When at my house I connect my laptop to my apple display and use a bluetooth key board and mouse.  I love the setup but recently some called to attention one ‘problem’ with it.  I wanted to have the laptop the same height as the screen so when I looked around my den I grabbed the fist thing I had that was the desired height.

I

I have not used my copy of Office XP Developer in some time due to the fact I purchased Office 2008 for the mac.  I love it when I am able to reuse something however it is a bit of an eye sore compared to the rest of the setup.   Does anyone know of a good laptop stand that is frugal?  I just spend all my play money on a new laptop to I have to be price conscious.  If you do know of one drop me a e-mail or leave a comment on the blog please.  

Once again I am dead to Jorge :-)

Last night the fun really kicked up with Yahoo! hosting a night of drinks, food and a Wii give away.  I learned that Yahoo is not only a PostgreSQL shop but has a two petabyte PosgresSQL database, I think PostgreSQL may be ready for the enterprise

Today the hour long sessions start and there are many great presentations I am looking forward to attending.  Today is also the day I will be speaking  and look forward to talking about the EMOL project, another PostgreSQL success story. 

Episode 1 - A Babe in the Woods (55:27) (MP3 (50.7MB) / ogg (37.4MB))

• 00:00 Intro Music (Throne of Blood http://www.throneofblood.com)
• 00:25 Show Start
• 01:14 Host Introductions
• 04:00 Show Introduction
• 07:25 How to get involved with the show (smoscast at penguicon dot org)
• 09:00 Penguicon 6.0
• 09:19 A note with love and understanding by Jer
• 09:55 Our favorites of 6.0
• 10:53 We aren’t at all conceited
• 13:27 Steve GUTTERMAN, not Steve GUTTENBERG
• 13:50 Official Soundbyte!(tm)
• 15:47 Dreamland Theater (http://www.dreamlandtheater.com)
• 16:40 Shoggoth on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgvogA7r5b0)
• 19:07 Guest of Honor lovin’
• 19:43 Woobies: A woman causing a motorboat situation with her breasts!
• 20:40 Tim Leib is teh awesome / Penguicon != Scientology
• 25:42 Jer’s phone makes an annoying appearance (35 seconds of pain, oops)
• 28:35 Jess has mathematical difficulty
• 20:28 Matt’s missing ConChair Report
• 29:40 Jobs at Penguicon
• 32:17 penguicon.info (Coming soon)
• 33:39 Job Opening: Operations & Ops Staff!
• 34:39 Obscenity Alert - Only 34 minutes late!
• 36:15 consuite at penguicon dot org
• 36:45 Introducing Penguicon *BING*
• 37:06 Job Opening: Sponsorship/Marketing and Staff!
• 39:39 Help Wanted (http://sites.google.com/a/penguicon.org/penguicon-7-planning/help-wanted)
• 42:02 The truth comes out
• 42:13 Meeting List (http://sites.google.com/a/penguicon.org/penguicon-7-planning/milestonesandmeetings)
• 43:17 SMOS explained
• 44:30 Wrap-Up/Kick-Off Meeting recap (Jess’s drunken escapades)
• 49:38 Hosting your own SMOS Dinner
• 50:56 We’re about done here / Planning for live broadcast
• 51:45 http://www.penguicon.org and http://www.ibloviate.org
• 53:02 Ending matter and license
• 53:15 Closing music (Throne of Blood)

This is a plan that definitely did not come together. First the main board manufacturer thought it would be a good idea to use two different Intel chips for the two Ethernet controllers. One is an Intel PRO/1000 PL the other is an Intel PRO/1000 PM. The add-on card we purchased is an Intel PRO/1000 PT. So it turns out the Intel cards are far from the same and I am not happy about that. It took me much Internet digging to find this out.

Intel PRO/1000 PM - does not support jumbo frames
Intel PRO/1000 PT - supports jumbo frames in Microsoft Windows operating systems only when Intel PROSet for Windows Device Manager is installed and only up to 9238 bytes.
Intel PRO/1000 PL - support jumbo frames larger than 9238 bytes.

So what are my options? Well I do not run Windows, and I would like to run at a minimum two network ports teamed. Which means now I need to order an additional Ethernet card or a two port Ethernet card. What I do know is it will likely not be a Intel Pro 1000.

A few highlight from this weekend was the weather, the people, and Giant Singing Tesla Coils.  There have been Penguicons where a blizzard has dumped inches of snow during the event; this year we had plenty of great spring weather.  What I like most about Penguicon is the chance to meet and talk with exciting people.  As an organizer I am fortunate to have Thursday night and often times Sunday night to interact with the guests on a bit more personal level.  This year was no exception and the food and company for my Thursday and Sunday dinner was terrific.  This year at Penguicon we introduced a new guest type, Hack of Honor.  The inaugural Hack of Honor was no other then the Giant Singing Tesla Coils.  I really did not know what to expect but I can say that any expectation I had was completely blown away!  The amazing spring weather with the beautiful lighting and fun music was one of the most interesting experiences I have ever had.  The music was a selection of video game music, popular tunes and a bit if classical.  If you ever get a chance to see the Giant Singing Tesla Coils in person I would not miss it for anything. 

I am very tired after the weekend and will write more about the weekend in the coming week. 

If you are reading this and have some time this Friday I am looking for volunteers to help load the AV into the truck and then unload it at the hotel.  The plan is to meet in the Hotel Lobby at noon on Friday there I will pass out directions to the warehouse about four miles away where we need to load the truck.  Once we loaded the truck we will head back to the hotel where we will unload the truck and get the equipment staged to go into each room at 3pm. 

The water bottle is where things went all wrong yesterday. I filled it up as usual in the morning and tossed it into my backpack. When I arrived at today’s work location, I opened the backpack up and was a tad surprised to see an empty water bottle. I remember thinking to myself: hmmm I thought I filled that. Not yet alarmed, I went to grab my laptop and this is when the horror struck me. I pulled my laptop out of my to have it draining water all over the floor. I look into the bottom of the backpack and see that there was over 2 inches of water in the bottom. I was suddenly impressed with Eddie Bauer Backpacks. This one is over 10 years old, and with a half liter of water in it, the backpack was nearly completely water-tight. I took the backpack over to the sink and poured out all the water. I wiped it out and it has never been cleaner.

I run back to the laptop which is still dripping and pop the battery out, but to be honest I had written the system off at that point. It was still dripping and it sat hard drive-end in the water for at least 10 minutes. I started wiping the laptop down, opening every cover and ejecting the battery and drives. The hard drive was soaked, and I thought there was no way this thing would ever work again. I let everything dry out for 12 hours and put it back together and crossed my finger. I was shocked! The system booted up and the only problem as a resulting of its bathing is a funny pattern on my screen.

I am grateful that the laptop is working because with Penguicon only a week away I do not have time to operate with a broken laptop. I would guess that the patern is from water stuck in the screen and that it will dry out better with time.

PostgreSQL is known to be a powerful open source relational database with many uses. One such use is warehousing EMRs (Electronic Medical Records) from oncology practices across the country. PostgreSQL, Perl, Apache, Ubuntu Linux and OpenBSD are all used for their strengths to deliver information to pharmaceutical companies to see what their drugs are doing for individuals in real world scenarios. Do you have a large amount of data that needs to be searchable, aggregated and extremely secure at the same time? See many of the creative solutions that have been deployed to help facilitate how we put PostgreSQL to the task of drugs.

The talk is mainly about what my genius friend Brian has been building, with a bit of help from yours truly, for the last year: a simple way to manage and data mine medical records for HUGE numbers of people.  The end goal is to make healthcare better for everyone and the best part is that this week he has two large customers clamoring to work with him!
If all that was not enough to make excited I just finished an interview that went very well.  I have to say that I am not a huge fan of formal interviews.  You know the ones, where they ask you to explain a time when you worked in a group and there was a conflict and you helped resolve it.  My interview today was with people high up but was more of a conversation.  They asked some questions, we talked about some things and then I asked some questions.  I feel it went well and I think I will be seeing them again the next round of speaking with the company.

With all that has been going well I think it is time to run out and buy a lotto ticket.