Hello all.

It’s been many days since my last post.  I have excuses, but my best reason is laziness (but you already knew that)

Right now, I’m embroiled in a Microsoft Ticket/Case.  Upgrading Team Foundation Server 2005 to TFS 2008.  Let me tell you, if you have the opportunity to wiggle out of buying this product, then take that opportunity and hold onto it for dear life.  This product also helps prove my adage: “Buy Microsoft so you can get support.  Get support because you bought Microsoft.”  We’ll see if this putting this phrase to print

Back to the present.  I am on call No. 6 (being generous, probably 10) with someone in India (a fine country I’m sure, I enjoy the food immensely), which is the start of call that will probably last 5 hours (35 hours total on the phone, again, being generous).  My case has just been transferred to a new person, who is not very familiar with all the troubleshooting I’ve done with my buddy Vimal.  This case has been going on for 3-4 weeks and we’ve retried steps in teh Microsoft-certified instructions many times over.  Now that I have a new person on the case and we are retreading old ground and getting nowhere.

The problems all started when someone at Microsoft said, (paraphrasing, don’t sue me) “Hey, let’s integrate Source Code Control, Reports and Documents for a Software Project.”  Problem is the TFS designers decided to use all these separate components as is and paste them together.  So, TFS is really: SQL db for source-code, Sharepoint Services for docs and SQL Reporting Services for reports.  Now when you upgrade one component (see previous posts on the subject if you interested in sleeping) other components ‘break’ or don’t work how they used to and the MSDN Forums aren’t much help.  SOOOOO, you get to call MS$ support, which you have to pay for, and then wait for someone in India to remote in and solve problem, give or take 3-30 days.

Thank goodness I decided to use a virtual environment to do a 2005 to 2008 test upgrade.  But, we are still unable to recreate teh working production environment, after 3+ weeks.

And that is where we sit, working on getting a working duplicate of our production server up and running.

I have no faith in the production upgrade, thank goodness for music (next time more fun: Sasquatch Festival ‘08)

It’s been almost a year since I upgraded Wordpress’ back-end.  I haven’t modified my custom theme since my blog uses the same theme as the rest of my site.  I’ll probably make a new theme this summer.

In the coming week I’ll do some short reviews of my recently-viewed Netflix movies.  Over the last few months I’ve seen 19 movies on DVD.  Some were repeats, some were inspired by Oscar nominations and some were older movies I found through Netflix’s suggestion service.

The fantasy baseball season began last week with a live draft through Yahoo’s Fantasy Sports site.  I think I ended up with a pretty solid team.  I consciously took some risks with younger players (James Shields, Evan Longoria, Jeff Francoeur) that have well-projected upsides combined with veteran keepers (Magglio Ordonez, Derrek Lee, Carlos Beltran).  I’ve also done a lot more research/fun reading over the past year on baseball statistics.  That includes reading some baseball analysis blogs: FJM, McCovey Chronicles and Sabernomics, reading Baseball Prospectus (subscriber for 1 year) and listening to ESPN podcasts.  I even did some analysis of the fantasy league I’m in with Helpdeskers using Baseball Prospectus’ PECOTA statistics.  My pre-season team looks to be middle of the pack and Mahrens is my first week opponent.  My PECOTA analysis projects me to win 9-1, but you know statistics, “throw ‘em out the window” paraphrasing Joe Morgan.

Arsenal took a 1-0 lead against Chelsea with half an hour to.  And it’s a Sagna near-post header.  Almunia has been great in goal as well.  Chelsea responded in the 73′ with bullet from 15 yards by Drogba.  Drogba whipped in a second at the 80′ mark from 6 yards out.  It was a long free-kick pass and Drogba wasn’t even marked.  Arsenal end up losing and they drop to 3rd place in the table.  Manchester United beat Liverpool 3-0  earlier this morning, stretching their 1st place lead and Chelsea takes over 2nd.  The race to the finish should be quite intense.

The NCAA tournament has left my bracket in tatters. I knew Oregon probably wouldn’t win, but it was a homer pick.  My sleeper Final Four pick was Pittsburg (4) who didn’t even make the Sweet 16, losing to Michigan State last night.  Some of the Pac-10 games have been very watchable though, namely Stanford v Marquette and UCLA v Texas A & M.  Washington State blew Notre Dame out of the water, holding them to 41, even though most analysts predicted Notre Dame to win.  They had predicted Notre Dame would have a similarly stingy defense, but they must not have seen any Wazoo games this year.

Inspired by Marktopia, I’ve decided to list my iTunes artists. I didn’t go with the iPod since I’ve still got an old Nano. I shall be upgrading to an iPhone or an iPod touch this summer. The March 6 presentation really sold it for me with Exchange, Cisco IPSec VPN and SDK in the 2.0 Software Update due out in June. There’s the added excuse that I need to upgrade my iPod anyways, so why not go all the way.

Back to the list:

Air
Arcade Fire
Badly Drawn Boy
Barenaked Ladies
Beastie Boys
Beck
Bell Orchestre
Belle & Sebastian
Ben Folds
Bjork
The Black Keys
Bloc Party
Blur
Bright Eyes
Caribou
Christopher O’Riley
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Clash
Coldplay (insert Derek Jeter jokes here)
Cream
The Cure
Daft Punk
The Darkness
Dave Attell
David Bowie
David Cross
Death Cab for Cutie
The Decemberists
Dire Straits
ELO
Elton John
Explosions in the Sky
Final Fantasy
The Flaming Lips
Foo Fighters
Franz Ferdinand
George Harrison
Gorillaz
The Hives
Incubus
j.c. wilson (note the dots)
Jeff Buckley
Jeff Tweedy
Jim Gaffigan
John Williams
Journey
Katamari Damacy
The Killers
Lewis Black
Madvillain
Modest Mouse
My Bloody Valentine
My Morning Jacket
The National
OK Go
Panda Bear
Patti Smith
Pavement
Pixies
The Police
The Polyphonic Spree
The Postal Service
Public Enemy
R.E.M.
The Raconteurs
Radiohead
Rage Against the Machine
The Shins
Sigur Ros
The Smiths
Sonic Youth
Spoon
Stephen Malkmus
Stephen Malkmus & the Jicks
Sting
The Strokes
Sufjan Stevens
Supertramp
Talking Heads
Thom Yorke
Tom Petty
Traveling Wilburys
U2
Weezer
The White Stripes
Wilco
Wolf Parade

Hello readers,

It’s been a while since I last wrote. This is due to teh explosive combination of work and laziness. The new year has seen quite a few new projects at work, some planned, some not. To give you an idea, just in January, I’ve becoming the administrator of a new Incident Management web app, installed a new firewall (with the help of consultants) and am in the process of rebuilding a Windows NT Server with SQL 6.5.

This has meant a few 10 hour days and long weekends, but it’s starting to slow down a little. The next project could be a video-conferencing system or something else, but nothing as tough as recreating this NT box that needs to run a mission-critical SQL db. It all started when I tried to restore a SQL backup and it failed. Apparently a failed restore in SQL 6.5 kills your ability to use the current db, so we tried again and again and ended up going to a 2nd box for a temporary fix. Now we’ve discovered that the 2nd box isn’t going to be good enough either, having to do with limited licenses for NT (10 user limit for an MSDN install). Now it’s on to the 3rd box and hopefully there will be success.

The Australian Open has helped keep my mind off work. I don’t know what was a bigger upset, Tsonga crushing Nadal or Djokovic pwning Federer. I would have liked to watch all of the final live, but with the damn timezone difference I fell asleep half-way through the first set. No matter, Djokovic won even though losing the first set. He looked to have the game and experience to beat Tsonga anyways. Tsonga plays with very flat shots and doesn’t have a slice, but wins with his powerful groundstrokes and serve. Djokovic could handle the pace, so it was just a matter of time.

Podcasts I’ve been listening to:

The Bugle (John Oliver ,a la the/a Daily Show,+ Adam Zaltzman)
Around the Horn
PTI
WNYC’s RadioLab (recommended by This American Life)
The Kong Show
B.S. Report with Bill Simmons
Windows Weekly (I do administrate a Windows network, so I feel somewhat obligated)

Anyone who knows me, knows that I loves me the Radiohead. They released In Rainbows, their latest album, via digital download on 10/10 of this year. I downloaded the album after purchasing the ‘discbox’ option. They weren’t to ship until Dec 3rd so I just got mine on Tuesday! It’s pretty damn cool. Vinyls of the proper LP, vinyl-sized album artwork, the LP & Disc 2 on CD, lyrics and a cool holder to contain it all.

Last month Radiohead did a live webcast to celebrate their new album. It was quite great since they played songs from In Rainbows, Amnesiac and covers from The Smiths, Bjork and Joy Division/New Order.

If you missed it, Radiohead’s US label has it available as a widget (see below)

More Radiohead:

Thom Yorke interview w/David Byrne
How Radiohead fans can reduce CO2 emissions for concerts
Get a free, printable Radiohead 2008 Calendar [PDF]

The Thanksgiving weekend is almost over and it was a very nice 4-day break. It’s over just in time for me to fly to San Jose for software training, where I’ll be learning TeamTrack, another application I will need to administrate. San Jose is quite close to San Francisco, so I’ll be able to visit Oculon on his new home turf. I may even drive by the Google’s headquarters for giggles.

As referenced in teh title, Arsenal beat Wigan in a very close match to take the top spot from Manchester United. Arsenal were without Cesc Fabregas due to suspension, and it showed, but they still prevailed with a great run and header by Gallas in the 83′. Rosicky finished it off for a 2-0 victory. The win was made even more enjoyable when I read that Man Utd lost to Bolton!!?!? Now Arsenal is 3 points up and still have played one less game than the Red Devils.

In Fantasy Football, my team slipped again and as I watch this week, both of my starting QBs (Bulger and Garcia) have gone down and are out of the game. In a two QB starting league, I will surely lose. By the end of the weekend, I’ll be mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. Now I’ll just get to enjoy the games on TV and wait for the college bowl games.

Readers and viewers can look forward to a new workspace video, as I will be moving   again at work.

Inspired by Shane’s Video Blog, I have decided to post a short iMovie of my FSI workspace.

Here she goes: MyWorkspace

It’s been a while since the last blog post. The Fall TV lineup has been in full swing. So, I’ve been watch lots of 30 Rock, Heroes, Weeds, etc.

In sports land there has been the MLB playoffs. The Cubs lost to the Diamondbacks, who look even worse since the Rockies swept the Diamondbacks last night. Who knows if the Cubs will ever get it together. Their hitters always seem to be swinging for the fences, which does no good against the Brandon Webb’s of the world. The pitching is Carlos Zambrono (volatility) + Lilly, Hill, Marshall (mediocrity). The bullpen isn’t very good. Maybe Hill and Marshall will get better, but this hitting (Soriano, Lee, Ramirez) has probably already peaked, even though Ramirez will have more years left than Soriano and Lee. It’s almost like Boston Red Sox-lite. They don’t spend enough money to get the great pitching and good role-hitters, but have the few power guys (Ramirez, Ortiz, Lowell), at the same positions too. Problem is, Boston-lite won’t win the World Series, and it won’t get you out of the NLDS.

Onto better news…

My fantasy teams are starting to turn around. I had some bad luck early in the year with Bulger under-performing, and then injured. I made some trades to be better in a few weeks, and now I have a bye week. After that, barring injury, like always, I could make a run for the playoffs after being down 1-4 after week 5.

College football Saturdays, NFL Sundays are great. I have to balance that with the EPL. But the English have been off TV for two weeks with Euro ‘08 qualifiers and a weird TV schedule. This Saturday was quite crazy in college football with the #1 and #2 teams losing. Now Ohio State, South Florida and Boston College are 1, 2 and 3. I don’t think any of those three would beat LSU or Florida.

Finally. The biggest news of all. The new Radiohead album In Rainbows was released through digital download only. You choose the price, so it’s been getting more press than normal. I got the download after buying the disc box (vinyls: LP + B-sides, cds: LP + B-sides and artwork), so I paid a flat $80 fee. I’ve listened to the album about 15 times now and it is pretty great. Like all of the other Radiohead greats (OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac) it doesn’t get old. It ranks up there with Neon Bible and Boxer for my favorite albums of 2007.

6:30 AM PST.

I usually wake up at this early during the weekdays, but not the weekend.  Today is not just any Saturday, it’s the start of the English Premier League!

With the wonder of Fox Soccer Channel I can watch two, 2, TWO, live matches this morning.  The first match is between Manchester City and West Ham.  This isn’t likely to be the highest quality of games as both teams were in the bottom flight last year.  Analysts have predicted that both will probably do much of the same this year and some have even said that West Ham will be relegated.  The Hammers probably will be relegated because the only thing that saved them last year was Carlos Tevez and he went to Manchester United.

The next match is the real one to watch, Liverpool at Aston Villa.  Liverpool finished 2nd in the Champions League and 3rd in the Premiership last season and they should continue with similar, top-flight success.  Aston Villa were hanging out in the lower-to-middle part of the table for most of last season and finished in 11th.  Many analysts are predicting a top-6 finish since Patrik Berger is back and ready to play.  So, I’m really looking forward to this match.

FUTBOL! GOAL!