Vox Backup

Good-bye, Vox.

Well, Vox, it's been an interesting ride.  I think you are still awesome, and I love the way you look and feel.  I'm really sad that you are going and never managed to take off.

If wishes were horses...

Fly safe.

where rumors tread

Most of you have heard by now, but I thought I'd make an announcement here anyway: I have resigned from CCP Games and am returning to the Bay Area in mid-December.  Just about three weeks from now, actually.

I am not entirely certain of the future, but I expect the first few weeks will be involved in me trudging around the country saying hello to various elements of the various families that might have some interest in my presence for that unholy contraption we like to call the "Holidays."  After that, however, all bets are off as I try to get back into the groove after being in Iceland for the past year.

It has been a good trip.  Being out here for the past nine months has taught me a lot about myself, about my relationship with Janine, and about life in general.  I've learned more about what I can and can't handle, what is and is not acceptable in a job, and a bit of Icelandic besides!  Ég tala pínulítið íslensku.  (Okay; I'm not entirely sure that's right.  But it's understandable if you speak the language.)

The reasons for my return are many, but it basically boils down to being homesick and disagreeing with some of the decisions upper management has made regarding employees who actively play EVE Online.  C'est la vie, as they say.  Life moves on.

I am excited to be returning "home" - as much as the Bay Area is my home anyway - and am looking forward to catching up with everybody I've missed in 2007.  See you soon!

PS, those of you curious, Iceland has been quite warm so far.  I don't think the temperature has hit freezing except one or two days, and it's still raining out - no snow, no ice!  I know most places have succumb to the weather already, but Iceland is still chugging along, nice and warm(ish).  Of course, we'll say nothing about the daylight...currently the sun is coming up around 9:30 AM and going away at 4:30 PM.

Also, I saw the aurora the other night!  It was faintly visible in the city so I hopped in the car and drove out to my favorite spot by the lighthouse, but by that point the clouds had rolled in.  Shame.

Welcome to Vox, Fudge!

The word has reached mine ears that Fudge now has her very own theme on Vox!  Way to go, awesome puppy gets an awesome theme.  Thanks to Stacey for doing the art and the Vox team for approving it.  We always wanted to see Fudge on here, now we can.  Yay!

In other news, not much to report.  I am back in the US for two weeks visiting Janine.  Trip is going well.  Life in Iceland is continuing apace.  Work, play, work, and more work are my general activities.  Oh and stopping to take some time to go out from time to time.

I still am not sure what to do with two blogs really.  Keep thinking I want to start keeping a tech blog and talk about programming and similar things that I am doing.  But most of my readers are on LJ already, so I'd hate to split them.  Of course, having a public face I can just point people to would be nice.  Ah well, thoughts for another day.

Hmm, I don't see anything new on the compose page.  I think the top menu has been redesigned some - at least, I don't remember the pulled out bar with common links and Help and such.  Tip section seems new too.  Looking good, Vox, looking good.  Like the space theme too.

In retrospect, I really like Vox (although I still think of it as NotComet when I am feeling nostalgic).  It's a solid product.  I am quite optimistic about its future!

life updates and a QotD

People do many different things to cope with stress, loss, and "bumps in the road". How do you handle stress and hard times? 

Music.  Find an earworm and let it ride.  Presently I am dealing with Janine's return to the States by sticking Alizée's Moi... Lolita on repeat.  Music GO!

In other news, I figured I'd hop back to Vox and see what's up.  The posting UI has changed some, but I can't really point at any one thing and say "that's new".  Oh - there's an "embed" button that I've not seen before.  Neat.

Okay, I'm going to share some photos from the recent past here in Iceland.

Bales of Hay

They wrap them in plastic.  Apparently the hay stays green through the winter that way, giving their livestock nutrients so they don't die from malnutrition.  I wonder how this worked before they had baling machines.  (I can't imagine wrapping these by hand?)

Unknown Village

This is some village we visited on an adventure while Janine was here.  It was very idyllic.  Quiet, kids playing, some Father at the church standing outside and talking to us.

Icelandic Horses

They're short.  Very short.  Well, their heads were at about chest level for me.  They also apparently have stylish hair.  Awesome.

Cave Wall

The singing cave.  I didn't want to leave.  It's not very big, but quite interesting.  You can see some pretty amazing dates in there - 1700s and 1800s.  Of course, I could go in and carve "1605" on the wall, but I choose to believe that the dates are accurate.

2AM Sunset

Sunset ... and sunrise.  This was about the lowest the sun got, then it started flying its way back up into the sky.  Shot from my front porch, this was just an amazing view.  Gotta love it.

Anyway.  Enough photos.

Iceland is great.  The job is entertaining and interesting, but it's not very challenging.  I'm doing web work, but not the kind of work that I was doing at Six Apart - no scaling, nothing that really pushes me to find tough solutions or look at things from a low level perspective.  It's kinda sad, that's one thing I really enjoyed at 6A - there were challenges to be solved, problems to find solutions for.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining.  I'm doing good work and people are happy with it - EVE players and managers alike!  It'd just be nice to do something that required a little more brainpower.  Oh well.  Maybe when I go to Atlanta there will be more challenging work.

Current plans put me out there next summer sometime.  The details are still being worked out, of course.  Fingers crossed and all that.

Oh, I'll be back in the Bay Area sometime in October, it looks like.  I'll come by the office and say hi sometime.  :)

Ta ta for now!

happy birthday

Well, happy birthday Vox.  You're now a year old from the very first entry ever.  That was back when it was called Comet and we didn't know what the name was going to be.  That first post was from when the infrastructure got setup "for real" and we had most of the components in place.

The site has certainly come a long, long way from where it used to be.  It's rather impressive what Vox is like now.  While I don't really use it much (everybody I know is on LJ and I hate posting in two places), whenever I do come back it's just striking how much more polished it feels.  Vox is beautiful.  The schemes, the layouts, it's just a joy to work with.

Shine on, Vox.  Shine on.

penny for your thoughts

It seems that IIS is single threaded.  Everything online says that it is not, but I know for a fact that my IIS will only serve one ASP request at a time.  Is this due to some configuration error?  I don't see anything related to this subject in the configuration screens I can find.  Or is there some underlying issue that I'm unaware of?

I found some IIS manager on MSDN, but it doesn't seem to have installed any icons so I don't know where it ended up.  I've got some sleuthing to do.  It has a readme that talks about what to do once it's open, but I can't seem to find where it went.  (Oh, dpkg -L, I miss you...)

Sleep.

IIS and Apache, but more generally...

So, most of you know I've been working for another company (CCP Games) for the past about a month and half or something.  Anyway, they are completely a Microsoft shop.  Windows, Exchange, IIS, etc.  No Unix or Macs in site, really.  Even the artists work in Windows.  It's pretty different from what I've learned at Six Apart/Danga.  In fact, you could probably call it the opposite.

All of the Microsoft software seems designed to make things easier at the expense of making it harder to actually dig in and find the things you're looking for.  Notably, I am sorely missing things that might tell me what is going on.  Right now IIS is sitting in the background spinning trying to serve a page.  I'm getting no output.  I'm very unsure as to how to troubleshoot this.

Sometimes when I hit the page it says remote procedure call failed, and sometimes it spins.  Further investigation reveals that it is every other time.  Okay, dig out the Event Viewer, which is Microsoft's way to show what's going on.  Ah, in the System log, there's an error that happens when the page spins:

The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{0C0A3666-30C9-11D0-8F20-00805F2CD064}
 to the user ...snip....  This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.

For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.

Well, if that isn't helpful, I don't know what is.  It wasn't doing this before I went on vacation.  Well, let's take a short trip down the Google path and see if I can find anything useful.  Well, I found some info.  Dug through the registry and found that the above is referring to the Machine Debug Manager.  I pulled up Component Services and am trying to figure out why it can't launch?  It seems like it should work, the various accounts there have access to launch it.

In further exploration, it seems like this is caused by ASPCache expiring.  I had downloaded a demo version because I couldn't find the full one on the internal site.  So now I need to actually take the time to dig it out of the network somewhere and get the real one installed.  Then hopefully things will work again.  Hopefully.

Back to work... exciting!

merry christmas

Well, I'm hanging out here on Christmas day - alone in my house, except for the company of our dearest little Fudge and the two rats.  It's pretty cool, it's been a really low key day, and I like that.  Jesse and Nicole are heading over here in a bit for some dinner and movie and stuff.

Anyway, I realized I hadn't posted in my Vox in a while.  Figured I should take a peek back over here and see how things are going.  The service looks great as it always has - the front page (logged in) looks a lot cleaner, although it seems to emphasize media over posts?  (I had to scroll to see posts.)

Merry Christmas, and now, guests are here!

oh snap

Hello from a hotel in NYC.  Some random place near the JFK airport.  I woke up early today, way before my alarm, I guess my body is telling me that it thinks it's really late to be asleep.  Damn timezones.  Yay for the Internet to keep me occupied, though.

Flying back to SF today.  Woohoo long flights.  Not much else to say right now, so, bubye.

Hello from Iceland!

Good morning!

Although I realize it's not morning where you are, probably.  All you folk back at Six Apart are probably snug as a bug in the rug, sleeping off Friday night's transgressions.  Woo!

I'm here in Iceland!  I made it safe and sound.  There were a lot of annoyances on the trip - my luggage was lost, they confiscated half of my alcohol, and I missed the FlyBus and had to wait 4 hours for the next one.  Past that, the trip has been really great so far.

Highlights include spending time in a neat bakery this morning drinking some coffee and eating a donut while watching the people go by.  On the annoying side, walking to the office (30 minutes) when the temperature is barely above 0 (celsius) and raining is not so fun.

I have taken pictures, but don't have the cord for my camera to offload them.  I will try to find one sometime and then upload some pictures.  Worst case, you'll have to wait until I return.  Woe is you!

Not much else to say.  This weekend should involve much wandering around.  Later.