Busy times, though not that I am complaining since it's all fun, though I have found that I have had less time to do some things, including keeping my blog up to date. Among the things I have been doing lately is watching Camden grow up (he is crawling really well now!); practicing playing my acoustic; working on the Holland Backup Framework; working on our Making Perfect Scents website; putting together my weekly radio show at work; and still finding time to watch the last few episodes of Lost. I also do music with John biweekly, which is great since I have not otherwise been doing much on my own due to spending most of that time working on the guitar.

I have also started running 3 mornings a week, though I have only run 2 times so far. I am trying the Couch to 5k program, though it may take me longer than that. I have some ground to make up I think. Due to the way I walk (basically like a Penguin, I won't lie) I use muscles when running that I rarely otherwise use (since I run straight-footed). That or I just need a better pair of sneakers to fit my running style (hopefully not though). Otherwise that has been rather enjoyable.

All generally good things and my only regret is having little to show for it music-wise. Playing my acoustic has been really fun though so I think that is well worth the time invested at least for future music endeavors. I do need to start getting back into producing though, and should be able to do a bit more once Holland is a bit more off the ground. I also should get back into blogging more. One thing I have been thinking about to bridge the gap is to at least post my Tweets on the website. The Twitter API makes that super-easy, I just have not figured out where to put them (really, that is like the hardest part since, again, the Twitter API is awesomely easy).

Good Times...

Tags:

When did this happen!?

This is awesome! I've been waiting...well...awhile for this but hey I won't complain! Thanks Apple (finally)!

Tags: iTunes, transcode

Over the past few months, I have been saving up for an acoustic guitar. That could be a whole conversation of its own. I mean there is size, wood choice, design, brand, all sorts of things. I have been asking some of the other musicians at work and the dominant suggestion has been to simply go and try playing a few out to see which one is best for me.

That's good advice, by the way. So yesterday, we went to Sam Ash to do just that. They have an entire room dedicated to acoustics which must be sound proofed because it was amazingly quiet and cozy. The real reason they do that is probably for humidity but it was pretty neat. No one was there initially so I picked up a few guitars on my own. I found a few I liked though other than a few model numbers of brands I did not have much to go on.

About 10 minutes later one of the guitar guys came in and asked if I needed anything. I told him it was my first acoustic and my price point. He thought about it for a bit and grabbed a Taylor 110 for me to try. While it is not an all solid wooden guitar (something I was wanting though is hard to find from domestic makers for my price range) it does have a solid wooden top. Man it sounded good. It was the best guitar I had played that day. Great action, fantastic sound. I think it's the one.

Though I am going to have to save a little bit more. Corey and I set aside a small amount of money per paycheck as out fun money so I will have to wait until next paycheck before I can pull the trigger. It does give me some time to think about it and there a few guitars Sam Ash did not have that I wanted to play. And I could try Guitar Center, though given my past experience, I honestly would rather not.

I guess that is partly my point, though. The guy at Sam Ash was so helpful! He was constantly helping me switch out guitars to find one that I liked. And while I kept going back to the Taylor 110, he was patient, helpful, and made be feel comfortable about guying an acoustic and one that I know would serve me very well. Every experience I have had at Sam Ash has been nothing but the best customer service experience I have had. Even when I ordered my Virus Classic online it was an awesome experience. I cannot say enough about that company. They are fantastic. And though they did not have the exact guitars I was looking for (specifically an Ibanez AW3000 and a Martin DX1), I was able to find a guitar that is likely going to be the one I end up getting anyway.

It's a great place and I highly recommend any musician giving them a chance.

Tags: SamAsh, acoustic guitar

One could argue that I am a bit biased when it comes to customer service. At Rackspace, that's basically what we do. It's one of my favorite parts of my job. So one could argue I have high standards. Which is mostly true, but I am also a fairly patient guy when it comes down to things.

Regardless, I think I experienced perhaps the worst customer service experience I have ever had to date. Today the plan was to have us all meet at Olan Mills to take some family and friends photos. Right at the start there was miscommunication on the appointment time (if it was supposed to be 3:30pm or 3:40pm). Nonetheless, we all showed up basically on time (perhaps a little late due to traffic, to be fair). When we got there, the place was basically full. In fact, at one point there were no seats available for the number of people. One of the photographers told us it would be 30-45 minutes. Not a good start, but not a huge deal.

At about the 2 hour mark, we had to start feeding the babies. So Amy went to go use their microwave and, while doing so, asked how much longer it would be. The response from one of the photographers was an indifferent "we will get to you when we can." Again, we had an appointment. Well, when it was finally our turn (at about the 2 1/2 hour mark), we overheard another lady who had made an appointment a full month earlier that was told of the wait. She was not having any of that, and rightly so. We also noticed the manager playing Solitaire. Again, we had an appointment. Brandon mentioned this as well and also told the other customer how long we had waited.

When we finally got to the session, it was actually not that bad. The photos themselves turned out decent, though the photographer was already on the defense, probably sensing we were not happy already. She really just did not seem to listen and process what we were saying or do a good job at explaining her directions. Be that as it may, we finished the session and then went to go get our prints made.

Our request basically was that we wanted to see what the cheapest option was for ordering a CD. The CD of the photos by itself is wildly expensive, but becomes reasonable when purchasing prints. So you can basically purchase prints and a CD for less than just buying a CD (due to our membership). The photographer explained what we needed to do, however, she actually got it wrong. She ended up being about $50 off of the final price. Brandon caught this mistake right at the beginning though the photographer did not understand or listen. Turns out, to pick another plan, we would have had to repick the photos all over again (a process that took at least 30 minutes).

It was about 6:00pm by this time. After all this, there was no apology during any part of this. And the photographer, though admitting her mistake, refused to honor her mis-calculated price. Brandon and Matt both intervened, and rightly so. I've never seen Matt quite that animated, in fact. Finally she matched price when Corey said we would either pay the price she told us initially or leave. So reluctantly matched, though again no apology.

A process that should have, in total, taking less than a few hours. We got there at 3:30pm and left almost 8:00pm. Really the time was not the issue. It was the lack of communication, extremely poor scheduling, and no apology from either the photograph or manager (who, again, spent most of her time playing Solitaire.

Brandon is still not happy and is working on talking with the area manager. Hopefully something good comes of it. If not, lesson learned, we know to stay the hell away from Olan Mills. We could take our own photos next time, or perhaps go to a more local photographer (such as James Taylor for those in Bandera or around the area). The thing that bothers me so much is that customer service is not hard. Most of it is simply being honest, admitting mistakes, apologizing it, and working to constantly improve. None of this is something we saw from Olan Mills today. It's just not hard to do. In fact, I would think it's WAY more difficult to have shitty customer service than it is to have good one. I fail to see how so many companies miss this mark. In the case of Olan Mills, I'm not sure they could have missed it any more than they did today...

Tags: srslywtf

Ok so I got a bit behind on updating my blog because I was so busy actually enjoying the conference. The last two days were also quite good with the most informative talk, at least for me, being the talk on PCI and MySQL. That comes up somewhat frequently at work and it was nice to see that most of my assumptions were correct. I also learned a few things about PCI and how to apply it that I did not know.

The talk on NoSQL was also pretty good. Honestly I have not made up my mind about NoSQL but I have realized one side does not (nor really ever did) fit all. Some applications just need a relational database. Others might not. Still others can be happy with both. Because relational databases can give you consistency and referential integrity. You add in constraints and it becomes an elegant solution since it is near impossible (with proper design) to end up with referential inconsistency. Not everyone needs that for all parts of the website. I like the MySQL + Memcached model because you can leverage both solutions, though I will admit it is not for every config. One point did stick in my mind from the talk - and that's that application developers are not often DBAs. Now, in my mind, it's not that hard to become decent at writing queries, but that is one more thing to hinder rapid development. And while I might not agree with that, I do understand the concept. So, like it or not, NoSQL is going to stay in some form, though I do hope the technology improves.

Great thing is that Drizzle could help solve for both cases since I heard talk about integrating NoSQL technologies into Drizzle via plugins (and visa versa). That's hot because it makes hybrid solutions very easy. And even in cases where applications really fit in one model or the other, Drizzle offers options and future possibilities.

All in all it was a good conference. I do hope next year has more people and more innovation. I will admit that I am skeptical as to MySQL's future under Oracle, though either way, I am not worried. There is plenty of innovation with or without Oracle. My money is on Drizzle (and PBXT of course, which is getting some awesome features!) but I am no prophet.

I think I will end the day by playing games at an arcade with the Threadless folks. Tomorrow I wake up before dawn to fly out wildly early in the morning and return back to the regular world. A bit wiser, perhaps, though I always do miss the conference. I have plenty of stuff to start working on though! More Drizzle awesomeness, PBXT, Gearman, Galeon, Tokyo Cabinet, among others. Fun stuff!

Tags: mysqlconf

Day 2 of the MySQL Conference I found to be quite good. Things were kicked off with a keynote by Oracle then followed by Tim O'Reilly (of O'Reilly press - yes, that O'Reilly) which I enjoyed quite a bit. I basically equated O'Reilly to Sarah Conner and Skynet being the companies offering complete stack solutions. Google is one such name and, at least the impression I got from O'Reilly, was that, even if Google is a good company, any company that has control over everything is a bad thing. And I tend to agree. Choice, after all, is a great thing. He had quite a bit more to say but that was the thing that stuck most with me.

I also was honored to receive an award from Rackspace's behalf for our commitment to Drizzle. To be fair, this is really something that came from our Cloud division so perhaps someone from Cloud may have been the better choice. Nonetheless, I will make sure it gets to the right place (likely in our awards space at the Castle - our new headquarters). I am glad to see this as well because it shows how committed Rackspace is to open source and a very viable database both in the cloud and otherwise. I really like where Drizzle is going, particularly its pluggable aspects.

After the keynotes, I went to some great talks about Drizzle, Gearman, PBXT, and SSD performance. All of which were quite good. I have been following PBXT for quite some time but there are some interesting new developments there, such as engine-level replication. While that may not suit everyone, it is a novel idea and is much more low-level (and faster) than MySQL replication is today. My favorite talk of the day was on Gearman. It was an introductory talk but I was able to learn things I did not previously know and it builds on talks that will be tomorrow and Thursday. Really exciting stuff!

Consider, for instance, using Gearman to fire off all those stats queries for tracking page views on a high traffic website. One could conceivably use Gearman as a way to fire these off asynchronously so that you do not block page loads when simply collecting stats the end user doesn't care about. Or the simple task of resizing images. Doing that in PHP is an expensive affair but I could use Gearman to fire off these resizing jobs to tools written in C to do the job faster and also without blocking. Similarly, with Gearman UDFs in MySQL, you can do some crazy (sometimes bad) things, such as fire off an e-mail when something goes wrong.

Gearman is a very simple concept but wildly useful for larger deployments. Granted, my little website may not have much need for it, but that will likely not stop me from giving it a spin. At least then I will have some context when explaining it to customers that may benefit from it.

After all that, I went out for Thai with some of the Cloud folks and some of the dudes from Threadless. Threadless are always fun to hang with, being both on more of the bleeding edge of web technologies and having a ton of interesting stories to tell. These guys are awesome. Plus their shirts own face and are really driven by the community. Anyone can submit a shirt design, have people vote on it, and potentially turn it into a t-shirt. Plus, they also are the ones behind I Park LIke An Idiot. I have a stash of those bumper stickers in both my cars and my desk drawer at work. They are a Godsend for those parking, well, like idiots.

We rounded out the evening by going to a Schooner meet and greet, and then for a few more drinks to talk about SSDs, replication, guitars, and District 9, and called it an evening. It is late so I should retire as well for tomorrow looks like it will be just as awesome, if not more so, than today! Goodnight all!

Tags: Rackspace, drizzle, pbxt, mysqlconf, Threadless, Schooner, Gearman

While Dan, Trent, and I were hanging out last night after the MySQL Conference, we brought up racing (actually, I think I brought it up :P). I always like to know what those from other countries things about F1 and IndyCar. Most that I have talked to say the same thing - namely that they prefer F1. Some are more excited than others about F1, though Dan and Trent seemed to agree that the lack of refueling was a bit lame.

Anyhow, while talking about the two, an older (I think British) gentleman called out from the table behind us "IndyCar sucks!", though he then added a bit later "And so does F1!". I would imagine that he is angry about F1's politics and how it often overshadows racing. I would also imagine he doesn't like IndyCar because it is a spec series, and one that has limited choices at the moment (1 chassis, 1 engine supplier). I told him at least we have 2012 in Indy, which will hopefully give us both multiple engine manufacturers and, I hope, multiple chassis (though they may opt to settle only on one for cost).

Unfortunately, I did not get his name, though apparently he was actually at one time a team owner who had both Scott Dixon and Dan Wheldon drive for him. He mentioned his team name though it was one that was before I began watching IndyCar. Still, that seemed really cool! Weather true or not, it was neat to see passion about racing, particularly at a venue I did not think I would see any interest in it.

Tags: IndyCar, F1

I am not sure when this will actually get posted online since I currently have no internet in my room. My one gripe (perhaps other than the chairs) about the conference is that the hotel does not offer free Internet and it is just expensive enough to cause me to use some discretion.

Be that as it may, day 1 was fun. Admittedly, some of the talk by Percona were things I already knew, though I did learn a few nice things (mostly about how to approach problems the right way since I do tend to jump into problems perhaps a bit prematurely at times). Some of the concepts Baron pointed out, while simply, are things I do not always think of when approaching a problem. I am almost excited to start putting such ideas to good use, in fact.

Likewise, the Drizzle talk, while quite interesting, went above my head. That is not saying much though since I have not touched C++ in a long time and have not really looked at the internals hardly at all. I found it quite helpful, though, just to see some of the internals and learn how Drizzle actually works Parts of it seem quite elegant. Both sessions I felt were well worth it. The next few days also look to be quite interesting as well.

After the sessions, I spent some time drinking with Dan and Trent before eating a quick dinner and retiring up to my room to rest up for the next day. All in all it was a great start to a great conference!

(By the way, the green tea paste snack thing was quite delicious with chocolate and caramel on-top! Not sure what it was, but it was good!)

Tags: mysqlconf