Goodbye blogger, Helloooo Wordpress MU!

We've been setting up a Wordpress MU server at work, and I've migrated my blog over to it along with Clif. The new blog is at http://blog.ianbeyer.com.

Blogger's been nice, but WP has so much more to offer.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Had a wonderful 35th birthday today, thanks to my family and a bunch of friends, mostly from the department, with a few others thrown in for good measure.

We moved our usual end-of-the-month game night up a week to have a birthday party at the same time, which was the third event of the week at our house, and the fourth gathering I'd been to this week...

Monday: Small Group at our house.
Tuesday: Arena Survival Party at Brian's place. Perfect day for it. Got some great pics of the girls.
Wednesday: night off.
Thursday: Après-Party for Jeremy's wife following dinner at Llywelyn's (a nice celtic pub within walking distance of our place, with good food, good beer, and good music.)
Tonight: Game Night/Birthday.

Janelle and Brandon (who looks like he could be Terry Storch's little brother) joined us. Janelle is our staff Adminstrel/mercenary and goes around filling in for folks on vacation. This week, she's in HR. Brandon is a web designer for a local advertising agency. Janelle said she loved to play Settlers of Catan, so I invited her and her hubby along (since he's a geek too). There were enough of us (11 plus the kids) to play two boards of Settlers, which amazingly finished up within minutes of each other. Brian and my wife were the victors.

Before gaming, there was munching. A ridiculous amount of dessert and munchies materialized, in addition to the "official" birthday cake from 3 women and an oven (which is dangerously within walking distance of our house):



(in the background is one of my rapidly-becoming-legendary margaritas, and a bit of Janelle in her KU swag)

Matt was duly impressed by the candle arrangement. This was after all a party attended by geeks. The carrot cake was heavenly. It was the first time we'd outsourced birthday cake production due to Andrea starting full-time work at the church this week and our busy social calendar.

Wait, what? I have a social life? How did that happen? OK, so it's mostly with other geeks. Demented and sad, but social.

The night was capped off by Brandon, Matt, and Philip playing on Matt's Wii. Thanks to all my peeps and homies for making it such a fun birthday.

Moving over to WordPress.

Over Here

EDIT: Err, I should clarify. I'm migrating my entries over to WP and trying it out for a bit. I'll post to both places for now.

Ubuntu HH usability testing

The Content Consumer has a great post about testing Ubuntu's latest release. He Installed a standard desktop system and stuck his girlfriend in front of it. The results were interesting, and a testament to why programmers and engineers shouldn't try to design UIs.

Macs - Just Say Yes?

Chris Green has a great post titled "Saying “No Macs” is no longer an option for *Church* IT". Some definite food for thought that's got me thinking about ProPresenter on iMacs vs. MediaShout on Dell 745s for our worship spaces.

It's all about the pixels!

Yesterday I went down and picked up some some servers and workstations that were donated to us. This company runs a trading floor, and I started salivating when I walked in to the place. This is what a typical desk looks like:



Yep, that's *sixteen* monitors per machine. A typical desk has just shy of 21 million pixels covering nearly 20 square feet to play in. There are no cube walls, because they're all made of monitors.

The upside to this was that the workstations we were donated ran these pixel rigs in their former lives. And they all were stuffed full of PCI video cards (GeForce FX5500 for the curious). Naturally, I snagged a couple out of one of the stations to put in my WhatsUp monitoring station. I was disappointed to find that it only has 2 PCI slots.

I expanded on my own pixel rig, which I had recently reconfigured by mounting the 24" screens to the top of my cube walls in order to reclaim some much-needed desk space. Here is the result:



Left to right, top to bottom:

• Acer X241W, 24" 1920x1200, running WhatsUp Gold and keeping an eye on the facility map and my rack
  
• Acer X241W, 24" 1920x1200, running WhatsUp Gold with 2 IE panes. The one on the left is monitoring network traffic and response, the one on the right is monitoring disk usage,.
  
• Dell E153FP, 15" 1024x768, running Google Earth with Area 51 radar overlays from WeatherTap (probably gonna replace this with a 17")
  
• Dell E177FPb, 17" 1280x1024, running VirtualCenter console
  
• Dell E207WFPc, 20" 1680x1050, running WhatsUp Gold, with the wireless bridge workspace. This is a dual-input monitor that is also hooked to my laptop
  
• Dell D820, 15.4", 1920x1200, main workstation laptop
  

The brains of the monitoring station run on a Dell Optiplex GX620 with 3.2GHz P4, 3GB RAM, Radeon X600 primary (AGP) and two GeForce FX5500 secondaries (PCI). The WhatsUp backend runs on a Dell PowerEdge 2650 with 4GB RAM and dual 2GHz Xeon processors.

Total pixels: 10,773,152

I still have one additional monitor output I can use. If I put a 17" on that one and replace the 15", I'll be cruising at 13,918,880 pixels.

I love my job :)

Starbucks goes retro (and a little naughty) !

Over here, on $* changing the logo on their cup to the pre-1987 logo as part of a promotion of their new house brew:

Here's my question, Starbucks fans: Does the logo, be it be green, white and conservative, or brown, white and slightly pornographic, have anything to do with why you line up around the block for the Seattle company's coffee -- new blend or old?


Reminds me of the joke about the origins of the Canadian flag... They wanted to create a flag that represented both male and female Canadians... But that would be pornographic, so they covered it up with a maple leaf :)