On this clear day, we drove to the Ouray National Wildlife Refuge and found very little in terms of wildlife 3xcept this porcupine who was a bit annoyed that we woke him up from his nap in the tree limb above the road.
The photo is not the very best from an artistic point of view, but it was fun to watch this fine specimen enjoy a little sun on a cold December day.
Farmer Brown has a tractor. Farmer Jones has a tractor. Both tractors break down every Monday.
Farmer Brown spends every Monday afternoon fixing his tractor and then gets a good five days of work in before he rests on Sunday.
Farmer Jones spends Monday afternoon evaluating the tractor and Monday evening discussing it with his wife writing up a plan and reviewing that plan for fixing it.
Tuesday morning Farmer Jones goes to the diner for coffee and a donut and to discuss his tractor woes with his pals, showing off his plan for fixing the tractor. One of the pals suggests it might not a problem with the doohickey as Farmer Jones suspects. He recommends that Farmer Brown take the tractor to the mechanic for further diagnosis and discussion. So Farmer Jones spends the rest of the day loading up his tractor onto the trailer and hauling it into town whereupon the mechanic tells him he can get to it first thing in the morning.
On Wednesday morning after coffee at the diner, Farmer Jones ambles on over to the mechanic shop and learns that the problem was indeed what he had suspected all along and that he could have fixed the problem in an hour or two on Monday afternoon. So farmer Jones loads up the tractor and takes it home only to find that his wife has baked a nice apple pie and so he spends a lazy afternoon eating pie and talking with his wife and the neighbor who has come over to gossip. That evening he fixes the tractor.
Now first thing Thursday morning, Farmer Jones gets to work and works through Sunday, making his wife cross with him for not attending Services at the church. Farmer Jones is too tired to listen and flops down in bed in need of rest.
And on Monday morning both tractors break down again.
Farmer Brown gets 20% more work done and rests one day a week.
Farmer Jones later gives up on farming and gets a job managing the parts store at the mechanic shop.
What kind of farmer are you?
A very large portion of my system drive, a 250GB SSD, seemed to be gobbled up with my fresh Windows 8.1 install and after install all my tools, I was fast running out of disk space on the C: drive. A quick search for culprits using Effective Search from SowSoft turned up a 64GB file called hiberfil.sys.
After a little hunting and poking, I found the GUI for power management options and tried to turn off hibernate. But that did not get rid of the file.
Not until I found and used the following in an “as Administrator” cmd window did I recover the 64GB of SSD space:
powercfg -h off
And yes, I have 64GB of RAM. Call me spoiled.
It's been seven months and two job changes and crazy busy with family, work and life.
Vacation is over.
List of things to blog about.
So much to say, so little time to say it.
In elementary school, I loved being an AV (audio-visual) library assistant and running the mimeograph machine. I knew all the tricks to getting that film strip projector to work. I was an expert overhead projector operator. And I could thread a 16mm projector faster than anyone.
I was the master of my domain. I was a geek before the pocket protector became the defacto standard geek identification badge.
Fast forward to a time when I had suppressed the geek within to become a lawyer. I even took an English undergrad degree. I was married when I received my Bachelor of Arts, so I’m not sure it counted. But they gave it to me anyway. Then having had a chance to work for a lawyer for a while, I realized I could never be a lawyer—I hated the work too much to study for the LSAT. And so I became a tech writer. What else.
And a few years later, while I furiously scribbled notes on my legal pad, the ancient primitive predecessor to the iPad, I overheard a software engineer say, “It’s not supposed to do that,” while looking at the screen of a computerized simulation going very wrong. At that moment, my mind darted back to my junior high and high school days of banging out BASIC on a Commodore PET, translating the Atari BASIC from the Creative Computing magazine, so that my friends and I could play Adventure.
You are in a deep dark cave. There is a lamp here. What do you want to do?
The microsecond burst of nostalgia closed and I knew then that if I had written the code for that software, it would be doing exactly what I told that computer to do. It took a few years to make the transition, but I let the inner geek out and consumed every computer programming book I could get my hands on. Finally I landed my first professional programming job. And have been doing that for nearly fourteen years now.
And just today, in stand up, I overheard a team member say those immortal words, “It’s not supposed to do that.” My brain seized on the phrase and compelled me to write this post before I could sleep again.
Where did your geek come from?
Technically speaking, I had a fun and productive 2013. Here are some highlights worth mentioning.
StorageClient: Client Side Load Balancing
A technology specific problem solved, bypassing server based solution with client side load balancing and fast fail retry algorithms that took us from horrible to nearly 5 nines in reliability while improving overall performance. (This was at the day job, so that's about as much as I can share about that.)
LocalCache: In Memory Cache with Async Persistence
A library that takes advantage of Concurrent Collections in .NET and SQLite to provide fast in-memory caching that persists asynchronously on local disk for rapid rehydration of in-memory cache when an application pool is recycled. This solved a big problem with service level compliance recovery on a critical service, taking complete recovery time from hours to a few minutes. (Also for the day job.)
DuoVia.Net: TCP and NamedPipes Services Library
An extension and revival of RemotingLite that makes intra-process communication easy and fast. This was my first foray into creating and sharing open source software on GitHub and publishing packages on NuGet. I enjoyed it so much, I added 8 more packages to the set. And while these projects were built on my own time, one or two of them are in regular use by one or two teams at the current day job and they have been downloaded over 1,500 times.
VersionedCollections: A Shared Idea Brought to Life
Recently I shared an idea with Ayende Rahien on his blog with respect to creating a snapshot-in-time, read-only view of a collection that is being written to constantly. I'm happy to report that it turned out to be exactly what he needed. And I am honored and appreciative to Ayende for the kudos. Sharing good ideas with community friends is almost as much fun as bringing them to life yourself.
Here's to an equally fun and productive 2014.
I have removed Facebook mobile apps from my mobile devices. It was really just occupying too much of my time. I am now considering removing my account entirely. I am finding less and less value in the increasing amount of time I spend on the site. what about you? Have you abandoned Facebook too. Let me know why and how leaving Facebook has affected your life.
If the Bard had written in C#:
public class Self
{
public bool ToSelf()
{
return true;
}
}