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Quite a year 2007 has proven to be. Here are a few points worth mentioning:
- Changed jobs in February to start here at MySpace
- My wife & I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary in March
- My father-in-law went into the ICU at Cedar Sinai on that same anniversary
- My father-in-law passed away on Easter Day
Well... I was going to go on past April, but it all sort of gets stuck on those four things and how it made the year what it was for me and my family.
Getting to know my family as they are in such stressful circumstances has been the most eventful of all.
The new job added a total of 12+ hours to my weekly commute time. You see, I moved our family out to the eastern outskirts of Orange County in order to be closer to my previous job and in a neighborhood safe enough to walk the streets alone at night (even for my wife). To cope under the strain of a loved one so far away in the hospital, we spent multiple weeks living at my mother-in-law's house to stay closer to everything.
At this time, my family was adjusting to my first month in a new job with the new commute, struggling with the possibility of losing such a dear loved one, and living out of suit cases in my wife's parent's house. This made even breathing difficult. Each and every breathe felt heavy.
My wife's family pulled together and the support was large in size but needed to be spread to so many. My mother-in-law, the three daughters (my wife and her sisters), and the six grandchildren that ranged in ages between 3 and 20.
On Easter day, we began with an early egg hunt in my sister-in-law's large back yard. By this time the outcome of their father was well known, not successful and at the same time completely unclear as to how much longer he would be with us. He was out of the ICU and in a place where his comfort was the top priority which was somewhat a relief for us all after all that went on in the previous month. I took the grand kids to the park while my wife, her two sisters and their mother went to be with him. I received only a single phone update to his status and it was one of the scariest calls I have ever had with my wife. I was driving around looking for another place to take the kids and just about lost my way in a city that I grew up in and have driven through for many years.
Wow... enough of that day, suffice it to say, it was the day he left us. We again spent a few weeks living with my mother-in-law and focussed on preparing the service and supporting everyone's grief.
The most positive thing of all that can be said of this process has been the emotional growth that all of us have gone through. None of us are the same. Allowing strong feelings to come out has become much more acceptable and even expected. Giving time to one another to process has also become quite the routine from day to day.
Loss creates a void that can never be filled the same way again. It does not mean that it cannot be filled at all though. It has been this sort of vacuum effect that some of us have experienced that has us reaching out at times to things we need to draw into our souls. Sometimes it fits right, and sometimes it don't.
Kind of like if you have ever fasted for any period of time, and then try to eat again. Depending on what foods are around you or how far your are willing to travel, you focus on filling up again. This can lead to you feeling sick until you get the balance right. The right ingredients and the right amounts.
Well... I can't say that we all have got the mix just right yet, but each of us in our own time and way are trying to make that happen.
I do not do much blogging anymore, but had a moment to reflect and felt this blog would be the best fit.
As for 2008...? I intend on making *** work. Things break (not just on MySpace) and I just cannot let it go without a round of serious troubleshooting and fixin'. I will also try my derndest to quickly identify when it ain't something for me to fix and move along. After all, time is too precious for me to be wasting it on fruitless ventures.
Happy New Year to you all and may 2008 fill you up without making you sick!
;-}
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WOW! This new job is amazing and it keeps getting better.
I am learning new things daily and I cannot remember being this excited about developing before. I have loved the creative and challenging aspects of software development ever since I caught the bug (hehe) like 15 years ago. I think things just started to get a bit slow on the challenging side and a bit too restrictive on the creative side.
Well... that has all changed now, and I am revvin' each day. The team I develop with is supportive and they challenge me to step up as well. I look forward to the projects we will be working on together.
I cannot mention the details of the things I am and will be working on here, but I can share the experience.
So... if you have not connected with me @MySpace yet, please hop on over and Add Me!
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I must say that the usage of Websidestory's Hitbox tracking API makes no more sense than Britney Spears' new haircut.
If it weren't for the fact that a company that I was completing a Web development project for required it, you would not be able to pay me to use this. I mean, even if you offered me all the Viagra in the world!
Even though the market value of such a large amount of popular pharmaceuticals would allow me to skip refinancing my home and let me purchase it outright, it just ain't worth the pain.
Maybe this painful interface has something to do with Anna Nicole Smith's recent death...
nahhhh...
OK, I think that is enough Google Juice for the year.
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So I decided to make a change in jobs... It was not an easy decision due to the 40+ mile (one-way) commute, but I finally decided (well Robin & I that is) to make the switch.
I have been working at www.wordandbrown.com now for almost 3 years and have really learned a lot. I will miss many folks there after I leave in 3 weeks. This was also one of the factors that made the decision difficult. It would have been easy if they were a bunch of jerks who treated me poorly, but that is definitely not the case.
The draw to the new company was all about experiences that I would never get from my current company. Things like mega-volume, data-bottlenecks, large agile teams, global presence, and on and on...
So, at the end of this month I will begin a new adventure with this company in Beverly Hills that is happens to be owned by FOX. Their website is their business, and they have been steadily growing for over 3 years now.
Well, enjoy the song. I need to go update my myspace page...
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The system is down for maintenance as of 08:30 PST.
It'll be back shortly.
I won't mention the name of the site that this came from (because they are Beta and they do ROCK), but I couldn't resist sharing the image.
The Web sure has come a long way since:
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Since my last post about myspace, I have learned a lot more about their situation. In fact, just yesterday I read an article (from Baseline) that gave me a whole new sense of deep respect for (if anything) the technical team at MySpace.
Facts like:
"the site now handles almost 40 billion page views a month."
This sort of brings the issues into perspective. If you have ever been frustrated with MySpace, or know someone that is, I recommend refering to this article.
So... in all fairness, I have changed my MySpace profile name from:
Robbie hates myspace
To:
Robbie (NOW) likes myspace
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Found a little nugget this morning on DIGG describing how you can register your own email alias for the CIA.com domain for free.
http://cia.com/indexUS.do
I am even posting this blog post from the new email address I setup there via blogmailr.
I LOVE this country!!
P.S. – Yes I am aware of the fact that the CIA is on the cia.gov domain… I just think it looks cool and throws a lot of people off at first look.
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So now that our oldest daughter is growing too tall for a toddler bed, we decide to make the jump and get bunk beds for both of them.
We put the order in at a local furniture wholesaler about two weeks ago and then waited anxiously whilst purchasing all that goes along with new beds.
However, as luck would have it, upon delivery night we were surprised to find that the bed (yes singular) that was delivered was not a bunk bed at all. The company had ordered, delivered, and assembled upstairs in their room... the WRONG BED!
Robin quickly let me know and told me to stop the delivery guys. After a little call to the store, we identified that the wrong item was ordered. The delivery guys went back upstairs, disassembled the bed, and took it back to the store. This left us with a very disappointed family and a very empty bedroom right at their bedtime.
Enter the new BED-room...
Yup, two twin mattresses side-by-side in a very small room.
At least there is enough space for a 5 year old to walk around the mattresses...
YEESH...
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Here it is...
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Testing out blogmailr.com.
Published with BlogMailr
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Well, it wasn't really the "Bring your kid(s) to work day" that companies organize...
Instead, my wife came down with some sort of stomach bug on the morning my team was to deploy a 2+ month long project to production.
I was hoping that she would be feeling better by the time my oldest got out of school, because things at work weren't really going to get interesting until after 3:00 PM anyway. But, after a phone call from the car to my wife (who did not sound too good) and a heated struggle to calm my two children in the car, I decided that they would easily overtake their mom within one hour of me dropping them off... so, I called my director to inform him that I would have a couple of tag-alongs with me for this deployment.
So here was my plan:
- Find help from all them people who made "oooohhh how sweet..." comments about my childrens' pictures all over my desk to read stories and occupy my offspring.
- Get a handle on where the project was at and free-up the developer who was covering for me all morning.
- Prepare the build solution for the scheduled 5:00 PM deployment.
- Turn on the "Site Down" page for the entire domain at 5:00 PM.
- Deploy to the staging directory and alert QA it is ready for final test run.
- Attend short Go/No Go meeting.
- All is Go, deploy to LIVE root and simultaneously turn off the "Site Down" page.
Well... at least steps 2 & 6 went as planned...
I was only able to hook up a baby sitter for short periods of time that left me balancing my build with telling the 3 year old: "please put down the push pins sweety..."
Since I was behind on the build, I did get the "Site Down" feature in place first by 5:15ish. This by the way was a little more difficult than my practice run on the DEV box. Apparently, IIS does not forget Web.config settings from the root just because it is now inside a Virtual App Directory...
OK, during the build, the kids had to pee! And, while the 5 year old was on the throne, the 3 year old could no longer wait. So, after cleaning her up and a cell phone call to my director to bring in the change of clothes, we were back to the build machine in just under 15 minutes. I quickly hand of the little tykes to my boss for story time and get back to the build. 5 minutes later my boss is back asking if I have another change of clothes... Apparently the 3 year old, whilst enjoying the stories, looked up to declare: "I peed!"
It is now 5 minutes to 6:00 and the site is still not deployed to staging. This is where VS.NET began complaining that the site I was publishing to was not ASP.NET 1.1... No, it was (yes we are not yet to 2.0, another post, another time). This is all because of my ingenious way of ensuring all web requests get the "Site Down" "htm" page. Apparently if you set the Custom Error for 404 to direct to a static HTM/HTML page, when VS.NET requests it's funky get_asp_version.aspx (or whatever it is) the response has no .NET version in the headers, so...
OK, 404 reset back to normal, staging is published, QA is happy, we get a "GO" from the meeting, all is deployed to LIVE/PRODUCTION by 7:15 PM.
Thank goodness we had a message up on the site all day stating it would be down from 5:00 PM until 9:00 PM...
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I do not remember what round we are in, only that both contenders look pretty tired and bloodied.
Why are these two applications fighting for supremecy? That I do not know either.
Today I had the basic task of getting the latest version of my team's projects inside our BUILD Solution and then publishing to our QA environment. Something that should not strike-up such a long drawn out fight, but it did.
Immeadiately after VS.NET completed getting the latest version recursively (and after I had filled up my jug o' water, checked email, started up all my robotic apps of productivity (Scott Hanselman & Lifehacker have contributed a few tools to my collection), and balanced the U.S. budget), I checked the Output window to see the list of VSS updates I had gleened. Low & behold I find new project items that were supposed to be for a branched project one of my developers has been working on. Curious...
Apparently when we setup his VS.NET Solution to link to the branched VSS location instead of the mainline one (used for release publishing), it was nice enough to offer up a cryptic dialog prompt asking wheter to use the Solution's bindings (which had none, who actually puts the VS.NET Solutions into VSS?) or the Project's bindings. My developer and I being of sound mind decided on the later of the two. This apparently was the opening bell to Round 1.
So when we thought that he was checking in and out to the newly created branch for his project, instead he was adding a week's worth of history into the mainline. Anywho, from that point he & I spent 3+ hours fixing what had transpired. He fought hard to force VS.NET into submission and to link to the correct VSS path, and I battled with VSS to roll-back the changes that I captured in Visual Notepad 
from a copy and paste of the Output (Source Control) log in VS.NET.
So who won the match you ask?
Ask me tomorrow...
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OK, for those of you not familiar with myspace.com, you need not read on (you can crawl back into your internet-less cave ).
But… if you are familiar with it, then chances are you are also familiar with the frequency that they are anything but UP 
.
So, this is my post to vent my frustrations with Tom and company!
- When I need to see something or post something, they're down
- For some f'd up reason, email notifications never happen for me (and they work fine for my wife who is on the same private email domain as me using the same email interface to maintain it).
- Just when I get my profile looking somewhat well formatted (very difficult task), they slap me in the face and strip away all my hard work.
There, I got it out.
Update: Downgraded my rant level to YELLOW (bit from Sasha)
See my new post for an explanation.
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While trying to make this thing more maintainable I finally got it ClickOnce-able.
All the install details are located Here.
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I finally had to find and enable a CAPCHA solution for CommunityServer 2.0. Enough already with all of those Online Gambling and Rx companies!
A huge thanks to Timothy Humphrey for providing the FREE control for CS 2.0!