James M. Burke

Today was the day of the bachelor party.  Marc picked me up at my Dad’s house, and we drove to Lubbock.  My dad rented a couple of rooms at the Embassy Suites in Lubbock, and we met Clay at the hotel.  We began the evening with free drinks at the hotel and then headed downtown to visit a couple of bars to play some pool.  Lots of drinks later, the night ended in misery for me. 

Relaxing.  That’s how these two days have been.  I’ve slept in, and enjoyed not spending the majority of the time in a car.  Today, I helped my Dad fix up the new house.

Tomorrow…another trip to Lubbock.

Today was yet another busy day of traveling.  We had to make it to Lubbock, TX today to get the marriage license.  Texas requires you to do this 72 hours before the wedding.  I didn’t realize how far Lubbock was from Dallas.  We got to Lubbock at around 2:30pm or so, went to the court house, got the license and Rebecca headed to Hobbs with our dog, Daisy.  I came back to my Dad’s house…the trip for me was around 590 miles round trip.  That brings my travel tally to somewhere around 1900 miles.  I still have another trip to Lubbock to make, a round-trip flight to Hawaii, and then the long journey back to Raleigh.

For day two, not too much to report.  We left Monroe, Louisiana for the Dallas/Ft. Worth area of Texas at around 8:00am.  It took us until about 1:30pm to make it to my dad’s house in Granbury.

Rebecca got to meet my dad’s brother for the first time (even though we’ve dated over 6 years, their schedules just never aligned).

As you may know, Rebecca and I are getting married in Lubbock, TX on December 23rd. Today, we began our trip to Texas to visit with family up until the big day. We decided to drive from North Carolina since we have a ton of stuff to bring, and thought it would be a nice trip. For day one, we made it to Monroe, Louisiana. Here’s a recap of the trip statistics for Day 1:

897.3 miles traveled
66.5 miles per hour (mph) overall average
70.6 miles per hour (mph) moving average
94.7 miles per hour (mph) maximum speed
13 hours, 29 minutes total time
12 hours, 42 minutes moving time
46 minutes stopped time

During the trip, we discovered five new states we’ve never been to: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and now Louisiana. All in all, the trip hasn’t been that bad so far — I expected to be dead tired by now…

The plan is to drive another 351.6 miles tomorrow to make it to my Dad’s house for the night.

Today, I removed the phpBB forums that I had up - it was terribly underused.  I also discovered that I had somewhere around 150 users, most of which were spambots that managed to create posts about various inappropriate topics.

If there is a need for a forum in the future, I’ll do a better job of blocking that content - I just don’t see the need at the moment.  Any conversations can take place on the topics posted here, or feel free to contact me.

Is it just me, or is the Playstation 3 interface just flat out ugly? Engadget recently posted a video of a complete walkthrough of the Playstation 3 user interface. It looks so 1990ish - especially when compared to the Xbox 360’s user interface.

It’s not all bad though - the picture slideshow looks nice, as does the video clip preview. Read my last post and this one, and it would appear as if I’m biased.

Back in July, I posted my thoughts on HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray.  Personally, I’ve chosen to go the HD-DVD route with the Xbox 360 HD-DVD drive.  I pre-ordered it on Amazon, and it ships this week.  I’ve seen many articles comparing the two, and I still see HD-DVD as ruling the format war, at least in the short term.  There are four main reasons for that: 1) It’s cheaper - at least until the PS3 rolls around  2) The ability to have HD on one side of a disc and SD on the other really appeals to home users  3) The standards are higher for HD - required ethernet capability, required multiple video streams for Picture-in-Picture, quicker menus, etc.  4) The compression format - again, Blu-ray is using a 10 year old compression algorithm (MPEG-2) hindering its storage capablities.  HD-DVD has been using the brand-new VC-1 by Microsoft since day one.

That doesn’t even go into the production process - where Blu-ray media is burned on the top of the disc, and is therefore more prone to damage….Anyway - I’m excited to get my drive in!

Last week was an incredible week for me at NetApp.  My team just shipped two more products for the Windows® platform.

The first being the updated FCP Windows Attach Kit that was renamed to the FCP Windows Host Utilities 3.0 for Native OS.  New for this release is support for the Itanium (IA64) platform, a bump to the new QLogic driver (9.1.2.11 for SCSIport or 9.1.2.16 for STORport), and other bug fixes to the utilities and installation packages.

Secondly, the MAJOR release our department has been focused on is the Data ONTAP® DSM 3.0 for Windows MPIO.  This takes the place of the MPIO component that was previously bundled with SnapDrive®.  Now, the multipathing component belongs to our team, and the Device Specific Module was rewritten in this new version.

The Data ONTAP DSM 3.0 for Windows MPIO enables you to manage multiple Fibre Channel protocol (FCP) paths between a Network Appliance™ storage system and a Windows host computer. You can have one active path and multiple passive paths. If the active path fails, the DSM automatically switches to a passive path, maintaining the host’s access to its storage.

New to the DSM is support for SnapDrive 4.2, Failover and Automatic load balancing, and more.  It is available for Windows 2000 and Windows 2003 (x86, x64, Itanium).

Download: FCP Windows® Host Utilities 3.0 for Native OS (NOW) 
Download: Data ONTAP® DSM 3.0 for Windows® MPIO (NOW, requires license key) 

On Wednesday, Microsoft released the next major version of their Internet browser, Internet Explorer 7.0.  For those of you who’ve been using IE 6.0, it now includes tabbed browsing (like Firefox, Opera, etc.).  It also includes a cool feature called Quick Tabs that shows you previews of all of your opened tabs.  It also includes improved search, security and even includes the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds. 

I’ve been using IE 7 through the release candidates and I must say, you have to give it a try.  It’s a HUGE improvement over IE 6 and I think it competes very well with Firefox 2.0.  It’s available for download now from the Microsoft site, and it will be pushed out as an auto-update in the near future.

Download:  Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0