On job offers and career management pt II - The end is the beginning is the end

Well, after much consideration and hearing lots of opinions (which I respectfully considered and discarded) I've decided to stay at my current job for now.

You know, sometimes it's not just about the money for me. I would miss the friends I've made (I can't believe I keep calling my coworkers "friends") and I would miss Solaris. And AIX, and Informix and Perl and... and to be completely honest, the offer wasn't all that you know? I mean, I actually heard the words "We only sell Microsoft technologies because if we didn't they would badmouth us to our potential costumers" and _that_ is something I want to stay away from.

And yeah, the title of this post is a reference to "batman and robin", because that's how I feel sometimes when I'm working with likes of "no-time-to-blog"er, penantes, "still offline" sab and "blogui? isso não é da SUN não" alex.

...And I _do_ mean the fellowship part, not the homosexual connoted male in tights thing, ok???

+1

Tuesday Penantes switched.

I'm counting the number of "converts" I've brought into the light ... does anybody know how many I'll need so I get a free toy from Steve?

Some people are just... different!

"As the climate grows more and more desperate for record labels, their answer to their mostly self-inflicted wounds seems to be to screw the consumer over even more. A couple of examples that quickly come to mind:

* The ABSURD retail pricing of Year Zero in Australia. Shame on you, UMG. Year Zero is selling for $34.99 Australian dollars ($29.10 US). No wonder people steal music. Avril Lavigne's record in the same store was $21.99 ($18.21 US).
By the way, when I asked a label rep about this his response was: "It's because we know you have a real core audience that will pay whatever it costs when you put something out - you know, true fans. It's the pop stuff we have to discount to get people to buy."
So... I guess as a reward for being a "true fan" you get ripped off.

* The dreaded EURO Maxi-single. Nothing but a consumer rip-off that I've been talked into my whole career. No more.

The point is, I am trying my best to make sure the music and items NIN puts in the marketplace have value, substance and are worth you considering purchasing. I am not allowing Capital G to be repackaged into several configurations that result in you getting ripped off.

We are planning a full-length remix collection of substance that will be announced soon."

Posted by Trent Reznor, as seen on : http://www.nin.com/tr/default.aspx

FARM project (*)

You might have heard me drool about having helped implement the first Rails app at work.

If you read this blog regularly, you might even know that this was a project done in collaboration with penantes.

Now, what has been missing is an overview of the technology used and a brief explanation thereof.

The project itself is little more that a web-based front-end to penantes's voodoo-like perl scripts and it's purpose is solely of giving interested parties a better view of the spell's script's results.

Well, we had an old Dell Poweredge laying around, so that was the machine used. It had an ancient implementation of Red Hat 8 (actually. I think it was vd who installed it) so that had to go. Not so much because it was old, but because it was Red Hat. And no noticeable services running around so a clean install it would be.

For OS we chose FreeBSD. We wasn't our first choice, but Ubuntu didn't correctly recognize the SCSI controllers and the openSolaris DVD was well...a DVD, and Debian 4 was late. The machine at this time didn't have a working network connection and only a CD drive for media. Since FreeBSD is a distant cousin from both Solaris and Mac (I just had to bring this up) it was the next best thing.

The install was easy enough and the software available was pretty much all we needed.
For web serving we have Apache, for database we used Mysql, and has i've said, we used Rails for development. And apart from configuring Apache with fcgid which is a hole new post subject, everything runs just fine for now.

Recommended reading Rails on FreeBSD wiki page.

(*) in case you didn't notice....
FreeBSD
Apache
Rails
Mysql

27th birthday

My favorite birthday presents:

i can't do what???

09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0

or if you prefer...

0x09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0