Discovering Myself

Well, I’m really excited about the end of the year coming up.  I’ve been working with the same company for 1 year and 4 months.  Longest so far besides my very first job working for LSU.  Anywho, I’ve met an absolutely wonderful man and we’ve been dating for 6 months come Saturday.  I’m thinking about doing some special, and we have a formal party we are attending that I need to shop for.  I’m thinking about stopping by K and G on the way home and picking up a suit for the party.  Just haven’t had time.  Traffic is also pretty horrid lately.

I’ve started watching what I eat, which isn’t easy.  I’ve gotten a little complacent and I get free meals too often.  I’ve started cooking in more often or eating my shake for dinner.  Lunch is the biggest meal by far, I need to cut down on it.

I’m working out 4/7 days now, I’ve met my goal this work, although I’ll probably hit the gym once more tomorrow night.

Oh a lighter note, I’m totally going to see The Day the Earth Stood Still tomorrow night.  If my boyfriend wants to go I’ll have to adjust or kidnap him or something.

Speaking of kidnappy him, he’s got a lot on his plate right now and I just wish I could help out more than I do, he’s just a little far away right now, I get out there on weekends mostly and he comes in for a couple of days during the week.  I know eventually we’ll find a place together, the commute really isn’t even that bad and having out own places is good for our relationship, it makes seeing each other that much more important.  Anywho, I love him and I’m a mushy guy so I’m sure I embarass him at times… haha.  He’ll just have to learn to deal with it!

I’m off to bed now.  Have a meeting with Microsoft tomorrow.  Punks!

I feel like lately I’ve been extremely busy.  I think this is a good thing because if I wasn’t busy, maybe I wouldn’t have a job and someone I love filling up my time.  It makes sense.  So I like being busy.  This weekend is the first weekend in a while where I’m just doing chores and hanging out.

I actually miss going to my bf’s house and hanging out though.  I like the activity and people to always do something with.  Usually a rousing game of Trivial pursuit where boys rules and girls drewl!

Haha, I’m domesticated I suppose, but I love it!

Work has been CRAZY lately!  I’m been working on a education program with my colleague on Security Awareness.  It’s such a cultural change to get these things through though… It’s wierd.

Anywho, I’m off to finish up some cleaning and trying to figure out how to get rid of some of my stuff.  I need to pair down.

This poster is FANTASTIC for us 80s kids!

I love the 80s!

I hope to grow old with and surprise my love with flowers!

Lately I’ve been going up to visit my boyfriend in Snellville.  Seemed like this weekend just went by so quickly.  The weather was wonderful, maybe next weekend we’ll take advantage of it.  I wouldn’t mind having a BBQ or sitting out by the pool or something.  It was almost brisk.  All in all I had a great time up there, but I wish it wasn’t so out of the way, the house is beautiful, but the location… a bit far from the city.  Although, it couldn’t be worse than Jackson, MS.  That place is just the pits!

Regardless of where he is, I’ve probably still make the trip because I really enjoy spending time with him and he’s really sweet.  He’s the first guy I’ve dated that I feel makes an effort at showing his affection back to me.  I love the way he gasps when I tease him.  Anywho, he’s great, I’m great, all is well with the world.  IF ONLY I HAD SCREENS ON MY DOORS!!!  The weather is amazing.

Words of Love!

This is for V!

I’ve been collecting scaling stories for some time now and last week I came across the following run down on Fliker scaling: Federation at Flickr: Doing Billions of Queries Per Day by Dathan Vance Pattishall, the Flickr database guy.

The Flickr DB Architecture is sharded with a PHP access layer to maintain consistency.  Flickr users are randomly assigned to a shard. Each shard is duplicated in another database that is also serving active shards. Each DB needs to be less than 50% loaded to be able to handle failover.

Shards are found via a lookup ring that maps userID or groupID to shardID and photoID to userID.  The DBs are protected by a memcached layer with a 30 minute caching lifetime. Slide 16 says they are maintaining consistency using distributed transactions but I strongly suspect they are actually just running two parallel transactions with application management rather than 2pc.

Maintenance is done by bringing down ½ the DBs and the remaining DBs will handle the load but it appears they have no redundancy (failure protection) during the maintenance periods.

They have 12TB of user data in aggregate and they appear to be using MySQL (slide 25 complains about an INNODB bug).

Other web site scaling stories:

· Scaling Linkedin: http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/06/08/ScalingLinkedIn.aspx

· Scaling Amazon: http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/02/early-amazon-splitting-website.html

· Scaling Second Life: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/04/web_20_and_databases_part_1_se.html

· Scaling Technorati: http://www.royans.net/arch/2007/10/25/scaling-technorati-100-million-blogs-indexed-everyday/

· Scaling Flickr: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/04/database_war_stories_3_flickr.html

· Scaling Craigslist: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/04/database_war_stories_5_craigsl.html

· Scaling Findory: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/05/database_war_stories_8_findory_1.html

· MySpace 2006: http://sessions.visitmix.com/upperlayer.asp?event=&session=&id=1423&year=All&search=megasite&sortChoice=&stype=

· MySpace 2007: http://sessions.visitmix.com/upperlayer.asp?event=&session=&id=1521&year=All&search=scale&sortChoice=&stype=

· Twitter, Flickr, Live Journal, Six Apart, Bloglines, Last.fm, SlideShare, and eBay: http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2007/04/29/3616/the-top-10-presentation-on-scaling-websites-twitter-flickr-bloglines-vox-and-more

1. Resign from a commitment you’re not passionate about.
2. Stop trying to be perfect.
3. Implement a basic cleaning schedule.
4. Sign up for automatic billpay.
5. Automate a portion of your investing.
6. Clean out your media collection and keep only the items you love.
7. Plant perennials that will automatically bloom next spring.
8. Clean out your purse or wallet.
9. Put a paper shredder next to your mail spot.
10. Winnow your wardrobe down to pieces that work together.
11. Delete any social networking accounts you don’t actually use.
12. Add your number to the do-not-call list.
13. Create a car maintenance schedule and post it somewhere you’ll see it.
14. Design a filing system that you can stick to.
15. Start your day with a healthy meal.
16. Turn your phone off when you need quiet time.
17. Invest in a programmable thermostat.
18. Set one good goal, and go achieve it.
19. Record your good “shower” ideas and then implement them. (Don’t we all get our best inspirations in the shower?)
20. Write to a friend with (gasp!) pen and paper.
21. Set limits on your bad habits, and reward yourself when you stick with them.
22. Stop trying to be a saint and indulge yourself every once in a while.
23. Pay off your credit card debt.
24. Avoid watching commercials and reading advertisements.
25. Rediscover the pleasure of reading purely for enjoyment.
26. Plan two weeks of delicious meals ahead of time and skip the nightly grocery run.
27. Go to your doctor for a preventative checkup.
28. Remember the joys of doing nothing.
29. Singletask as much as possible.
30. Learn to ask for help.

These are the 10 essentials of gay dating.  I don’t go for the stereotypical shit…

1. Attractive:  This is very subjective, if you don’t find the other person attractive, don’t waste your time.  It must be a mutual thing.  You can still be friends with people you aren’t attracted to, so don’t discount them as a friend, but be clear that you don’t find them attractive in a sexual way early on.
2. Respect:  You need to have respect for the person and they should also respect you in the same way.  This could be as little as helping clean up after dinner to something more important like jokes told in the company of friends.
3. Go Dutch:  You should never pay for the other person to start off.  You should both be able to pay for yourselves and be comfortable in your own lives.  It seems to be the trend in the gay community for one person to pick up the tab, I’ve fallen victim to this too many times.
4. Trust:  This one is built over time, but you should have trust that you will adhere to whatever boundaries you decide the dating will fall into.  I, for instance, believe in a monogamous relationship.  I don’t want anything coming into my house or body that I don’t know.  That includes diseases.
5. Boundaries:  Again, you must both set the boundaries of the relationship.  What you both expect to get and to receive.  This might seem tough to do when you start dating, but it needs to be dealt with early.
6. Location:  You should not mind traveling between the two places of dwelling.  If it’s not feasible it needs to be discussed.  Long distance relationships are hard and humans just aren’t built for those.
7. Communication:  You should both be able to communicate effectively with each other.  This is VERY important in any relationship.  Effectively communicating needs and wants are essential to a healthy life.
8. Shared Ideals:  You should share some of the same ideals.  Life, family, love, and the like.
9. Hobbies:  This is not essential, but it helps with conversation and things to do.  It’s nice to share some of the same hobbies, but you can also develop these along the way.  Essentially, you should like doing things together, regardless of what it is.
10. Friendship:  Try to develop a friendship before you get to the more meaningful parts of a relationship.  You should want to hang out with this person more than your other friends.  If not, then it probably won’t last.

So, I’ve been working in my current position for almost 1 year now. I have about 3 months left. I love the job, but I’ve been having a bit of trouble really shaking out what I’ll be doing going forward. My co-worker’s thoughts are very disjointed and hard to follow, so explanations don’t come through clearly.

So I took an initiative to put together a list of all the applications/services we offer in Security. It’s quite a list, I was really surprised. I don’t think we’ve put something like this together before. I’m glad I started it. It was really supposed to help me rate my skill level in each of our respective services, but it turned into sort of a “let’s tell the company what we do” type of thing for our department.

My main focus is application security testing, and education material. I have yet to really get to delve into the topic here, but I’m hoping I will get to that soon. It’s very intriguing to me.

Anyway, I went on a date last week, it went great. We had a follow up date the next day. My only worry is that he lives about 30 minutes away, so as long as that’s not an issue I think it will be ok. My friend Jason and I have to get together again, he’s a nice guy, I’m going to throw him into my group of friends and see if he floats. I hope Jason is doing good.

Anyway, time for me to get back to work.