24 hours away from Vladville

Every now and then I am entitled to a weird personal post… So I’ve spent the past 7 days building the new clusters and systems, mostly stuff for my personal development and test/troubleshooting and it finally crashed me. I spend most of my 20 hour workdays in front of a monitor coding, hacking, tuning, analysing… not lifting 80lb servers and bleeding profusely over cheap motherboards. Yesterday around noon I just couldn’t take it anymore, sat down and the next thing I remember is waking up around 1 PM today.

Celeron D, 64Bit, DEP, Dual Core
First of all, let me come out of the closet on Celeron processors. My entire next-gen Vladlab is being built on these and I am impressed. Not only are these Celeron D processors Dual Core, but they are also 64bit (64EMT) and they have that no-execute bit that Windows tries to emulate with DEP. Best part, they run cool and cheap – at $80 a chip this puny little Celeron D is beating up my P4 3.2G E which costs more than 3 times as much. Talk about wasting too much money on P4 and HyperThreading.. again, Dual Core. Need I say more?

SBSshow.com
Now that I’m back up and going through 800 emails – I have good news. We’re over 4,000 downloads of the first show which makes it over 5,000 total. Looks like my long-standing claim that most SBSers are not ITPRO / consultant crowd is coming to surface. I am shocked at the amount of traffic and positive feedback coming in from everyone. We’re taping our third episode later today, it will be a far more serious topic on disaster planning and business continuity.

What happened while I was gone?
Haven’t been connected for 24 hours, how much weird stuff can possibly happen? Well, according to my RSS subscriptions, quite a bit. First, the cast of Star Trek is re-enacting The War of Worlds on public radio. Then my buddies at Google are paying $1 to everyone that downloads Firefox and installs Google Toolbar. To top that off, Linspire is offering to replace all Windows computers in South Korea with Linux for just $5 million, saving tat country about quarter billion in licensing fees (roughly 10 cents per head). And to top it all off: Pirates open fire on cruise ship off Somalia. Pirates? Argh, patch eye and parrot? Talk about a strange, strange world.