The fact that we are here today to debate raising America ’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the US Government can not pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. Increasing America ’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here.' Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

- Senator Barack H. Obama , March 2006

I feel the need to uncover some things that you will have to pry from my cold dead hands. These things are critical to my happiness, so don't even attempt to deprive me of them.

• Music. In particular, 90's grunge/alternative and rock. Sirius keeps me sane.
• My family. They're the best and most reliable people on the Earth. I love them.
• God. He keeps me company, looks over me, and provides guidance. He's always there for me to talk to.
• ICE, not meth, but the internal combustion engine. No battery-powered car will replace the ICE.
• Electronics. It's not a weird obsession. You're just jealous your career isn't your job too.
• How I Met Your Mother. It's the best show of this decade.
• Beer. Man has spent hundreds of years perfecting it so I can enjoy it.
• 24-hour news channels. I never thought I would miss them as much as I do. I have to stay informed or I feel like an idiot.
• Internet. It provides hours of entertainment and answers almost all of my questions.
• Basic necessities. Of course you can't take away my shelter, water, etc.

These are the things, in no particular order, that keep me going. The inspiration was music, therefore it was first on the list. I wish we could go back to the 90's so we could get some more good music. The Black Eyed Peas just aren't cutting it.

A lot of people have really given Apple some flack about the newest version of iTunes. Of course, I have things that I wish would've been done, but overall, I believe it's a step in the right direction.

Many people are complaining about the icon. I can't believe people get so outraged by something so insignificant. Would you rather have the Windows Media Player icon? I didn't think so.

Others have critiqued the monochrome icons in the Library. I think they look slick. Just my opinion. This leads to the next complaint that you can't distiguish between the app being in focus or running in the background. Honestly, I don't like that the apps get brighter white when they're out of focus. Does it matter if iTunes is in focus? If it's on top, that's close enough for me. The stoplight seems to give it away for me.

Oh yeah, the stoplight. It's sideways. Who cares? It conserves screen real estate. I'm ok with that.

On to my gripe... That's right, just one. How can Apple release a new version of iTunes and completely neglect Remote.app for iOS4? I need to remotely control my music, but I can't even connect my phone to my iTunes library. I've been waiting for Retina support, and this is making the wait even more unbearable.

In case you haven't heard, Posterous, my website host has been battling a DoS attack (link to more info about DoS) for the last few days. Sorry for any outages. 

As of this moment, it seems the attack has susided, but with the nature of this form of attack, you never know when the attack will return. Please bear with me as Posterous and I try to combat this attack.

Other sources of information:

• Posterous' Initial Information Release
• Posterous' Follow-up

In May, the company I work for made the dive into a virtual environment. I must say, I love the capabilities of the VMware environment. Restarting a server went from a 5-10 minute process to a 1 minute process, 2 servers replaced 10, and the ability to move Guest OS's from one host to other is absolutely amazing. Of course our implementation wasn't without fault, but it went fairly well.

Fairly well... Once our consultants split, we discovered that our backup solution wasn't cutting it. We had purchased Symantec's Backup Exec 2010 with the VMware APIs that allow vCenter to take snapshots and back those up. In case of failure, we just restore the entire VM from the snapshot. Easy, right? Yeah, if we could ever get a backup. Our data transfer rates were somewhere around the 200MB/min mark. When you're moving over 2TB of data...well, that takes several days. That's unacceptable.

I won't go through all the steps of what I did to troubleshoot the problem, but it went something like this. VLAN'd off the iSCSI traffic, created a new subnet for iSCSI traffic, moved iSCSI traffic to a dedicated switch, enabled jumbo frames and updated every single driver and firmware available. At this point we would reach 600MB/min if we were lucky. I spent weeks on the phone with IBM, VMware and Symantec, trying every little solution they offered. Again, no help.

Over a month later, the problem is solved and you'll never believe what it was... well maybe you will since you've seen the title of this post. The Backup Exec/VMware API doesn't work as expected. Nope, not at all. I would love to call Symantec and inquire about the issue, but I've spent 4 hours on hold before and never got issues resolved with them.

Here is our workaround. Hopefully this will save someone some trouble one day. I had to install the Backup Exec agent on every Guest OS, just as if they were physical servers. Now we get speeds closer to 2,000MB/min which is a lot more acceptable. I would much rather use the VMware API, but for now, this is the only way we can get reasonable speeds. Maybe Symantec can squash some bugs soon and I can use the product as advertised.

Disclaimer: This post is meant to be informative for others troubleshooting slow data transfer speeds using Backup Exec 2010 and the VMware API.

Recently I migrated from Blogger and Wordpress to Posterous since I read lots of great things and saw many people migrating as well. Sometimes you shouldn't follow the crowd without realizing what you're getting into. Here's my problems with Posterous at its current state. Hopefully this will help educate you on some of the quirks you may face. 

1. No "Save as Draft." Are you kidding me? Where am I supposed to jot my ideas, compose my posts, and let them sit for later proofreading? Apparently Text Edit on my Mac like I'm doing now. This blows my mind. I guess they're taking a new approach to things with this "email a post and we'll blast it out," idea that leaves traditional bloggers out in the cold. Call me selfish, but I'm thinking for us people that use our editors to collect our thoughts and create posts, that feature should be included.
2. CSS. Many people that want a simple blog don't care about this, but for people that are remotely interested in customizing a site for them, access to the CSS is necessary. I don't want to have to manually override with my CSS all the time.
3. The layout/features of the post editor. Why hide things like tags, date, and Autopost options? That stuff is important. Since it's hidden, I almost always forget to go check/uncheck boxes and tag my posts. Where is the geotagging box? On the other hand, the media uploader is nice.
4. Search. It doesn't work…at all. End of story.
5. Visitor Stats. Not that any other service I've used has done a phenomenal job of this, but I'd like to have more traffic stats inside Posterous. Instead, they have made it easy to add Google Analytics, which is nice, but I want something easier.
6. Speed. I don't know if it's the large about of scripting that's going on for the various functions on the site or the 3-5 page redirects I get every time I navigate to a page on my site, but Posterous seems very slow.
7. Mobile Support.  Posterous boasts about their mobile theme being included and ready to go, but I'm not impressed. Lots to improve there.

I'll jump off my soap box now. Hopefully these things will be addressed in future releases, but until then, be mindful of its limitations before committing.

Stick around for "What's Right with Posterous."

Last Tuesday, Apple opened the flood gates for eager fans to pre-order their iPhones. I was one of those people, awake and poised at the keyboard by 8 am, waiting for them to flip the “go” switch. Once the switch was flipped, it was a whole different game. AT&T’s backend (the part that checks to make sure you’re eligible for an upgrade and have a contract and all) crapped out for 90% of the day. I attempted to order at least 15 times throughout the day.

Around 11 pm, when I returned home, I was finally able to get the whole process completed. When I looked down to see the “ships by” date, I noticed it said sometime in July. Wait, what? I hoped it was a fluke, but then some people on Twitter were getting the same thing. It was true… the first wave of iPhone was sold out. It was too late. I didn’t want to cancel to try going to a store on Thursday and risk not getting one at all. After all, the next day, the wait time increased by another two weeks.

I guess I can’t complain too much, as there are a lot of other users in the same boat and some that are on the boat two weeks behind me. Either way, when you’ve been waiting for so long, waiting longer sucks. At least I’m able to order it, and I’ll practice patience in waiting until July 6-8.

Hopefully next time AT&T and Apple would have learned from this launch what it needs to do to prepare for such an event. Who am I kidding? AT&T doesn’t realize it should place a micro cell for events such as graduations or that their customers shouldn’t have to buy their own MicroCell to patch up AT&T’s dead zones.

In case you didn't hear, iPhone 4 will be here on June 24th. I'll be one of those fools that will pre-order it, I believe. I can honestly say this is the first thing I've ever pre-ordered and I'll probably even wait in a line for it.

Here's some of the things that are appealing to me:

• HD Video Camera - Now shoots HD video as well as a 5MP camera. I am often in a situation where carrying an additional camera, like my D60, is way too much, and I feel the the 3G's camera doesn't cut it. This should fill the gap.
• Front Facing Camera - Now you can video conference using the iPhone. Initially this feature seems pointless to me. With it's wifi-only and iPhone4-to-iPhone4-only limitations, I'll be chatting by myself. I have one friend with an iPhone and who knows when/if he'll upgrade to iPhone 4. Apple says that it's video chat protocol is based on open standards, but getting AIM on board before the announcement would have been preferred. Also, 3G calling would make it far more useful. I can't say I'm ever anywhere with wifi except my house or my parents' house. If I'm at home, why would I use a phone to video chat? I'm in this one for the future.
• A4 Processor and Extended Battery Life - Amazing technology in the processor that no one really knows about and the extra talk/surf time is very welcomed.
• Multitasking - Just because I can. I rarely use apps like Pandora and Sirius on my iPhone because I can't do anything else while listening. This should open up a new floodgate.

Four months after the announcement, the iPhone 3G and 3GS now support MMS. I must say it is quite nice to finally have features that almost every phone manufactured after 2004 has. However, it should be noted that it's not Apple's fault. The phone has supported MMS for a while now, just AT&T has not allowed it.

All you have to do is plug up your phone, check for updates, and the carrier patch will be applied. I had to restart my phone for the patch to take effect. The whole process took under a minute.

Now we're just waiting for tethering. I wonder how long it will take AT&T to pull that one together.

Happy MMSing everyone!

My Mac has 17.5 GB of audio files and 140.8 GB of video files in iTunes. Now, that's a lot more than my 16GB iPhone can hold, in case you couldn't do the math. iTunes allows me to select what movies I want to sync as well as which TV shows to sync. I wish I had a little bit more control of the TV shows thing, but I can live with that.

My complaint here is that not all of my audio files fit on my phone. I'm using the "Sync only checked song and videos" option for my phone which means I have a large selection of my music library unchecked. I check the songs I want on my iPhone and uncheck the ones that I'll just listen to on my computer. Which brings me to my problem.

When I'm just hanging out around the house, I put on some music and let it play through. iTunes decided that since I don't have songs checked, I never want to hear them. Well, I do. I just don't have room for them on my iPhone.

Thinking that Apple has a solution for everything, I checked my iTunes preferences, sure there would be an option to "play unchecked songs." I was wrong. When an unchecked song comes up in the playlist, it is skipped. If I double click the unchecked song, it will play, but once it finishes it will move on to the next checked song. Am I the only person that thinks this is painfully annoying?

So let me propose an solution: add a line in the preferences to "Skip unchecked song in playback," so that I can uncheck that box. Thanks!