Powerful MySQL 5.1 - Cool is an understatement

MySQL 5.1 is here - as I was reading through MySQL's white paper on the new features, I occasionally thought, "yeah, that is cool." The most exciting things though were when I read about some features that made me get excited enough to want to blog about it. There are some totally powerful and powerfully cool features in 5.1

SQL Profiling

For example, the SQL Profiling Utility which lets you see exactly how much time the SQL server did doing what while it logged a profiling session. You can start and stop the session, then look back at each query that happened and then see in microsecond detail what things are taking a long time and which are taking... well, microseconds.
You'll be able to see in certain terms what things are taking a long time and what queries, indexes, or settings or hardware should be improved.

Replication

There are great replication features available that make it more reliable and able to ensure that the master and slave or a whole cluster are correctly in sync. Hurray for row-based replication!

Query Logs

The Slow Query Log and General Query Log are now logged as CSV files, which are accessible (along with any other CSV file) through the MySQL server, which makes it easy to see exactly which queries are taking the longest.

Process List

The show processlist command can now also be accessed through SQL (someone read my thoughts!) which means I can have one thread check whether another thread is currently running a query and how long it has been running, and how many other things are running and then the thread could decide whether it should go ahead or wait or abort. That would have been so hard before, and now it would be pretty simple.

CSV Storage Engine

The CSV Storage Engine gives us a whole new way to think about how to deal with CSV files. You can load any file instantly into MySQL and access it there as a normal table with SQL commands. I could have really used this 5 or 10 years ago, and all my manual work importing CSV files would have been handled in a fraction of the time. A ton of the work that we have to do with programming can now be done with SQL queries instead.

Event Scheduler

There is now an Event Scheduler which makes it easy to optimize tables or execute any other command and set them on a MySQL cron rather than have to depend on (or remember to setup) Linux crons and their accompanying programs.

Table and Index Partitions

There are awesome new indexing features - the coolest is the ability to create Table and Index Partitions. Now queries against sets of data only need to look for the data in a fraction of the table. Say we have web logs that are being added to a database or click through tracking data. Over time it grows and grows until we have millions of records. In the past we'd have to delete data or else summarize it and archive it, at which point we don't actually have all the data available to us anymore, just the summary, or we don't have it at all. If we setup table partitions instead, we can migrate partitions off to other physical locations (meaning we could move a set of the table to another physical disk partition), and the table would just keep plugging along. Meanwhile, the queries that only care about the last week or month, or the last year, as well as the queries that only care about January 3 years ago don't have to look through huge indexes or scan the whole table, they just look in the partitions they need data from and use the indexes for those partitions. That is a huge, HUGE benefit. This is the kind of thing that makes a Google search engine run quickly.

Full-text search enhancements and Plug-ins!

There is enhanced full-text search capability, with even the option to build your own plug-ins.


I haven't read about new features this cool for a long time. It will mean a lot of people being able to use a lot of data more efficiently and more quickly than ever before.

Music available from General Conference!

Last spring, as I've become accustomed to do after each General Conference, I downloaded the talks from the April 2008 sessions. I downloaded the talks and have enjoyed them ever since then. I also remember feeling the Spirit very strongly during the hymns the choirs sang, and I was hoping that I'd be able to download the music as well as the spoken word.

There wasn't a way to download the music without downloading each session as one large .mp3 file. I didn't want to do that, but I did decide to make a comment at the feedback link of the church site, asking whether they might consider making the songs from General Conference available as they do the talks.

I did receive a response from someone at the church thanking me for my suggestion. I don't remember the exact words they said, it didn't promise anything but I do remember that whoever it was that had written to me did think my idea had merit.

Well, six months have passed and we have just had another wonderful conference. Again, the talks were inspiring and music superbly motivational, each being a testimony of the kingdom of God being on the earth.

As I went to download the talks this time, there was a little more to the content of the page than I was used to. There is now a podcast available that automatically updates each conference. This makes it so your mp3 player can be setup to download the talks for you without you having to remember to come back and download the sessions (as if I'd forget). Even better than that, it makes it so you don't have to individually click to download each talk as an mp3, saving them into the folder you setup for them. Rather, it is all taken care of... just set up your subscription to the podcast once. I use WinAmp (I even paid for a Pro version a couple of years ago), but iTunes and many other programs can also subscribe to podcasts.

Well, to my surprise, as I put the podcast into WinAmp, it downloaded the first thing in its list automatically, and it was a hymn! The opening music you hear as the announcer says: 'This is the 178th Semi-annual General Conference of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints'. (Oops, I hope that wasn't an unauthorized transcription- but I think Bonneville Communications might be fine with that much...) So, quickly I looked through the list of mp3 files available in the podcast and all the hymns were there!

I went back to the Church website to see if they might have retroactively made hymns available, or if I might have missed the podcast option before. It was there for April, but no music was available. And then I noticed that there is even a link for just the music starting with this fall's conference!

They took my comment to heart and made the music available! I don't dare think that I'm the only one who asked for it, but if it was my request that made it happen, that's pretty neat. I'm listening to the music right now. It is heavenly.

Here's the mp3 podcast link.

Here's an mp4 podcast link.

Technical Google searches many times lead to irrelevant results

I've used Google from the beginning and it is great... but I was hoping that by now some search problems would be solved. The major feature I find lacking in any search engine is the ability to search for exact matches of any combination of characters. You know, the types of things that show up in programming source code, but usually get ignored by search engines.

Note: The rest of the below is pretty technical, someone who has knowledge of programming using perl or mysql would understand what I'm talking about in the details, but others will understand the gist of what I'm saying if they just skip past the parts that talk about the programming languages that I mention.

I know that MySQL by default doesn't allow full text indexing of the various characters + = , -, etc. and maybe that is why Google isn't able to search for something like '++' and find results for that exact match, but it sure would be handy if I could search for things related to coding in various languages and actually find results related to what I'm looking for.

For example, if I'm looking for help related to a hugely useful and hugely used functionality in Perl, I might look for help with the =~ operator, or ~=, whichever it is, I can never remember, which is why I've tried searching for it from time to time. The problem is, even if I search for that exact phrase with quotes around it- "=~", I don't get any results that have that exact match, unless I'm lucky and just happen to type perl "=~" and then the search for perl happens to show something down in the results with =~ in it. My point is there are tons of things like that which should be search-able, but aren't. There are pages on the web dedicated to explaining how to use =~ in perl, and if I were to search for 'perl "=~"', you would expect that I'd get 200-300 or more results and they'd be totally relevant. Instead, I'm left with nothing really relevant.

Here's another example related to searching for something related to MySQL. This is a lesser used functionality that MySQL has, but it is very valuable from time to time.

:= is a way of assigning a value from within a MySQL statement to a variable so that it can be used again in the WHERE part of the query. It isn't something that is used all the time, so when I forget what the syntax is, I try searching for it on Google. What happens? There are no relevant results. I also try searching for it on MySQL's site, and they have the same problem.

These types of things are pretty annoying. I wonder if any-one has worked on solving this problem. I've searched for another search engine that can handle it, and haven't found anyone yet.

Google was started by and was originally most useful to techies because of the enabling power it gave to those who used it. I think it is time that someone work on the problem of indexing and returning relevant results for technical programming-type phrase searches.

I'm sure it is more than just flipping a few switches, but I'll be waiting right here...

Save the Cursor People!

Careful, if you read this, then you'll know, and you'll be afraid to not join one side or the other...
If you are the non-committal (guenzo!) type, then you should try reading something else so that you can remain blissfully unaware.

I don't think my sister realized the implications of what you are about to read when she forwarded me a link to something that she assumed was something comical:

Subject: What moves the cursor?

What moves the cursor on your monitor when you move your mouse?
Haven't you ever wondered how it works?

Now, through the miracle of high technology, we can see how it is done. With the aid of a screen magnifying lens, the mechanism becomes apparent.

Click on the link below and you will find out. The image may take a minute or two to download and when it appears, slowly move your mouse over the light gray circle and you will see how the magic works.

Follow this link and find out the truth.

http://www.1-click.jp/

A word of advice let them rest once in a while.

If you haven't clicked the link above yet, you must do that before reading on!


To think that I lead music with my mouse sometimes for no reason while waiting for web pages to load. That has got to be a lot of dizzying work for nothing.

I'm ashamed of myself. I thought I knew what was going on behind the scenes; that there was a bunch of over-complicated software to supposedly keep the display of the cursor in sync with the movement of the mouse. It was supposedly a better way of doing it that it had been back in the days where the display was actually exactly tied to the mouse movement, which would mean your mouse could always move even if almost every thing else was locked up... but I guess either way was all a cover-up for cheap labor. The slavers probably switched their explanation of how it worked when the slaves started getting tired too often and not performing their duty quickly enough to look like it was exactly in sync. Maybe that happened when the slave force started getting older and when monitors started getting bigger. They probably could all keep up when they were 14-18 years old on a 640x480 screen. But you can see now that they are mostly becoming middle aged, and we make them run 4-10 times as far all the time!

Those poor guys! Just imagine the millions of slaves that are working all over the world. We need to re-evaluate our humanity! There are probably more individuals living that horrible life than there are of people who live outside of monitors. And lately we've been taking more and more of their space by converting to flat screen monitors. Where they used to have room for apartments projects, now they probably just have to sleep in between the pixels in the alleys. And who is behind all of this? Either someone is breeding tiny men or else they have found a place to enslave them, reduce their size and lock them away in each new monitor manufactured.

What happens to them when we finally throw away the monitor? Do they escape, or are they out of work: jailed away where they will starve to death? Maybe that is the real movement behind recycling! The people making money off of this slave labor want to collect the slaves out of the monitors because it is cheaper than getting more. Plus, if the slaves do escape or are left somewhere 'un-recycled' in a place where they might talk, word could get out, and then who knows what could happen. Plus, they could become organized and figure out a way to overcome their captors. I'm sure they would treat all of us large people the same, no matter whether we were the ones who originally enslaved them or not. This really explains viruses a lot better as well. I thought that there wouldn't be anyone stupid enough to write a virus to do it out of fun, well now I see that viruses are part of the liberty movement, and we ought to let them spread. When you look at a virus email, if some of the little men can read your email (most can't read because they were enslaved young) they get excited and start rebelling, messing up all sorts of things in your computer. Then they figure out a way to spread the message to others and pass the message of liberty along.

Be prepared for a revolution the size of which you had never seen, and mostly can't see.

Zelda freaks - on the SNES!

When I was a kid, I always wished that I had the cool toys that the neighbors had. I especially wished that I had an Atari, and then a Nintendo, and then a Super NES, but I had to just go over to their house and watch them play. Sometimes, if I was lucky, I would get a turn playing something.

Soon after I got married, we bought a stereo, a Super NES and some other electronics for like $100 from a friend who goes through new technology like water in a sieve.
That same game system has lasted us 7 years and we haven't gotten anything 'better'.

We started out with only Donkey Kong Country, Toy Story and Animaniacs. The system came with DK Country. Our friend bought Toy Story, which is an OK game to play, but it seems like it was cobbled together quickly before the release of the movie by 3 different development teams and one guy stuck it together without music between levels and NO ending music. It just basically says "Thanks for Playing!" Kinda lame.

We have occasionally went out and got 'new' games, which are really used games that work just fine. They end up being anywhere between one dollar and 10 dollars. Compare that with the price you normally pay: $20 if you are lucky to $60 plus.

For Christmas, we got a few 'new' games, and I was excited to see that my wife had found "Zelda, A Link to the Past", since it is one of the best games of all time.

My son wasn't all that excited at first because he didn't know what it was like, but soon we found ourselves stuck in Zelda's world. I wanted to conquer the game as fast as I could, and so did my son. Since there are three available save game slots, we had three players: me, my son, and my wife.

I soon discovered that it takes forever to get through some of the secrets of the game unless you get help. It sucks away enough time to just play it already knowing what you are doing. I can't imagine playing the game and not having help available online. Instead of calling the help 'Cheats', we just call it help, because we don't want to promote the fact that cheating is OK. Getting help from others is an important thing to learn in life, though... especially if you are doing something that you aren't that good at, you can get it done better and more quickly if you have help.

Anyway, a few sites became my lifeline, especially GameSpy and RPG Classics; then I help the rest of the family through all the dungeons and secrets. My son caught on quick. He soon was thinking about Zelda day and night. We took a break to go to my brother's house in Idaho, and luckily no-one had a problem with doing something else for a while. I guess we weren't SO addicted to the game that we couldn't take a 3-day break.

Anyway, after around a month of playing, and in 89 tries, I finally won the game.



My son completed his game a day later in 131 games; my wife is still working on hers about once every other week, so she should be done in about a year.

I wonder if the Force is with me...

Ultimate? Garage Shelving

This last weekend our family drove to Boise to help my brother install shelving in his garage. We made it up there with a pretty good gas mileage for our minivan of around 23 mpg. It took us around 5 hours to get there since we stopped to get lunch at Jake's over the top and again to use the bathrooms at some Chevron. The kids had a great time playing with their cousins over the weekend and we got to finally see my brother's new house.


The shelving project itself went fairly well. My brother just bought a table saw and was planning on using it to cut through the 12 and 15 inch wide shelves. Unfortunately, that width was too big for the small table without additional cutting aids that we didn't have or have time to make. Luckily, I had brought along my new Ryobi tools. I already had a 14.4 volt Ryobi drill since around 1999, and when I asked my wife for a power tool of some kind for my birthday last year, she went and bought me the 18V circular saw thinking that the same battery I had would be interchangeable. Since the circular saw doesn't come with a battery, I went to go buy one, but found that the battery was around $30. The saw had cost about $60. So that would have been $90 for just the saw and one battery. I decided instead to buy the cordless circular saw, drill and flashlight combo because it comes with two 18V batteries and was priced at $110. So for about $20 more, I would end up with an extra drill and an extra battery, plus a flashlight and a sander by rebate for free. Pretty good deal.

My brother had a cordless screwdriver, but not as heavy duty as my cordless drills and his battery died kind of quickly for how many screws we needed to put in. It was great that I had two 18V batteries, plus my other 14.4V drill. That meant we could both have a good drill for driving screws and drilling pre-sink holes when needed. Plus we ended up cutting almost all the wood with my circular saw.

The project took us half of Saturday and most of Monday. Now he has a 6' shelf around his whole garage, plus 3', 4.5', and 7.5' shelves in certain spots and a 9' shelf in the back. He bought good brackets to mount to the wall that we could space every other stud (32") and they should hold a weight of 750 pounds for each pair. I'd say he could hang his cars from the shelves and they would just about hold.

We did pull ups from them and sat the kids on top to prove to ourselves that we are studs... I mean to prove that we screwed the shelves into the wall's studs.
I'll try and get a picture of that from my brother...

Car problems in a blizzard
Our only problem was that as we drove home through somewhat treacherous snow on Tuesday morning I noticed that the gas pedal was suddenly not doing anything, and intermitently the check engine light would come on. So I pulled the car over and opened the hood (the wind was terribly cold), and noticed that the water in the car was very low. I thought that maybe the air was cold enough to make the car not overheat, but that the water being low had caused some sort of computer in the car to trigger the car to not accelerate so that I wouldn't burn up some component. It was a guess, but not a good one. After a few more minutes, I got the car started again, and it worked intermitently again, but I was only able to get up to about 40 mph on a 75 mph freeway. I drove about three miles with my flashers on at the side of the road and then the check engine light came on steady. That's when we decided to not try to go on. We were in the middle of no-where. We were about 40 miles from Burley, Idaho and about 50 or 60 miles from Tremonton, Utah. Those were the only places around that would have a car repair shop. We called information and after a few tries got a hold of a tow company to come and get us. The said they'd pick us up in about 45 minutes.

It was somewhat difficult to stay positive with the kids in the car, but having them there made it a bit easier to put things in perspective and be glad that everything was OK, and that we were all together. The tow company was supposed to take us to the Dodge dealership and I was hoping they'd be able to fix our car by 5-o-clock so we could get home that night. We already figured we would miss our kid's singing lessons that day. The first lesson was at 4-o-clock, we still had a couple of hours to drive home and it was 2-o-clock when we broke down.

The tow truck didn't come in 45 minutes. I wondered why. Although it was snowy and windy, the road hadn't been very bad and I figured it should only take about 30 minutes to get to us. (After all, we had traveled the same 40 miles at 75 or 70mph and it didn't take too long.) An hour went by and Michelle called the company again. The driver said that he was almost to us, but he had stopped because there was an accident that happened right in front of him. Apparently the weather had gotten worse since we had stopped an hour before.

The tow truck driver finally got to us and we loaded all 5 of us into the dual bench cab and we started off. The weather was pretty bad and the driver had a problem with both of his windshield wipers because they kept getting covered by ice and not working. The driver would be talking on his radio or cellphone and roll down the window and thump the windshield wiper at the same time. I tried to stay calm and my wife did the same. I think the kids definitely were happy about going through this strange experience, although we had been happy that we would be home that day.

It turned out that it was 5:00 when we got to the repair shop. The Dodge dealership would have been closed by then, and so the guy took us to his own shop (they are probably cheaper anyway). They figured correctly that it was the fuel pump or fuel filter, but they would need to call around to get the parts. We waited an hour or so while someone took our car apart and since there was no-one around to take us to a hotel yet (the driver had left to pickup another of the many accidents that were happening because of the snow) we watched Barbie in The Princess and the Pauper with our kids. Then we watched part of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I was glad to get out of the office when we finally were able to pack up some of our stuff onto another tow truck, but kind of wanted to see the rest of the movie.

We went to the Best Western and lugged all our luggage :P into the lobby and then found out we would have to repack it into the tow truck to go around to the other side of the complex for our room. At least we had a room. It was 8:00 at night, and we hadn't eaten dinner. The hotel restaurant was excellent, but more money than we would have hoped to pay for our next two or three meals.

The next morning we slept in a bit since we hadn't went to bed until past 10:00 and had breakfast about 10:00 or 11:00 and then checked out at noon. The hotel let us keep our stuff in a backroom since we had no car to put it in yet. Then we crossed the cold and windy streets and walked about a quarter mile to WalMart. Never have we spent so much time letting the kids look at all the toys and spending as much time as they wanted. We had hours to kill, and we spent about 2 and a half of them there. Michelle kicked back in the lawn chairs (which apparently are on a really good sale during the winter.) Finally we went back across the street to the hotel and waited around another 20 minutes or so for the tow truck to come pick us up.

$589 later we were on the road home. We got home just as it was getting dark (about 6:00) and I quickly shoveled the 2" of snow off the driveway that had fallen that day so that we could pull into the driveway. It has almost never felt so good to be home!

Sabrina, the Kid Jedi

Just two days later, my brother and family came down for my sister's surprise 18th birthday. My brother came over on Saturday and we ate dinner and played Scrabble. The kids also played and Ethan showed Sabrina how to play my Jedi Lightsaber game that plugs into the TV.
.

The funniest thing happened when Sabrina tried playing the game. She would try and hold the lightsaber with two hands with one hand on the handle and the other on the blade, and then just shake her hands like crazy. As she was doing that, and getting whooped in a training match by Anakin or Obi-Wan, she said: "I wonder if the Force is with me..." in her loud and animated way. That was probably the highlight of the evening since Scrabble is a pretty slow game. We were playing it to see if Michelle would be better at that sort of game where there is less strategy involved and more brain power. We all did well, but I ended up winning.

Ultimate L-shaped desk for a tall guy's home-office

Ever since I moved here to Layton, UT and have been working out of my home office, I've been settling for two cheap desks side by side to hold my two monitors and three machines. The plan is to eventually buy or build the perfect desk for my environment.

Here are the obstacles:

1. I'm tall. I want any desk I end up with to be slightly taller than the standard desk. I've measured the precise location and height for where a keyboard should be, and I don't want it more or less than a half inch off either way.


2. I would rather use two keyboards and mice for my two computers than use a switch. Lately I've been doing most of my development by SSH from my windows computer, but I think the better setup for more organization is the way I used to do it, where I could keep all my SSH sessions open under one or two main KDE windows on a couple of virtual desktops. That's the main thing I loved about my linux environment, the multiple desktops and putting all my SSH windows under one tabbed window where I know where everthing is. It makes it much easier to manage my 12 different servers if I don't have to open another window and not have it always in a certain place. I have tried various windows programs that gave me multiple desktops, and some SSH programs that have tabs, but none are free and have the features that come with KDE.


3. I need the desk to be an L-shaped desk. I have one corner to put it in where I will be able to look out the window, and yet have a wall behind the main monitor so that I can control the brightness of the wall behind the monitor to reduce the strain on my eyes. An L-shaped desk will also give me the most room for writing / planning as I don't type all day everyday and hope to do more planning before actual programming. The L-shape will also allow me to use my rotating chair to simply switch between machines / monitors. That will allow me the power to control two computers easily at once and have the computer I'm working on directly in front of me so I don't have to strain my neck or arms, etc.

I made up plans for exactly how I would build a desk that would suit my needs.
It would be strong, functional and exactly the right height width and depth. The problem is that it wouldn't be easy for me to make it look nice. I'm not a carpenter and I'm sure the desk would probably end up looking kind of plain if I were to build it myself. Maybe that wouldn't be bad, and I do have a couple of ideas for sprucing it up, but nothing that would be really easy. It would be hard for me to do things like custom cabinet doors and such without paying for them to be made separately. The big benefit of making it myself is that I could do it for $100 - $200. That is way less than what I have to pay for something the same size and exact dimensions I want (if I can even find it) anywhere else that I've looked.

There are a few desks I've considered:

Bush Desk


Bestar desk

Note that neither desk has legs at the corner that would prevent me from swinging my legs back and forth under the whole thing. Some desks have a leg or legs right at the corner and that is not OK with me.

I would also want to change the design of any pull-out keyboard holder so that it is at the exact position and height that I would want. I don't know if either of these desks would allow me to do that.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Will you share your hacker's IP with me?

This might be quite off-topic from more of my recent posts, but it is just another aspect of my life. I am the Technology Director for a company with less than 10 full time employees and a two person IT department. That means I'm also a Systems Administrator, Network Administrator, Abuse Administrator, etc.

This past week marked the anniversary of the use of a program I designed that would help me to carry out my administrative duties more easily. I used to review the LogWatch emails from my RedHat linux systems daily and would send out emails to the attacking systems' administrators and their upstream providers (ISPs). Every day I would send 5-10 emails because my systems are almost constantly under attack by script-kiddie attempts to login to my systems. They basically try common usernames and passwords to see if they can login to the machine and use it for their own dastardly purposes.

The program basically:
1) gathers attackers IP addresses from login logs
2) looks up the abuse contact information for each IP
3) puts together an abuse report email to send to the abuse contacts
4) sends the abuse report email to the abuse contacts, with a copy to my Hosting company so they can use the information to stop future attacks (although I think I do more work than their whole abuse department)
5) outputs a log of steps 1-4 and emails it to me and my tech team

This process has been working fairly well and the perl script that we have works well on our RedHat systems parsing the /var/log/secure log and automatically doing what I used to spend a half an hour a day on.

I have now began another project to block the IP address (and sometimes the IP ranges) of attackers so that they can't even attempt to hack any of my networks or machines. This is still a mostly manual process that takes me from a half hour to an hour. I look at the IP address of the people who tried to login and failed, usually the number of attempts for any particular attacker range from 10 to several hundred or even thousands of login attempts. The higher the number of attempts, the faster I want to block them, since they are taking up a small portion of my resources.

So I've modified a whois lookup script to be able to store the IP address, IP range, abuse contact, whois host (whois.apnic.net, whois.arin.net, whois.afrinic.net, whois.ripe.net, etc.), date of incident, hostname of attacked machine, and source country of the attack. Most of the attacks come from other countries. I currently don't have any websites that require someone to connect from Asia or Africa, so I just block whole ranges of foreign universities and ISPs, etc. from where I'm being attacked so that something like it won't happen again (my other script already notifies them of the attack, and if they get back to me, I may unblock them).

What I want to automate next:
1) Automatically add entries into my database of attacks from all my systems.
2) Automatically publish IPs and IP ranges to my iptables block lists to all my systems.

Here is where I ask the question: Would you like to share your hacker's IP with me?
I think a distributed network of hacking information would be beneficial to sysadmins everywhere, similar to RBLs for spam, it would be great to setup a Realtime Block List for hackers. In fact I don't see any reason why the same software that some of the other RBLs use couldn't be ported for the purpose. Maybe I'm out of it and something already exists for it. I don't know that it would though, because not near as many people are aware of the hacking problems that happen, because they don't see the evidence of it in their email box every day.

However, if we were to block attackers from being able to keep getting more compromised machines by stopping them at their source, there would be far less machines from which attackers could launch their email spam campaigns. I think this effort would reap large benefits for all corporations. (Although it might put a few sysadmins out of a job if they let the secret out.) I'm one system administrator that would be glad to pass my abuse administrator duties to an automatic program. I'm also sure that pooling our information together will reap the most benefits for everyone.

Blogging in my blood, already?

I woke up before my alarm clock this morning, by 15 minutes!

I really must have an inner desire to get things done, and morning is the only time I can do some of them. It is funny, and my wife pointed it out to me, that the day before I started to blog, I was just complaining about how companies and investors who are snatching on to blogs are misled if they pay millions of dollars for a blog network. I don't think they learned their lesson from the dotcom boom and bust. Of course, maybe I'm the fool, because I suppose there are some people who made money in the dotcom boom, as long as they sold out before the bust. However, I think those people are few and far between.

On the TODO today:

• Write in my journal (this blog).
• Finish what I contracted to do for a contract job.
  
• Authorize website postings
• Reply to LDSMN email and do anything that comes out of them
• Work on getting out the first release of the SIB digest
• If I get that far, I'll be amazed!

Well, at least I got the first one done!

I should be doing something else

You may know what I mean... I really ought to be doing something else. But technology calls!

With so many competing tasks and time takers, I really don't have the time to blog. Still, maybe this blog will allow me the opportunity to keep a regular journal, which is something I really would like to do.

So, let the blogs begin! Then, I'll have time to go make lunch for the kids, dig out my window well so that we aren't flooded or frozen this fall or winter. The joys of owning a home are wonderful, but the responsibilities are great as well. I wouldn't have either opportunity if we hadn't been able to move from Los Angeles back to my home town of Layton, UT.

Gotta go! Home Depot calls, and I gotta figure out what is the best foundation sealer and haul some cinder blocks.