Since December much of my focus at work has been on scaling a taxing Web application to meet an upcoming demand. This has afforded me to play with some really cool toys such as Amazon CloudFront, memcached, XDebug and APC. As our load-testing (using Grinder) winds down it looks like we’ll be launching our app on a combination of physical hardware and virtual machines. We rolled our own content delivery network (cdn) instead of going with CloudFront. memcached is truly our savior as it allows us to prime a cache for all of our logins and it helps as a PHP session store as well. APC is awesome at reducing load on our NetApps. We’re in the final stages of using XDebug to figure out just where the pain points in our software are and I’m hopeful our developers will be able to tune this pig down in time for our launch. Fun times.

On the home front I’ve scaled out my TV interests to include some fun documentaries. I watched The World At War last year and enjoyed it despite being long and drawn-out. I’m currently watching The Men Who Killed Kennedy and finishing up The Universe Season 1. I’m enjoying both and I’m looking forward to the next three seasons of The Universe. I’d also recommend Food Inc. – it’s short and powerful. It’s been fun taking a break from my usual menagerie of soap operas!

My fantasy football team is an epic FAIL. Couple that with a competitive league and stick a fork in me. However I just had my first dentist appointment in over 10 years where I didn’t receive bad news so that makes up for it.

I’ve been wrangling some awful software at work lately. I won’t name names but let’s just say the author rhymes with Sminternet Shmoo.
Garbage. So to help offset the pain and suffering I started toying around with Python at work. I wrote 3 MySQL admin tools in one afternoon last Friday, and all 3 didn’t even take up more than a page. As a language it’s pretty compact yet still very readable. I’m still struggling with some basic concepts but I enjoy the challenge.

Boondock Saints 2: All Saint’s Day opens next week. Excited doesn’t quite describe it.

Transformers 2 was awesome! More robots, more fighting. Not as special as the first movie but great nonetheless. I’ve been watching a few westerns lately. Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, The Wild Bunch, Duck You Sucker – all great flicks. Gran Torino is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long time. The Proposal was cute; Ryan Reynolds is always entertaining. Rachel and I are excited for Harry Potter this week!

I lost 700GB of data from a 1.5TB LaCie drive. This is now the second LaCie drive I’ve had fail on me; both using an HFS+ filesystem. Another company on my shitlist.

Speaking of shitlist – the city of Chicago is officially on the list now. The city’s red light cameras are a revenue-generating ploy permitted by the resident yuppies’ belief that we are our own worst enemy. They aren’t installed at the most dangerous intersections despite the rhetoric of the local windbag kickback-abusing politicians who insist the cameras are to make the city a safer place to drive. Schaumburg residents aren’t as bone-headed as Chicagoans – they complained to city hall and all cameras are being removed. +1 to suburbs.

Rachel graduates with her MBA in four weeks and I’m excited to have my wife back!

Summer is almost here and along with it comes the year’s biggest movies. Rachel and I enjoyed Wolverine, although I spent way too much time trying to figure out who the different (irrelevant, it turns out) mutants were. Before that, though, was I Love You Man, a funny movie with Paul Rudd, filled with plenty of Rush references and guy jokes. Can’t go wrong with that. I’ve watched Fanboys twice now and I think it’s really clever. Plus, the scene with Kristin Bell in a slave-Leia bikini at the end was the icing on the cake for an all-around funny flick. Star Trek opened last weekend and Rachel and I pulled our typical Sunday morning $5.50 special. Movie nachos FTW. The new Kirk was awesome, along with the rest of the characters. I’m a huge Romulan fan and I didn’t even know the Big Bad was a Romulan until they said it about 3 times in the film. That’s how mesmerized I was. The “reboot” was twisted into a classic sci-fi time-travelling, alternate reality-style cliche, but it worked. One of my all-time favorite movies; it was that good. As far as I’m concerned, give J.J. Abrams the keys and let that boy drive. Sign those actors to contracts for multiple sequels!

Knots Landing season 1 was terrible. Season 2, on the other hand, well, that’s a different story. Donna Mills is smoking hot and brings to the table exactly what that show needs – a villain. All of my favorite soaps have villains that I’m drawn to: J.R. Ewing, Alexis Carrington, Amanda Woodward, Al Swearengen, Chuck Bass, and now, Abby Cunningham. If only Falcon Crest was available on DVD …

We’re in the process of hiring a handyman service to fix a cabinet and a leaky toilet. I subscribed to Angieslist.com for the month to get the best quality reviews and I have some estimates coming in this weekend. We’re also going to install a new patio door in the back because the one we have currently is in poor condition. Finally, we’re talking about remodelling the master bathroom because the floor is going to have to get ripped up to fix the leak anyways. I didn’t know bathrooms were so expensive!

Rachel and I started the new show Castle recently. It has Nathan Fillion and it’s a really good show. It’s kind of like Bones – crime drama with sexual tension between the two leads. Fillion is hilarious so that’s why we started watching the show. We’re also watching Dollhouse – the new show by Joss Whedon. We’re huge Whedon fans so of course we stuck with his new show for the first 5 episodes. It finally started to get good last week (episode 6) so I’m excited to see if it picks up steam. Finally, Battlestar Galactica ended its run last Friday. I liked the finale but didn’t love it. Some finales are awesome (Buffy, Angel, Six Feet Under) and some are downright terrible (The Sopranos) and BSG’s was somewhere in the middle leaning towards the awesome side.

Also, I ranked up to Colonel in Conquer Club. I’m now ranked in the top 200 players on the site. This is because I am awesome.

It’s freezing in Chicago. Literally. Walking about two blocks to my car last night was miserable. People who say Chicago is a “nice” city are crazy. Sure it’s a lot of fun but “nice” is hardly the word for it. For starters, the side streets are largely ignored by the snow-plowing Powers That Be. Every car entombed in snow and if you don’t have all-wheel drive you can forget about actually leaving your parking space. I must have hit 30 massive potholes on my way home last night. One nearly swallowed my car and I was very lucky to not lose a tire or worse. Chicago is the pits in the winter.

We’re about to start a three day weekend and I’m extending mine a bit with some help from a vacation day. I look forward to playing Magic Online and watching Dallas season 10 which I’ll be buying later this morning. Other highlights of my weekend include joining more Jyhad Online games (Vampire: The Eternal Struggle played online, my latest craze!), watching some Angel season 4 (I hate Connor) and catching up on Hustle/90210/Office episodes. I also have the lofty goal of finishing a novel I’ve been working on since October. Finally, if all goes well this weekend, I’ll be just short of Colonel on Conquer Club. Not bad after 1 year of membership!

This week’s upcoming menu includes my first attempt at shepherd’s pie along with some Ed Barton orange cheese pity pizza action. I’ll probably have to follow that up with some boring chicken recipes to make up for the yummy pizza goodness.

At the current rate I update this blog I’ll see you again in March.

Here are some gift ideas for the 2008 holiday season:

• Magic Online gift certificates
• Argyle socks in black and navy blue varieties
• Jockey XL white crew neck undershirts
• Brooks Brothers gift certificates
• Bagel slicer

Well all of my TV shows are in full swing. I feel flooded already and some of them just started! I dumped Californication because it’s over the top unbelievable. I was hoping to dump Prison Break this season but darnit it’s good again! Picking up Mad Men was a smart decision. The Unit is the best show on TV pound for pound. Gossip Girl is still my current fav but that’s because I like guilty pleasure shows. Same goes for 90210. One thing is certain – I’m still not over Kelly Taylor!

Finally! I thought it would never end. I’m not a huge fan of summer at all. Rachel and I have been so busy this summer – weekend after weekend. I’m not a huge fan of being busy :) We went to Put-In-Bay on Sunday with Rachel’s parents and sister and had a blast. It was a very busy Labor Day weekend but we had fun.

We saw Genghis at the Woodward’s this weekend and he looks skinny but happy. He’s turned in to quite a hunter – mice, moles and even a rabbit are some of his kills this year. Apparently he was stalking a wild turkey but decided that was a bad idea and didn’t attack. There’s always next year, Genghis.

Rachel and I gave Attila a bath yesterday. We’ve had him for over 7 years I think and we’ve never given him a bath. Well he’s a fat kitty and has trouble reaching his lower back so we finally decided to give him a hand. We closed up the bathroom and readied a few towels and would you believe it he didn’t mind the bath at all! In fact he was purring when we were drying him off. We didn’t get his head wet so I think that may have calmed his nerves. Attila now smells like J&J Baby Shampoo instead of cat poop and greasy fur. Handsome!

We’re off to see Nightwish and Sonata Arctica on Saturday!

Well I got a new iPhone 3G. It’s a really cool device although it lacks two key features: 3G connection sharing (NetShare is not the perfect answer) and a SSH client. Aside from that, it’s really fun. All sorts of time-wasters like Facebook, MySpace, Last.fm and Yelp make it very dangerous to drive in traffic with!

Noel, Matt and I took a mid-July boys weekend to Vegas. The boys gambled and we didn’t get into any trouble. We watched the Silva UFC fight at The Palms. I was very hesitant to even go but it wasn’t long into the event and I became a fan of UFC!

The new Dragonforce album is spectacular. Epic power metal is so awesome!

Rachel and I have seen The Dark Knight twice already. We’ll probably watch Wanted and Hancock this weekend. Dallas season 9 is terrible – I’ve had it for 1.5 weeks and I’m only half-way through it. Noel got his Xbox 360 back and has assured me that there are terrorists to be killed this weekend. The chimney sweeps bent us over for $375 to remove the birds and put a new cap on. Suck.