All posts by warwick

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About warwick

I manage a team of professional technical consultants for a Fortune 100 company. I like clever uses of technology whether it's in a data center or the kitchen of my house.

Living with regret

Halo, Xbox

I sold my Xbox and everything with it on Friday. By Saturday I had seller’s remorse and my Monday the full impact of the transaction had hit hard. Yes, I made a decent payback on the console but I’d lost the camaraderie. No more “Halo Night” on Monday. No more late-night sniping sessions with friends, laughing and having a blast.

Why did I do it?

I thought it would help me feel less possessed by technology. I didn’t realize that it had become such a part of who I was–a geek. Now I’m living with regret. Friends tell me to get an Xbox360 and another copy of Halo 2. Since I’m about $250 short, that’s not very practical.

I’ve picked up consulting jobs in the past doing some light programming or web design. Now that I’m running WordPress, I may be able to do that again.

So…

If anyone needs some light PHP work done or WordPress templates created, let me know. I’ll even work for trade–if that trade comes in the form of a Xbox360.

A great end to tonight's smoke

Cooking, Smoker

Pictures can say so much. Here’s one of tonight’s pork roast. The “stripe” across the top is due to tong operator error. Otherwise, it had a good crust and simple flavor. We will be using this for sandwiches all this week and a cut off the end confirms it. I think I’m ready to try a pork shoulder.

The smoke went well but I got lucky with the heat. This time it *still* maintained 225˚F for two hours with the vents mostly closed for the first hour and all of the way open for the second hour. When you consider how much food was in the smoker, I think I did OK.

Yum!

Getting Life Done

Programming

For the benefit of regular readers, I want to give everyone some background on why the switches from Radio UserLand to Squib to Radio and finally to WordPress for blogging.

I’ve been thrashing a bit, that’s for sure. Thrashing is an old server admin term where the server thrashes about trying to get it’s job done. It reads and writes to memory and disk so fast and so often that it’s “thrashing” or moshing like a concert-goer.

My tech life had degraded to that point, no matter what I wanted to do to deny it. Radio UserLand was slow and the aggregator was deliberately frustrating. For example, it won’t correctly read Atom syndication format website feeds. It won’t properly translate some characters in RSS feeds and instead replaces them with accented captial letter “A”s. I couldn’t post remotely from Flickr or my cell phone. In otherwords, I was forcing myself to use a broken tool.

WordPress is easy to install if you’re a geek and if you’re not, it’s still pretty easy. I was up in the promised “five minutes or less” and I had wanted to, I could have imported my old Radio UserLand content. The old content is not popular with anyone but Google and me with two exceptions: the hummus recipe and anything about the WSM. That said, I’ve added the recipe back and it’s linked on the front page again. As far as the smoker, I’ll post about it like before and maybe it will get it’s own site someday.

Smoke 'em if you got 'em

Cooking, Smoker

Tammy and I fired up the Weber Smokey Mountain Cooker (WSM) this afternoon. I’ve got a variety of meat, all bought on the cheap:

* a 2 pound center cut pork loin roast
* 2 think center cut pork chops
* 2 whole chickens, quartered.

The chicken has only salt and pepper since we are going to use it on a variety of food later. The other meat has the Penzey’s Bicentenial Rub and Northwoods — both good for pork.

Also, I’m firing with half charcoal and half maple wood branches from the yard, hoping for a great “outdoors” flavor. Let’s hope I get two and a half hours of heat out of the fuel because I realized too late I’m out of charcoal.

What about old Radio UserLand content?

Uncategorized

Statistical analysis says that only Google cares about my old Radio-related content, with few exceptions. I’ll go through my logs in detail next week and move some static content about Radio to static pages here. If I get mod_rewrite working, the Apache god living in my server will redirect people automatically.

A switch to WordPress

Uncategorized

[Matt Kerner](http://kerner.net) and I talked by phone today and we agree: it’s time to switch to [WordPress](http://wordpress.org). I’m looking to simplify my life and working with a DIY weblog editor (like Radio UserLand or the OPML Editor) isn’t keeping me sane. WordPress took only a short time to set up and works like a champ. I can remotely post and (with some extra software) have an offline copy too.

Weblog

Light blogging this weekend. I'm turning off the technology and enjoy some time before the SuperBowl. See you all Monday.

Weblog

Business 2.0: Why blogs mean business.

Folks have forgotten that blogs work because people have something to say and others find what they say valuable. Our business culture works the same way — it runs on the currency of influence, authority, and relationships. People who have strong and well-informed opinions command respect and become influencers; they win deals, drive decisions, and ultimately determine the fate of companies. The thirst for high-end business information — the kind that makes people feel like influencers — has created a $15 billion professional publishing market in the United States alone.

The only thing I would add is that blogs and their companion RSS feeds create an environment that allows you to process information much more effectively. When the formation of opinions takes place in an environment where there are multiple original sources and where comment and, yes, criticism are encouraged, you are bound to get better opinions or at least more accurate ones.  Email was a big jump is speeding that process up.  As for publishing, blogs are a quantum leap ahead of email.

[Scott Young's Radio Weblog]