Gamasutra did a nice write-up of my work in San Diego. They barely mentioned IT, but my involvement with the groups hi-lighted is frequent. My group’s responsibility is to support the studios in San Diego and, specifically, I support Alienbrain, Perforce, and other “inward facing” services that the groups need to get their work done as well as the OS X infrastructure throughout the studios.
As anyone who knows me (or has read this blog) knows, I am a Mac user and pretty serious fan. Some would go so far as say “fanboy” but I like to think that I am honest enough to see the warts, too.
Having said that, one thing that has been quite interesting to me is the adoption (conversion?) rate of OS X and Macintosh hardware in my department at work recently. I work in IT and in my “section” there are sixteen of us. When I first transferred in about two years ago I was one of only two Mac users (the department was only 11 then). As our department grew, OS X improved, and products like Parallels came about, Apple hardware started showing up. At this point, nine of thirteen laptops are MacBooks and as I write this, my manager is anxiously awaiting his MacBook (updating to ten of thirteen).
I work with a lot of smart people.
This week, Apple released an updated iLife ’08 which is their creativity suite (iMovie, iTunes, iPhoto, GarageBand, iDVD, and iWeb). One of the new features of iPhoto is a Web Gallery that allows you to quickly upload pictures to your .Mac account for easy sharing with friends and family. The presentation on the web is quite impressive with a very dynamic display not normally found in a web site. A related feature is the iPhone is able to directly upload to that Web Gallery which will in-turn download it to your home library.
Becky and I are going to the DCI semi-finals tonight at the Rose Bowl. I’m going to try to “photo-blog” the whole experience so feel free to follow along or see the results.
Late June, we had a wonderful vacation with a 7-day cruise to Alaska out of Seattle, Washington. Since I wanted to be able to download pictures from the camera, we brought our laptop along. Partly wanting to copy pictures back home (in case the laptop got stolen/damaged) and partly wanting to have Internet access in general, I decided to borrow one of the Verizon EVDO cards from work. It worked out quite well even though signal was quite variable even when in port.
Unfortunately, the last night of the cruise was in Victoria, B.C. Signal was strong so I was able to sync up our photo album and do a little surfing. Yesterday, I was asked by our admin if I used the card in Canada. Having just recently paid our AT&T cell bill, I had learned that data also has roaming charges just like voice so I asked “how bad is it?” Try $736.38. At $.02/k it adds up quick, don’t it?
She’s going to talk to our account rep and see if they would be willing to reduce the charge any. We’ll see. Worst case, it’s another glorious “live & learn” moment.
I ran to the store this past weekend with the kids for a few items and saw this sitting on a light post in the parking lot. It just truly seems like a joke product. Bud Light & Clamato?!
There’s spanish below the title that says “With salt-and-lemon the perfect combination”. Perhaps, but I don’t think so.
I don’t write about work too often and that’s usually because I’m not sure what crosses the line of sharing too much. Fortunately, I don’t have to worry about it if someone else makes things public first.
SCEA (my employer), started a public blog a little bit ago and a recent article talked about the upcoming title, Warhawk, and how many of their game servers are running on off-the-shelf PS3’s. While not directly by my effort (I don’t support online games) it has been really cool seeing the setup get installed in the data center that is all of 100 feet from where I sit.
Please read the article as it give some additional details and links to some more pictures. The ones they used are o.k. but I think they could have done better.
But wait. It’s not my fault. Really! I noticed this past Thursday that our Internet connection at home was a bit spotty. I looked at our provider‘s status page but didn’t see anything applicable. I figured that our router had gotten a little wonky which happens on occasion and resetting it did improve things. I also got quite a few bounced messages of spam. That, too, isn’t too uncommon as the sending address for spam messages are often forged so I do occasionally get bounces to spam message that I didn’t send.
Friday morning, I found that I had received thousands of bounces and that our connection was almost unusable again. I logged in from work and stopped the mail server to investigate further. It turns out, that not only was the sending address forged, someone was using my mail server to originate spam. Ugh!
I pulled out my Postfix book and was able to tighten up the sending restrictions to only allow valid sending addresses (it was previously allowing anything@peay.us). I then had to clean up the thousands of queued up messages before I could start up the mail server again.
It took the better part of the morning which I feel bad since I was at work. I suppose it counts as professional development, but I can’t help but feel a bit embarrassed that the personal mail server of a Systems Administrator was originating spam. At least it wasn’t an open relay. I do know better than that!
A good friend at work shared a very funny joke with me this morning:
It was autumn, and the Indians on the reservation asked their new chief if it was going to be a cold winter. Raised in the ways of the modern world, the chief had never been taught the old secrets and had no way of knowing whether the winter would be cold or mild. To be on the safe side, he advised the tribe to collect wood and be prepared for a cold winter. A few days later, as a practical afterthought, he called the National Weather Service and asked whether they were forecasting a cold winter. The meteorologist replied that, indeed, he thought the winter would be quite cold. The chief advised the tribe to stock even more wood.
A coupe of weeks later, the chief checked in again with the Weather Service. “Does it still look like a cold winter? asked the chief.
“It sure does,” replied the meteorologist. “It looks like a very cold winter.” The chief advised the tribe to gather up every scrap of wood they could find.
A couple of weeks later, the chief called the Weather Service again and asked how the winter was looking at that point. The meteorologist said, “We’re now forecasting that it will be the one of the coldest winters on record!”
“Really?” said the chief. “How can you be so sure?”
The meteorologist replied, “The Indians are collecting wood like crazy!”
Of course everyone has seen Bluetooth headsets that you can get for most cell phones these days. 
I have even been using mine shown t the right for years. One of my favorite books is Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card and in the second book of the series, Speaker for the Dead the main character, Ender Wiggin, speaks to a computer (Jane) through a gem he keeps in his ear. Every time I see someone walking around with a headset, I can’t help but think of that.
While at CostCo returning a broken fan set, I saw a woman in the checkout lane who had two different headsets, one in each ear. I can only presume she is some über type-A person like a realtor, but when you’re not in your car, those headsets just look funny and that looked worse than usual.
Since my current headset is getting a little weak due to a severly aging battery, I’ll probably have to pick up a new one sometime soon. The one Apple made to compliment the new iPhone is quite nice and really small. I’ve also heard really good things about the Jawbone (the demo on the site is very impressive), and the noise cancellation would be useful in the car, but I’m inclined to go for something more compact (and presumably lighter).
Over the last few weeks, the MacBook Pro at home had been having some issues where it would go off to la la land for a bit before resuming whatever you were trying to do at the time. After some evaluation, I decided to reinstall the OS (which isn’t very troublesome as it leaves existing apps and copies over your user directories) which didn’t improve things.
Thinking it was the hard drive which was failing, I decided to purchase a new one but wanted to get a good backup of the original drive before replacing it. Of course, I already had numerous current copies of the user directories but the “up-to-the-moment” copies were on the drive itself. I spent the better part of the weekend trying to get a complete copy of the data off the drive which became quite tedious as the drive would pause and/or hang as it warmed up. My geek side just wasn’t satisfied with a day old backup.
In the end it all worked out. I got a refurb Seagate 120G (from the original 80G), have a clean OS install and restored the user directories just fine. Now I just can’t bring myself to throw the old (largely useless) drive away. I think there’s a drawer in the den I can put it…