticket with billing and let them quote me on replacing the power supply and that he thinks it would only cost me about $30 to get Jules all patched up.

I opened the ticket with Billing and was informed that all I needed to do was supply them with a replacement 250W power supply and that was that, no additional fees. ($27.99 on Amazon, with free 2-day shipping and Sprocket will soon have their new shiny 250W power supply.)

However, as it would happen, I for the life of me could not remember my password. Now, I can just see my wife laughing herself to death, as this isn’t entirely uncommon for me to forget a password. However, I have like 6 or 7 regular password that I rotate through.

I tried those and various potential variations that I could think of, but no luck. I called Josh back and asked him if he could please reset my root password.

He helped me out and got me a new root password, and I was able to restart the Apache engine and start writing this blog post.

And with that, I must now get back to the grind. But I want everyone to know that Sprocket Networks in Dallas, remains to be one of the best Colo/Hosting companies I have ever known.

Laterz

bdbenner Uncategorized hosting, jules, Power Supply, problems, Sprocket

It seemed like only yesterday, that I was roused out of bed with shouts about how I needed to grab a camera and run down to the dock, that was two years ago (almost to the day). My Father-in-Law had caught himself a 40-inch Muskie, with the record on the lake being 42-inches.

Well, unless someone managed to catch something bigger than a 44-inch Muskie in the last two years, my Father-in-Law, Tom Coscarelli has broken the record with his 44-inch Muskie catch that happened this morning. I was already awake and was making myself some toast.

And with almost the same level of excitement it was proclaimed that my wife, Gina needed to bring her camera down to the beach immediately as her father was coming back with the fish that had his lure. A few days back, Tom lost a lure (antique I was told) and he had been searching the lake everyday since.

I was really, really impressed that he managed to hook the same fish that had stolen his lure a few days before.

However, it turns out that the fish in question, did not have the lost lure. Tom explained that the fish in question was hooked really well and that he had called asking for Charles (Gina’s brother) to come on the wave-runner to come help with the removal of the lure (which apparently is a smaller version of the lost lure).

Tom is pretty certain that he did not lose the antique lure to a fish, as the smaller version of the lure had prevented the 44-inch Muskie from diving.

Regardless, it is an impressive catch. The previous Muskie was too small to keep, but this was is above the 42-inch required size. Tom was planning to release this monster of a fish back into the water, but upon first release into the open water, the beast went belly up.

Not a good sign for the fish, so Tom began to use all the tricks he knows to try and revive a stunned/shocked fish. Moving it back in forth in the water as to move the water through it’s gills to allow it to breathe. However, after about an hour and a half, and Charles’ (soon-to-be) Father-in-Law attempting to aid Tom in reviving the fish, they called it quits and began to determine who would clean the fish, as later today we will be having fish steaks (or possibly in the morning, either way, I will let you know if Muskie is good eating).

I need to get back to coding.

bdbenner vacation fishing, lake, muskie, up north, vacation

I tried to take a pic at least once a day since I shaved it off. I originally figured it was going to take about two months for my goatee to grow back, looking like it came back to almost full in under a month.

Here are some of those pics newest to oldest. ( I didn’t both linking all the photos back to flickr, click here.)

Taken 6/22/2010

Taken 6/04/2010

Taken 5/26/2010

Taken 5/21/2010

Ok, done with my blog posting for today.

bdbenner pictures flickr, me, pics

But counting in a good way.

I thought about having the title for this post be “23 days and the grass is still greener”, but I didn’t want to start this post out on an implied negative tone. (Notably, I might have just planted that seed by referencing, what I wasn’t going to do, but let’s gloss over that for now.)

If by chance you have a keen eye, you will notice that is a Jaduka business card on my desk. I had a few in my laptop bag and needed to ’shim’ up my laptop and monitor as to level out things.

I had to count up the number of days on the job here at Unwired, as I haven’t been keeping track really. I cannot get into details about everything that I have been working on, NDAs and all, but needless to say I am enjoying myself. I have been having the opportunity to do what I love best, a little bit of everything.

I have done some coding, some writing (documentation), some product management, systems architecting, some server configuration tweaking, chair assembly (bought myself a chair from IKEA).

I have learned that every Tuesday is ‘Chicken Day’, no not a day where we all run in fear and hide, but a day that we celebrate our victory over the chickens in that great war that no one seems to recall. Chicken Day is celebrated at Pluckers, where they serve up the losers of the great war in a variety of fashions.

(Note: While the back-story on this sounds like something I might have come up with in High School, no this is not my storyline, this is the story as it has been told to me by Jim, one of my new co-workers.)

Wednesday’s is sometimes referred to as ‘Taco Day’ or just “Maudie’s Day (but not fancy Maudie’s on 360, the other one, you know on Lamar”. There is no fabled war to speak of in terms of Taco Day, just good Mexican food.

I like to think that I am fitting in well with my new co-workers, this change in jobs for me is made a little bit easier than I think most folks find a change of company, as I met most of the folks I am working with a few years back and have run into them at social gatherings since that time.

Unwired is in the Austin Tech Incubator, which is part of The University of Texas, the building we are in is technically an university building, which is one of the reasons I bought my own chair, the ones they have here are not that great and considering I have been spending 8-12 hours a day sitting in it, I wanted something that would be kind to me and not break the bank.

I sit down the hall from the rest of the crew, but I have stocked my office with snacks and sodas, so I get the occasional visitor who has come to snag a soda or talk about something related to the current project.

For the first week or so I did not have my ID, which meant that I had to sign-in with the front-desk guy, Mark. Mark was very nice during the whole ordeal, but me not having my ID for a week, definitely seemed to bug him, as he asked me about it every day.

When the day finally came for me to get my ID, I headed downtown to campus had my picture taken (I think it is fine, but I have been told I made a dumb face) and grabbed lunch with Jeremy, who works downtown. I had the chance to see his office, he works for FGSQUARED, they are located on 6th St about two blocks west of I-35. After that, I have been able to come and go from the building at will, is a nice feeling.

This past weekend Jeremy and I knocked out a quick little coding contract, the gig was to build a couple of IVR call flows using Twilio, these call flows were interactive and used the database of the rest of the project that a former co-worker is building. After I hear that the site has gone live, I will post a note about what the site is, but until then, mums the word. The first call flow was pretty easy and we got that finished up pretty quick, the 2nd one took a bit longer to do (which is understandable as it had more functionality/logic to it).

We got stuck on the way in which Kohana 3 handles ‘routing’ vs the way Kohana 2 handles it. (Jeremy is the Kohana expert between the two of us, so I helped as much as I could, but it was him that got it working in the end.) But that isn’t to say we missed any deadlines, having lots of experience doing estimates for call flows, I made sure to estimate time in there for integration testing and tweaking. I had spent some time Friday night getting familiar with the site’s database and some of the code structure, practiced setting it up on my local dev box and then on our Server Beach server. The coding was pretty much all knocked out on Saturday. I made a few edits on Sunday, as I tweaked verbiage here and there, while writing up some documentation for the project manager on the gig.

It was fun, I definitely would like to do a couple of small coding contracts per month. The extra money is nice, but nothing I will get rich from, a big part of it is the chance to practice my coding on stuff that isn’t my day job, you know the ‘ever learning’ type of approach.

I definitely would like to do some more Twilio oriented projects, I think my years of experience at Jaduka, NetworkIP and Simplified have given me a significant amount of invaluable experience in designing good user-experience for telephone based interactive applications and helps me to figure out what the test scenarios are for that type of thing easily (almost like second nature).

I do wish the Twilio Text-to-Speech was a little bit better, at Jaduka we had licensed a TTS engine that was good and not too expensive, but for an implementation like Twilio’s, the cost would likely be prohibitive to implement, but then again if one is REALLY concerned about quality, then you pay for the professionally recorded prompts, so I can appreciate Twilio offering TTS that is not the best sounding in the world, because the offer the option to use professionally recorded prompts as well (you must get them recorded yourself.)

Well I best get back to it.

bdbenner programming, work contract, Jaduka, job, programming, twilio, unwired, work

So on my last day at Jaduka, I went for a bit of a shock factor.

It only comes around maybe once a year or two, but I shaved off me facial hair, meaning that I turned back the clock about 10-15 years. Though, one person did comment that it actually makes me look older, which I disagree with, as do most of the folks that have seen me in this condition.

BEFORE

AFTER

If memory serves, then my goatee will be back in about two months.

Well, I to run and take care of some errands.

Laterz

bdbenner pictures goatee, me

As I have been going through old digital files and what not, I found an pic of myself that was taken I think in early 2004 (or late 2003 maybe).

I uploaded it to my Flickr and have put up a slightly more recent pic, if I had spiked my hair today I would have taken a very recent shot, maybe I will do that tomorrow.

Anyways….

Me Circa 2004 (or late 2003).

Me from December 2009. (Pre Gladiator)

Anyway, I need to get back to making wireframes, only 4 more days of working here at NetIP, best get them done-zo.

Laterz

bdbenner Uncategorized flickr, me, pics of me

I have gone back and forth on what to title this blog post on for a couple of days now and I think that this is the most fitting, though it is pretty much just an inside joke, some folks might recognize this type of reference from various TV shows that used it as a means to describe how a character just up and disappeared one day.

Jeremy and I used to say it to one another whenever some problem came up that just was so frustrating (particularly because the problem at hand shouldn’t be difficult or flat out just shouldn’t exist), one of us would look over and say “I’m going for cigarettes.” and the other might reply with “Bring me back some gum.” or maybe “Your coming back right?”

Well, on Monday (5/10/2010) I gave my two weeks notice. Throughout the following days I spoke with various coworkers, some of them are surprised, some of them saw it coming, all of them have congratulated me.

I have to say that I am looking forward to working at Unwired Nation, I have known the founders there for quite a while. I believe we were first introduced back in 2005. I ran into them on a couple of occasions at developer conferences and from time-to-time down at the Austin Tech Happy Hour.

The details of my tenure and subsequent departure require many beers to try and follow the overall time-line, but I have been near NetworkIP (my now former employer) for almost 12 years, yes TWELVE years, working directly for 7 years).

I originally set out from Michigan to work for a company known as Simplified Telesys, a software vendor to NetworkIP. I spent the first two weeks of working for Simplified at NetworkIP’s offices in Longview, TX.

I believe that I only missed one NetworkIP x-mas party since 1998 (Simplified was a very close vendor, so NetIP was kind enough to allows us attend their parties).

I joined NetworkIP as an employee in November of 2003 and have worked on various projects and for the PrivateTel and Jaduka subsidiaries. There is a part of me that will miss this place, but I am definitely looking forward to new challenges.

With that abridged version of history, leaving NetworkIP is sort of like leaving my first career job, as many of the folks that I met and worked with 12 years ago are the same folks that I have been working with the last few months, the titles and responsibilities have changed, but the same folks nevertheless.

My last day at NetworkIP will be Friday, May 21st. I have been trying to figure out where my going away lunch should be, I am leaning towards burgers and bowling at Highland lanes.

I start with Unwired Nation on Monday, May 24th.

In the meantime, I have to get back to the grind.

Laterz

bdbenner Uncategorized i quit, Jaduka, job, moving on, networkip, unwired nation

I have setup a couple of blogs on WordPress.com and have found that the custom domain blogs are very reasonably priced and I don’t have to worry about my beloved server Jules dying (a computer that I built in 2003 for $400 and have been hosting in a Dallas based Colo for about 3 years now), Wordpress.com will have all my blog data backed up. (In terms of Pics, since moving to WordPress, I have tried to keep all my photos on flickr.com, as I knew the day would come where I would need to move my blog off Jules and I just didn’t want to deal with transferring photos, not to mention that should I have a really, really popular photo or blog post, the potential issues on bandwidth are mitigated by hosting those images over on flickr.com

I still need to figure out what I am going to do with my Technosnobs.com blog, as it is in serendipity, need to see about importing it into Wordpress. I will likely move Hashserver.com over to Vincent, but I am giving serious notion to spinning up an Amazon EC2 instance, need to give Cloud Computing a try.

I am in the process right now of registering my Ben.Dominguez-Benner.com domain on WordPress.com.

So the next blog post that I make should be on WordPress.com, of course I don’t think anyone should really notice.

I did want to point out that one of other reasons (aside from Jules potentially dying) is that I bought an iPad, and want to use the WordPress app, which would require me to upgrade my install of WordPress, not something I really want to bother with.

Laterz

bdbenner Personal hosting, ipad, jules, vincent, wordpress

For those of you that have not yet heard, my darling wife is starting a new job, very soon, this Monday actually. She had her last day in the Austin office last Friday. This week she has been in Longview. She will be starting her new job at the Humane Society of Williamson County as their “Rescue and Animal Care Supervisor”.

As part of her adventure, I have as I usually do, pushed her to write about it, I set her up a blog and choose a theme that I thought she would like. You can read about her adventures at ShelterStartup.com, I will be pushing her to blog regularly and if she doesn’t, then I might just use my journalism talents to blog on her behalf.

Gina has already volunteered (it was only half a day, but it counts) at the Humane Society and based upon what she told me, I have not doubt she will do a fantastic job there.

There are a few other things that are changing, but that will have to wait until the official announcements are sent out, I would love to scoop the story, but I’d rather not. I’ll post a follow-up in a few days.

However, I can say that work has been going well, one of my main focuses has been to expand my team. We found a great hire, Roger Le, he started with us last Thursday and has been picking up on how we do things pretty well. He has a lot to learn, but thus far I believe he will do just fine.

I continue to enjoy my Camp Gladiator workouts, though I do need to get back to a more consistent schedule, but thus far I have managed to get in two sessions a week. In the two and a half months of doing Camp Gladiator I have lost about 10 lbs, which on it’s face value isn’t great, but I have been adding some muscle, so it is all evens out. My clothes are fitting better and I find that all of the manual labor (yard work, demolition, etc) I have been doing in the last month has been easier to do.

I can jog about a quarter mile without stopping these day, my goal is to be able to go a full mile at a decent jog pace. I bought a heart monitor watch, to help me understand what my maximum heart rate is and it has the added benefit of telling me approximately how many calories I burn during my workouts.

In between this Camp Gladiator and the previous one, we had a week off. During that week I did three sessions of jogging at a soccer field near the house. I didn’t burn nearly as many calories as I do during one session of Camp Gladiator, but I do believe that I managed to increase my jogging stamina, I really want to start getting at least a thirty minute session in after (or before) work in addition to Camp Gladiator, just need to work it into my routine.

Well, I best get back to the grind, my late lunch hour is about five minutes from being done and I need to finish putting lunch stuff away.

Laterz

bdbenner exercise, gina, work bootcamp, camp gladiator, change, gina, work

I have used this saying quite a few times over the years. But as I am often described as a ‘Jack of All Trades’ it is hard to claim, let alone practice a given craft.

I haven’t had a chance to draw anything, aside from the random doodle on a piece of scrap paper. I have been bringing my wacom tablet into the office the last week or two, in the hopes of actually using it to aid me in creating some mockups/wireframes for a work project.

I decided to use it to just do a quick digital sketch this evening after work, while I was waiting for Gina to finish up. I couldn’t think of what to sketch, so the first thing that came to mind was the the fire power flower from Mario Bros.

I then decided to try and draw a few other Mario Bros items. In doing so I was also trying to test out Pixelmator’s different features. I need to get the wacom tablet’s software installed, so that I can switch between options from the table, having to stop and use the mouse is quite annoying.

While not nearly as good as some of my friends’ or family’s work, it felt good to sketch something. I was amazed at how easily I could use the pen to sketch what I wanted to draw quickly and more accurately than what I was able to do on the tablet.

But all of it is just a matter of practice.

Laterz

bdbenner art, digital drawing, sketching, wacom