I am at TechEd 2004 in San Diego, CA speaking at a pre-conference session on Guidance about Patterns & Practices.  Things are going great, the weather is good, etc.

Saw a hilarious new session:

Picture is terrible but loved the session title.  Programming for the non-Programmer...

Sunday, May 23, 2004 1:25:32 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

I guess I am not the only rider out there.  Martin coincidentally posts his CBR today.

I believe Eric Gunnerson is also a die hard rider.

Friday, May 21, 2004 8:43:50 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Bill Evjen posts that this is his third TechEd.  That just didn't sound right for me so I thought back and realized the first TechEd I attended was in 1993!  In fact in I believe it was 1991 or 1992 I attended the pre-cursor to TechEd called the Tools Forum at the Washington State Convention Center in downtown Seattle.  While I will freely admit to not attending every year I have spoken at I believe four of them and attended a few more. Hard to believe that time passes so fast...

Friday, May 21, 2004 7:45:30 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Crazy RD Scott Hanselman is at it again.  This time he is helping out with a promotion for the RD Community booth.  It is taking on an apprentice theme:

You'll want to stop by and see if you have the intellectual horsepower it takes to be the Apprentice.NET!  The Winner will receive a ticket to the EXCLUSIVE INVITE ONLY .NET Influencer's Dinner and rub elbows with various .NET Illuminati.  Truly a lifetime chance, and only possible to those with chops enough to be the Apprentice.NET. 

For those of you who are more 'Survivor'-brute-force-scavenger-hunt types src="http://www.hanselman.com/blog/smilies/wink.gif"> don't worry, we'll have RD Bingo for you to play.  You'll have a card with the faces of Bloggers and RDs that you know and love.  Get that individual to initial over their face.  Getting Bingo (or Blackout Bingo) wins prizes (plus it forces you anti-social bastards to network!)

Thursday, May 20, 2004 8:42:11 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

No I am not leaving the .NET ecosystem.  This post is a departure from the usual focus of this blog.

I first started Motorcycling at the age of 7.  My first bike a Honda SL70 is laughable today but I thought it was the greatest back then. Since then I have owned a number of bikes the most recent being a Honda CBR1100XX.

Clearly a long way from the Honda SL70!  But about three years ago I taught my boys to ride.  I never really got to ride with them since they aren't allowed to ride on the street (they were 10 and 11) and the blackbird doesn't handle the triples very well. I decided I wanted to ride with them and bought a cheap 1971 Suzuki PE185 that a friend was selling.  My first two stroke dirt bike.  It was a blast.  I really enjoyed riding with the boys but the trail riding we were doing just wasn't suited to the PE185. Well finally I realized I really wasn't riding the Blackbird as much as I once did and I was paying $70/month in insurance just for it to sit in the garage. So I sold it and the next day went out and bought a new Honda CRF250X.

Wow!  What a difference compared to the 30 year old technology in the Suzuki.  I have been riding almost daily with my boys and been loving it.  I have also realized it is great to be able to come home and do something while hanging out with my boys who are now getting to be quite a bit older.  All in all a great time.

Now to bring things back in line just a bit.  Post TechEd on the Saturday the 29th I will be headed out to Gary LaPlantes MotoVentures near Temecula for a dirt riding refresher course. I have heard great things about the school even from fairly experienced riders. Personal goal is to be able to get the bike more than 6 feet off the ground. If you have a day to kill come check it out.

Tuesday, May 18, 2004 8:32:45 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [2]  

I am putting together the schedule for ASPLive! Orlando this week and am looking for a few more sessions to round out the schedule.  The plan is to do a 60/40 split between 1.x and 2.0 material.  I am currently in need of mainly 1.x material.  Funny how all the speakers want to cover the latest and greatest stuff.

So what can you the intrepid reader do? 

First off I need submissions. Spread the word far and wide that I need submissions hopefully no later than Wednesday.  What should be in a submission?

• Name
• Company
• Email
• Bio
• Title
• 200 word abstract

Second, if you have any 1.x topics you would like to see covered, send those in also.  I might be able to conscript a few speakers into covering them.

Thanks!

Monday, May 17, 2004 9:55:52 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [3]  

Update to Building a SAN Part 1.

I love the SuperMicro case. It is well built, well thought out, has plenty of fans. I had a couple of issues.  The documentation is a little light. For example it came with a fan shroud that the documentation said you shouldn't run without.  Well come to find out that is for the next generation Xeon and isn't required and in fact won't fit with the current Xeon heat sinks!  Took a while to figure that one out.  Second the case doesn't have any provision for mounting a floppy drive or DVDRom.  Well I stopped mounting floppy drives in machines I built about four or five machines back.  However a CDRom/DVD is still pretty much a must for me since I have yet to setup DSI images that would allow me to install from a PXE boot. I debated on whether I would be able to boot from an external DVD and finally decided to just hang one out the top of the case temporarily until Windows 2003 was done installing.  Whoops, come to find out Windows 2003 requires you to load the RAID drivers off a floppy.  A CDRom won't work!  Ended up having to also hang a floppy out of the case temporarily.  Once I got everything setup I pulled the drives and am now good to go.  Waiting on a Gig Ethernet switch and I will be ready to test the SAN out probably in early June once I get off the road.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004 7:55:08 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

Well today is the kick off for the first Patterns & Practices Summit here in Redmond.  I can't wait for this event to kick off.  Keith and a number of the PAG guys have been working on this thing literally for months.  All of that prep work is now going to come to fruition.  This is the third event I believe that Guided Design has done.  We are changing things up a little bit this time.  We have broadened the speaker list this time around.  We now have folks like Rocky Lhotka, Ted Neward and Billy Hollis speaking on topics they are excited about.  We also have a number of Microsoft speakers including Blake Stone, Gianpaolo Carraro, Mike Kropp, Ron Jacobs, Sandy Khaund and Ward Cunningham.  Second big change we made is that we are staying pretty close to the material that the Patterns & Practices team has released over the last two years.  If you take a look at our session schedule you can pretty much match the material up to their corresponding blocks. There is a wealth of information to be mined in the blocks so I think this is a great approach.

I don't speak until tomorrow but I will be hanging around over the next three days in the back of the room.  Please stop by and let me know what you think about the event.

Tuesday, May 11, 2004 7:32:57 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [0]  

There has been quite a bit of talk about the cabanas at TechEd one thing that I haven't seen mentioned much is that this year they are eliminating the speaker lounge at TechEd. That's right, last I heard they were eliminating it.

This has the interesting side effect of forcing something that I think attendees wish speakers would do on their own, hang out with the attendees.  Sure most speakers will show up at an evening function, take questions after a talk or show up at some party but typically before a session and/or after a session they disappear and sequester themselves in the speaker room.

At any conference this is where you will find the majority of the speakers most of the time. 

This is of course a double edged sword.  Speakers do need private time to prep right before a session to get focused, etc about the topic they are about to present. However many speakers just hang out in the lounge to do email, have lunch, chat with friends, etc.  All of which could be done in the public spaces of the conference.

What do other folks think?  Good idea?  Bad idea?

Tuesday, May 04, 2004 1:18:11 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [1]  

You may remember that I posted about SANMelody enabling a low cost SAN not to long ago.  I decided to put together a box to test it out with and finally have all the parts assembled.  I will hopefully be installing an OS on it this week.  I ended up going with:

• SuperMicro SC933T-R760: This is a 3U case so you don't have to use riser cards for your add in cards.  Includes a 760W 3way redundant power supply, 14 SATA drives trays with backplane and rack rails. $907
• SuperMicro X5DPL-iGM: This is an extended ATX motherboard with dual Xeon support, up to 12GB of memory in 6 x DIMM slots, 1 x 1Gbe, 1 x 100Mbe, 3 x 64bit PCI slots, 3 x 32bit PCI slots. $338
• Intel 2.4 Ghz Xeon: I picked up two of these. 533Mhz front side bus. 2 x $200
• 2 x PC2100 1 GB DIMMs ECC 2 x $150
• 3Ware Escalade 8506-8: 8 channel SATA RAID controller with 64bit PCI interface. $475
• Western Digital 250GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache SATA Drives: To be quite honest I was looking for capacity over ultimate performance here. Normally use Seagate Barracudas but have had quite a few fail lately and the price per megabyte was poor. 8 x 170.

That was it.  $3780 for a machine with 2 terabytes of disk space and decent performance.  I can actually remember paying almost a million dollars in a previous job for 1 terabyte!

I will let you know how turning this into a SAN goes.

Sunday, April 25, 2004 10:41:10 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [2]