I’m A Barbie Girl, In A Barbie World
Courtesy of “Uncle” Ben Pitzer, Raleigh Craigslist gives us this gem: RTP Series Barbie.
The “Wake Forest Barbie” looks exactly like one of the women who bring their kids to Hayley’s soccer class. It’s scary.
Wii’re Here
After a surprisingly short shipping period, my Nintendo Wii arrived today. Yay! I’ve hooked it up, put it on the wireless, done the basic configuration, and played some Wii Sports. For such simple game, they’re a lot of fun. I also got some Wii Points and bought Super Mario Brothers (NES) and Sonic The Hedgehog (Genesis). They’re very smooth to play with the Wiimote.
Should be a lot of fun. If anyone else out there has one and would like to link up, drop me an email and I’ll send you my Wii number.
Back To Normal
Ah, that’s the North Carolina winter we’ve come to know and love over the past few years. 33 degrees and raining.
Assignment Complete
Revisiting my Year In Review post from a few weeks ago, where I was talking about news on the job front, I can post about it now. Today was my last day at WebAssign.
For the past few months, I’d been working with them to try to find some career growth opportunities outside of system administration. We tried a few different ideas, but couldn’t find anything that fit both their business needs and my career goals. So I turned in my notice a couple of weeks ago, and my replacement will be starting Monday.
I had a great time working at WebAssign – it was a fun company, they took care of their people well, my co-workers were high quality, and I gained some good experience. And I’d like to especially point out their handling of my career discussions and subsequent departure. You’ll hear a lot of lip service to companies “wanting to do what’s best for the employee,” but it’s quite often not followed through. That’s why employees looking for new work sneak around like ninjas and then pounce with a two-week notice.
In this case, WebAssign management was very up-front and honest while we were discussing my career goals, and when we couldn’t find resolution, they made it known that they weren’t looking to push me out the door to cover themselves. In return, I told them that I’d stay on until my replacement was on board. I had the agreement in principle on my new job in late December, but held off on the move until WebAssign was covered. It was really quite refreshing to work in such an environment, and my hat’s off to James, Brian, Steve, Peg, and Dr. Risley for the way they handled it. It was an air of mutual trust that I think paid off for all parties involved.
What’s next? Some famliar faces. I’m starting Monday at LEARN NC, the online learning division of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The specific duties are still up in the air, but I should be acting as the technical lead in a lot of areas – doing some system administration, technical architecture, budgeting. Things that further my management skills in addition to my technical ones. I’ve done some consulting with LEARN for a few years now, beginning when I was at HCS, so I’m excited about being able to devote time to helping the project. The commute will be worse (~45 minutes each way, vs. 20-25 for WebAssign), but I got myself XM for Christmas to help the drive go by.
I’m sad to leave the folks at WebAssign, but they’re in great hands. And I’m excited about the opportunities at LEARN.
Never a dull moment.
Wiiiiiiii
I’ve got an RSS feed going monitoring the in-stock-ness of the Wii at several online retailers. Lately, a very expensive 6-game bundle has been showing up at Wal-Mart.com, but I’ve been passing.
However, I just saw a $400 bundle that was decent, so I went ahead and placed the order. The bad part is, it’s a bundle, so it’s somewhat overpriced. The good part is the bundle is the “Kid’s Bundle”, so the standard $250 Wii system (controller, Wii Sports, etc) comes with the “Happy Feet” game, and Hayley’s on a huge Happy Feet kick, and Super Monkey Ball, plus a 1GB SD card. So it’s not like I’d be throwing the games away, hopefully, in order to get the console.
Plus it saves me from having to go fight the lines on Sunday when Target and Best Buy are supposed to have them in stock.
The system should arrive late next week or early the following week.
SURBL Robble
I’ve been getting quite a bit of spam through the “New Key Request” form on the Rails-based Mr. Voice website, and finally decided to do something about it. I wanted to take the spammy form fields and run them through the SURBL RBL.
I was hoping there was already a module that could take a URI, parse out the base domain from it, and query the RBL, but alas, there was not. So I wrote my own function to do it for me. I’m sure there are better ways to do it (that’s why I’m the sysadmin, not the developer), but I couldn’t find any. So in the hopes that someone else might find this useful, or possibly do it better, here’s the function (which I call like: if in_surbl(spammytext)…)
def in_surbl(text=”“)
require “uri”
require “ipaddr”
require “resolv”
uris = URI.extract(text)
uris.each do |uri|
dns = Resolv::DNS.new
begin
host = URI.parse(uri).host.to_s
rescue URI::InvalidURIError
next
end
begin
ipaddr = IPAddr.new(host)
revip = ipaddr.to_s.split(’.’).reverse.join(’.’).to_s
if (dns.getresources(”#{revip}.multi.surbl.org”, Resolv::DNS::Resource::IN::A)).size > 0
logger.warn “Found SURBL entry for IP #{host}”
return true
end
rescue
# We’re using a hostname
until (host.split(’.’).size <= 1)
if (dns.getresources(”#{host}.multi.surbl.org”, Resolv::DNS::Resource::IN::A)) .size > 0
logger.warn “Found SURBL entry for Host #{host}”
return true
end
array = host.split(’.’)
array.shift
host = array.join(’.’).to_s
end # until
end # begin/rescue
end # uris.each
return false
end # in.surbl?
What Passes For Winter In North Carolina
The forecasters were calling for a “wintry mix” early this morning, but that’s rarely panned out lately. So imagine my surprise when I got up to find, for the first time in at least two and possibly three years, measurable snowfall outside.
There wasn’t much out there, and by 8:30am or so it had already started to change over to rain. But there was enough for Hayley to go play in – we had a snowball fight, she made a semi-snow-angel, we ate some snow (not the yellow kind), and she made one of the world’s tiniest snowmen.
It was pretty much gone by this afternoon, so I hope she enjoyed it while it lasted. At this rate, she may be in middle school before we get another snowfall.
Ass Me No Questions
Steve and I were walking out of the WebAssign office just as they were installing the new sign, and we caught it at just the right point in the process for him to snap this picture with his cameraphone.
I think we’ve found a new business model!
Up On The Big Screen
For the Hurricanes fans who were at the RBC Center for tonight’s game, yes, that was Holly and me up on the Jumbotron during the “Kiss Cam” skit, with me wearing an Atlanta jersey and Holly cross-checking me out of the picture.
Was it live, or was it “Memorex”? I’ll never tell, but I will say that I was at the game with Hayley, and Holly was at home with Kate, if that helps.
MINI Me
My Saturn was getting long in the tooth, and I’d had my eye on one for quite a while, so I recently took the plunge and traded the old car in for a used (44k miles) MINI Cooper.
It’s still under warranty, so I’ve taken it out to Flow MINI in Winston-Salem and gotten a couple of minor details fixed. That wasn’t bad, except the trip out to Winston. Jeez, with all the MINIs I see in Raleigh, you’d think there’d be a dealer in the Triangle.
But I’m having fun driving it, and Hayley seems to enjoy it as well when I take her to school in the mornings.