Most of you have heard by now, but I thought I'd make an announcement here anyway: I have resigned from CCP Games and am returning to the Bay Area in mid-December. Just about three weeks from now, actually.
I am not entirely certain of the future, but I expect the first few weeks will be involved in me trudging around the country saying hello to various elements of the various families that might have some interest in my presence for that unholy contraption we like to call the "Holidays." After that, however, all bets are off as I try to get back into the groove after being in Iceland for the past year.
It has been a good trip. Being out here for the past nine months has taught me a lot about myself, about my relationship with Janine, and about life in general. I've learned more about what I can and can't handle, what is and is not acceptable in a job, and a bit of Icelandic besides! Ég tala pínulítið íslensku. (Okay; I'm not entirely sure that's right. But it's understandable if you speak the language.)
The reasons for my return are many, but it basically boils down to being homesick and disagreeing with some of the decisions upper management has made regarding employees who actively play EVE Online. C'est la vie, as they say. Life moves on.
I am excited to be returning "home" - as much as the Bay Area is my home anyway - and am looking forward to catching up with everybody I've missed in 2007. See you soon!
PS, those of you curious, Iceland has been quite warm so far. I don't think the temperature has hit freezing except one or two days, and it's still raining out - no snow, no ice! I know most places have succumb to the weather already, but Iceland is still chugging along, nice and warm(ish). Of course, we'll say nothing about the daylight...currently the sun is coming up around 9:30 AM and going away at 4:30 PM.
Also, I saw the aurora the other night! It was faintly visible in the city so I hopped in the car and drove out to my favorite spot by the lighthouse, but by that point the clouds had rolled in. Shame.
In the interest of getting fair results, everyone who has an LJ account should vote in my poll here.
And yes, this poll happened as a result of discovering that you people do it backwards. ;)
The word has reached mine ears that Fudge now has her very own theme on Vox! Way to go, awesome puppy gets an awesome theme. Thanks to Stacey for doing the art and the Vox team for approving it. We always wanted to see Fudge on here, now we can. Yay!
In other news, not much to report. I am back in the US for two weeks visiting Janine. Trip is going well. Life in Iceland is continuing apace. Work, play, work, and more work are my general activities. Oh and stopping to take some time to go out from time to time.
I still am not sure what to do with two blogs really. Keep thinking I want to start keeping a tech blog and talk about programming and similar things that I am doing. But most of my readers are on LJ already, so I'd hate to split them. Of course, having a public face I can just point people to would be nice. Ah well, thoughts for another day.
Hmm, I don't see anything new on the compose page. I think the top menu has been redesigned some - at least, I don't remember the pulled out bar with common links and Help and such. Tip section seems new too. Looking good, Vox, looking good. Like the space theme too.
In retrospect, I really like Vox (although I still think of it as NotComet when I am feeling nostalgic). It's a solid product. I am quite optimistic about its future!
Yay, Fudge is famous! You can choose the "Scribble Dog Fudge" theme on Vox now (it'll be on LiveJournal next release). She even comes with a little steak! Check out my Vox blog to see her in all her cuteness! :)
People do many different things to cope with stress, loss, and "bumps in the road". How do you handle stress and hard times?
Music. Find an earworm and let it ride. Presently I am dealing with Janine's return to the States by sticking Alizée's Moi... Lolita on repeat. Music GO!
In other news, I figured I'd hop back to Vox and see what's up. The posting UI has changed some, but I can't really point at any one thing and say "that's new". Oh - there's an "embed" button that I've not seen before. Neat.
Okay, I'm going to share some photos from the recent past here in Iceland.
Anyway. Enough photos.
Iceland is great. The job is entertaining and interesting, but it's not very challenging. I'm doing web work, but not the kind of work that I was doing at Six Apart - no scaling, nothing that really pushes me to find tough solutions or look at things from a low level perspective. It's kinda sad, that's one thing I really enjoyed at 6A - there were challenges to be solved, problems to find solutions for.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. I'm doing good work and people are happy with it - EVE players and managers alike! It'd just be nice to do something that required a little more brainpower. Oh well. Maybe when I go to Atlanta there will be more challenging work.
Current plans put me out there next summer sometime. The details are still being worked out, of course. Fingers crossed and all that.
Oh, I'll be back in the Bay Area sometime in October, it looks like. I'll come by the office and say hi sometime. :)
Ta ta for now!
Well, happy birthday Vox. You're now a year old from the very first entry ever. That was back when it was called Comet and we didn't know what the name was going to be. That first post was from when the infrastructure got setup "for real" and we had most of the components in place.
The site has certainly come a long, long way from where it used to be. It's rather impressive what Vox is like now. While I don't really use it much (everybody I know is on LJ and I hate posting in two places), whenever I do come back it's just striking how much more polished it feels. Vox is beautiful. The schemes, the layouts, it's just a joy to work with.
Shine on, Vox. Shine on.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Fusce laoreet porttitor magna. Nullam est nibh, tincidunt ut, tincidunt ac, varius quis, lectus. Mauris libero. Mauris sit amet nisi id tellus aliquam consectetuer. Sed consectetuer. Sed malesuada, lectus ac lacinia accumsan, orci erat ornare eros, at venenatis magna massa et odio. Nulla facilisi. Etiam porta, metus vel eleifend dignissim, enim libero rhoncus erat, ultrices malesuada orci tellus at mauris. Maecenas velit. Nullam metus urna, blandit eu, mattis et, rutrum nec, eros. Ut diam lacus, molestie a, euismod quis, vestibulum congue, felis. Donec lectus eros, elementum nec, viverra quis, elementum nec, leo. Sed felis nunc, vulputate ac, imperdiet sit amet, vestibulum vitae, libero. Pellentesque tincidunt, eros vel vestibulum ullamcorper, justo metus dapibus sapien, a imperdiet nulla nibh et massa. Duis a nisl. Cras arcu. Donec bibendum tortor.
Sed quis lacus quis ipsum facilisis tempor. Pellentesque ac lectus. Donec condimentum, nulla vitae varius porttitor, mauris elit mattis augue, ac lobortis mauris est nec lorem. Integer ultrices laoreet odio. Nunc congue purus vitae nulla. Cras bibendum, eros eget placerat semper, pede turpis sollicitudin ipsum, a interdum libero purus ut nisi. Nullam tristique tempor risus. Curabitur vehicula luctus tortor. Praesent lectus lectus, bibendum in, commodo convallis, dapibus id, dolor. Integer ipsum. Proin dui libero, aliquet a, tempor a, tempus sed, ante. In ut arcu. Donec non libero et ante mollis mollis. Nulla facilisis massa ac sapien. Nulla urna augue, ultricies et, suscipit ac, sagittis ac, nibh. Praesent fermentum laoreet urna. Vestibulum sed velit at libero condimentum hendrerit.
It seems that IIS is single threaded. Everything online says that it is not, but I know for a fact that my IIS will only serve one ASP request at a time. Is this due to some configuration error? I don't see anything related to this subject in the configuration screens I can find. Or is there some underlying issue that I'm unaware of?
I found some IIS manager on MSDN, but it doesn't seem to have installed any icons so I don't know where it ended up. I've got some sleuthing to do. It has a readme that talks about what to do once it's open, but I can't seem to find where it went. (Oh, dpkg -L, I miss you...)
Sleep.
So, most of you know I've been working for another company (CCP Games) for the past about a month and half or something. Anyway, they are completely a Microsoft shop. Windows, Exchange, IIS, etc. No Unix or Macs in site, really. Even the artists work in Windows. It's pretty different from what I've learned at Six Apart/Danga. In fact, you could probably call it the opposite.
All of the Microsoft software seems designed to make things easier at the expense of making it harder to actually dig in and find the things you're looking for. Notably, I am sorely missing things that might tell me what is going on. Right now IIS is sitting in the background spinning trying to serve a page. I'm getting no output. I'm very unsure as to how to troubleshoot this.
Sometimes when I hit the page it says remote procedure call failed, and sometimes it spins. Further investigation reveals that it is every other time. Okay, dig out the Event Viewer, which is Microsoft's way to show what's going on. Ah, in the System log, there's an error that happens when the page spins:
The application-specific permission settings do not grant Local Activation permission for the COM Server application with CLSID
{0C0A3666-30C9-11D0-8F20-00805F2CD064}
to the user ...snip.... This security permission can be modified using the Component Services administrative tool.For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
Well, if that isn't helpful, I don't know what is. It wasn't doing this before I went on vacation. Well, let's take a short trip down the Google path and see if I can find anything useful. Well, I found some info. Dug through the registry and found that the above is referring to the Machine Debug Manager. I pulled up Component Services and am trying to figure out why it can't launch? It seems like it should work, the various accounts there have access to launch it.
In further exploration, it seems like this is caused by ASPCache expiring. I had downloaded a demo version because I couldn't find the full one on the internal site. So now I need to actually take the time to dig it out of the network somewhere and get the real one installed. Then hopefully things will work again. Hopefully.
Back to work... exciting!
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
