Pink the Pit Bull may not be your average Pit Bull. However, I think more Pit Bulls are like her than you hear about in the news. She loves to watch TV and sit in your lap. This used to be fine when she was a little pup. Now, she’s 65lbs! She’s one of the best dogs I’ve ever had. If you’re looking for a good dog, I highly recommend a Pit Bull rescue in Charlotte, NC. They do a great job socializing their dogs.
My wife loves to garden and this year she planted a few sunflowers. I was expecting some “normal sized” flowers. I didn’t realize that she had planted Mammoth Sunflowers. In just a few weeks, these things shot up. One is about 12 feet tall. The bees are loving them!
Pink the Pit Bull loves her bones. She cracks me up when she walks around with them like they’re a Stogie. Maybe she could be featured on Cigar Aficionado?.
Sometimes it’s just too hot outside to rock a fat knot.
My wife and I have been enjoying Entourage episodes courtesy of the Spartanburg County Public Library. Ari Gold, one of the main characters, is always rocking a fat knot. You gotta love it! I was pleased to find out that the HBO Website has a complete listing of all of the music from the show. It’s broken down by season/episode. I was trying to find information about a song from one of the episodes and it was easy to find. Now, I’m off to iTunes to make a purchase…
On June 21st, my wife, brother-in-law, and I were in downtown Greenville, SC. We went out to dinner and then walked around downtown. We heard about some live music down at the Bohemian Cafe and we decided to check it out. Marvin King and The Blues Revival Band were playing. Marvin has a son, Marcus, that plays in the band. Marcus ROCKS … and he’s only 11 years old. This guy is a prodigy. Check out the video on YouTube:
If you ever have a chance to see them play live, go for it. You won’t be disappointed.
Got this image from Reggie Riser. He knows he needs to work on rocking a fatter knot, but he’s got the Seer Sucker suit down. Keep rocking the seer, Reggie. Alabama Player Style.
Tonight my wife had a “Girl’s night out.” She went out to dinner with some of her friends to chat and catch up.
So, I popped in our copy of Gladiator
and watched an awesome film one more time. In Gladiator, Russell Crowe stars as Maximus Decimus Meridius.
Maximus is a Roman General that, after many wars and battles, longs to return home to his wife and son.
That is his only request when asked what “Rome’s Greatest General” would like for winning their final major battle.
Later, Maximus finds himself betrayed and he lives as a slave. Trying to earn his freedom and revenge
on his betrayers, he fights as a gladiator. The skills that he honed in battle now aid him in the arenas. He unites
his fellow gladiators and they overcome tremendous adversaries. I love this movie. I love pulling for
that beaten down hero to bounce back and layeth the smacketh down.
On July 18th, 2008, my fellow Import Soldiers and I will lose a friend and a leader: Reggie Riser. He’s resigned so that he can return to
his family. He’s spent the last 9 months away from them. Sure, it’s not quite as long as the nearly 3 years that Maximus was away from his family in the movie.
Maximus didn’t have to suffer schedule compression, late night project plan escalation, or resource shortages. (at least not in the same way… Maximus didn’t have the BlackBerry) There are a lot of books about leadership
and management and the like. While I certainly believe in formal education, I don’t think that great leaders became great by reading these books
(or blogging about them). I think leadership is something that lives in some people. When these people are presented with hardships, challenges, or
even BLOCKER jira issues, they step up and this leadership comes out — naturally. These people are not arrogant. They work, live, and lead among the people.
They take an active role in the battles just like Maximus. Reggie Riser is one of these people. He’s been a very valuable resource for our team and
he will be missed. Good luck, Double-R!
What we do in JCT echoes in the Go-Live.
We who are about to code salute you.
Strength & Honor.
My uncle contacted me this week about problems with his PC. He has a Dell running Windows XP. (No, I have not been successful in converting all of my relatives over to non-Windows systems.) He was having problems starting his machine after upgrading his virus scanning program (AVG). I have used various Linux Live CDs in the past to recover data from machines, so my plan was to use one to get his machine going again. I had a Knoppix CD laying around, but it was a little dated, so I decided to try something new. I did a quick google and found Trinity Rescue Kit (TRK). It was a relatively small download (about 100MB) so I grabbed a copy. It booted right up on my uncle’s PC and even offered the option of exposing his drive as a SMB share. I was able to tar and bzip his important files, and then copy them over to my Mac for archiving to DVD. (The Mac allowed me to easily find and browse my uncle’s SMB shares that were set up by TRK) Once I knew his data was safe, I reinstalled XP and added the programs he would normally use. His machine is back in good working order. Not sure what caused his problems originally — but it could be something related to this. TRK also includes virus scanning and partitioning tools if you think you might be battling a virus or some other disk issue. If you ever encounter a similar situation, I highly recommend a live cd like TRK to help get things going again.
The 4th of July Fat Knot paired with the Seer Sucker Suit.
This morning my wife and I mapped out a new bike ride on Google Earth. The Tour de France starts today so we decided to do a “mini-tour” to get pumped up for it. Our tour was only a 5 mile loop of Clifton, SC — but Clifton has a lot of hills. After this morning’s ride, I can definitely tell that I spend way too much time on a computer… Check out our ride:
To celebrate Independence Day, rockthefatknot.com moved to a new home and got a new look. The site is now hosted by Joyent on a Joyent Accelerator. A while back, I posted about moving as much of my stuff to Python as possible. Now, rockthefatknot.com is running on byteflow (Byteflow is a blog engine that’s written in Python using Django.). I spent a couple of nights this past week working to migrate all of the posts over to byteflow. I got some help from the byteflow-users mailing list and used a handy script from Greg Heartsfield to migrate the data over. I setup an OpenSolaris VM in VirtualBox on my mac to handle all of the migration work. I’ll probably write up another post later with the technical details on the migration. Since the migration is complete, I’m going to celebrate!