Just a quick update...I'm still alive. I've been super busy with moving and getting settled in with the new job and city and new schools and all that jazz. It's been hectic. Rackspace is soooo worth the "life upheaval". (Google "rackspace castle" to get an idea of where I work. I love this place haha.)

I'll post more techie stuff when I get some time...

First up, this isn't one of those "woe is me" blog posts. My life is chaotic...and I love it. It's hectic, yes, but I operate best in "panic mode". haha. Probably some quirk that carried over from my years in the military. I dunno.

I put in my two week notice where I work because I accepted an offer from Rackspace Hosting, so my current company has been on me to document all of the in's and out's of the stuff I built while I was the Database Administrator...

During the summer of 2010 I had a nerve-wracking interview with Google. It was fun, mind you, but it was stressful. I passed the phone screenings with flying colors, flew to the west coast, underwent a grueling all day interview, and flew home confident I'd impressed them. Then I got the call saying they weren't moving forward with me. I was really bummed, but the timing just wasn't right. "It wasn't meant to be", everyone told me..."Your time is coming", they said. I got...

This seems to pop up a lot lately in Linux and Mac circles...

The presence of viruses for a particular platform does indeed point to security issues. However, supposing the reverse to be true in all manners is a logical fallacy (Denying the antecedent, for those interested in philosophy). It goes like this: "If a platform has viruses, it is insecure. Linux does not have viruses, so it is not insecure."

The problem with this logic is that viruses, while...

I have a few ETL boxen that handle insane amounts of data every night. Hundreds of billions of rows of data get extracted from our OLTP databases, transformed, and then loaded into our datawarehousing machines. Needless to say, we're running into serious networking bottlenecks that are causing some ETL operations on larger databases to take 10+ hours, and each night we can watch the gigabit links on each of our ETL servers peg out at 100%. It's getting so bad that we have connections that get...