Me and Chris Anderson, BFF.
Okay, so me and Chris Anderson, Editor in Chief of Wired Magazine aren't best friends, or even friends at all, but I'll be seeing him speak tomorrow at Startup School in Palo Alto at Stanford University. I don't recall how I came across the URL but seeing that it was close by and a bunch of badasses were speaking, I decided to apply. More people want to attend than there are seats so they came up with a few questions to narrow down the list. I got accepted so that means, according to their FAQ, that someone in Sillycon Valley considers me to be a bona-fide hacker (in the classical sense of the word). Sweet!
The application is no longer online but I recall a couple of the things they asked: What is your educational background, what are your favorite tools & why and what's the coolest thing you've built. To which I answered, along the lines of:
| 1. | Finishing up my BS in IS at the University of San Francisco (Dec 14, 2007!!) After a 6 year sabbatical, I returned to school and I'm finishing what I started. |
| 2. | Any type of scripting tool.. bash, AppleScript, VBScript, Powershell you name it. I love scripting because it's so simple yet so powerful. You can write just a few lines of code that affects hundreds or thousands of machines or users. Or you can save yourself literally months of work. |
| 3. | A colocated network in the same building where Google and my other heros host. As a poor Cajun from de bayou, dis is big! It all started out with using shitty leftover 486s running Linux and a cable modem hookup at my house to running real rackable servers at a real data center. Who knew one day I'd own servers that could throw a rock and hit sanjose.ca.us.undernet.org? |
Speaking of, today I purchased two of the awesomest machines. A friend hooked me up with two slightly used Rackable servers. Dual duo core Opteron 64-bit processors, half-sized 2U case, 4GB of RAM and 4 142GB SCSI drives. FOUR! That's way too much, actually. I'll be removing some and saving them for backups. And to top it off, the price was so low I can't even list it here. It was the hookup of a lifetime and they aren't even stolen! I had to get new machines though, Microsoft requires that Exchange 2007 run on 64-bit machines and my colocated stuff is currently all 32-bit. The two servers be staying at my office at the law firm until Longhorn is final. Till then, I'll be beta testing Longhorn and testing the final version of Exchange 2007. Thanks MSDN and SA!
To add to all this excitement, my friend Zach and I are going to the SupperHappyDevHouse gathering in Hillsborough for a night of raunchy tech-talk. If you're in the area, you should join us :-D
P.S. If Startup School sounds like something you'd like, you can read some notes from the 2006 conference. I'll also keep an eye out for notes from the 2007 event and keep the blog posted.