Backstory: I spent a great deal of time writing and extending a thread-safe, fault-tolerant enterprise framework for my current employer. The lead architect designed something of beauty, and it has been a real joy to work with it every day for the past two years. End of backstory.

When I started toying with Erlang as a side endeavor, I was instantly surprised to find it did almost exactly what we built… Except Erlang beat us to the punch by many years and, admittedly, Erlang did it better. For one thing, shared memory concurrency is flat-out broken, even in languages that make it “easy,” like C#. Sure it’s possible to make shared memory concurrency work, work correctly and it’s (generally) VERY fast… But it can be too difficult to introduce new developers to shared memory concepts… It’s difficult to debug and it’s generally very hard to get “right.” Erlang, by comparison, uses message passing concurrency… And it’s awesomazing to work with if you’re used to locking/unlocking your shared resources and spending three days trying to figure out why something deadlocked in production a year after your wrote it ’cause you never noticed the problem during the development process…
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So I’m looking for a job. This isn’t the most ideal time to be looking for a job, but what the hey! My wife and I have discussed relocating for some time, and we recently decided to go ahead with the plan! Exciting, to say the least.

But as I said, it’s not the most ideal time to be job hunting. The market is slow — at least, that’s what everyone’s telling me and what I’ve discovered on my own. To complicate matters, we’re trying to relocate to very specific locations: Phoenix, Portland or Boulder (what can I say, I like deserts, rain and mountains).

I’ve never had to relocate before, so I’m not sure how to go about it: Do I move first and try to find an opening or do I find an opening prior to moving? I’m fortunate right now in that I telecommute, so moving isn’t a big deal… But then again, I want to do what’s right.

What experience/advice do you have for someone wishing to relocate?

So… I’ve been away for a while. A longggg-ish while, anyway. So what’s been going on? Lots of things: I went out and got married to a very lovely lady: I became we and we began planning our relocation out of Oklahoma. Moving is stressful and blissful. So far we don’t know where we’re moving, but we’re looking at Arizona, California, Oregon and Colorado. We’ll see!

In the meantime, I’ve been playing with some old technologies, found some new technologies and generally kept myself very, very busy… Very much at the expense of this site, which brings me to today!

I’m working on an Erlang/mochiweb/mnesia/couchdb overview/tutorial post that I hope to have completed soon. In addition, I have more git goodies coming, as well as a new drawing or two. Time permitting, obviously

Quick post: Please, please, please check out Ronald Jenkees (and on YouTube). The guy is amazing! This is “Stay Crunchy:”

I can NOT believe today is the 23rd of December in the year 2008. In two days, it will be Christmas, and seven days after that we’ll be in 2009. As I have recently been looking back through photos from the past year, my mind is blown at the changes that have taken place before my eyes. Last year at this time, my son was only 8 months old. He is a completely different little guy today than he was last year. The following is a picture from the archive:

Little D

Here is how much he has changed almost 1 year later:

Little D

Crazy is the only word I can use to describe how quickly time seems to zip by. I look forward to another wild year with Little D.

In case I don’t get around to posting another blog entry before Christmas, I hope everyone has a great holiday! I am looking forward to some time off of work to spend with my family.

This week:

Took a close, hard look at Capistrano for the deployment and management of “production” sites. Became intimately familiar with SSL certificates under Apache (and thanks to the good people at GoDaddy, it ended up being a lot less painful than I expected). Got a good lesson in being “visible” to my employer as a contractor and deployed an instance of TikiWiki.

Overall, It was a good week

We recently replaced the standard WordPress 2.7 comment system with IntenseDebate. The integration was smooth, other than a minor CSS and template change specific to our deployment…

And what do I think?

The good folks over at IntenseDebate have created something of a wonder: It’s fantastic as far as comment systems go, at least in terms of performance and functionality… And yet their creation is flawed by tiny imperfections that mar its otherwise elegant implementation.

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If you told me that you have never heard of Sufjan Stevens, I do not think I would be surprised. Over the past year as I have asked various friends if they have ever heard of him – I usually get the same funny puzzled look. I have become a big fan of his after being exposed to a number of his songs thanks to one of the best websites in the universe – Pandora. 

Casimir Pulaski Day and Chicago from the album Illinois (CD/MP3’s) were tracks that I had bookmarked and given thumbs up to in Pandora, and I listen to them a lot. When Crave posted about Sufjan’s latest free MP3 availalbe on Download.com’s music site, I immediately downloaded and gave it a listen. The song is titled “That Was the Worst Christmas Ever!“, and is a melodic mix of acoustic guitar, banjo, and piano. The lyrics also help create vivid images as certain events are described. This song is certainly not a traditional Christmas song – in fact, it is one that I plan to listen to all year long. I highly recommend not only giving this song a listen, but search out the rest of Sufjan’s other work. More people need to know about his music and his talents.

Update:

Added Amazon MP3 Clip Widget. Give the tracks a listen below!

This “user experience” write up is not presented as a technical review of Mozy. I felt there were plenty of other reviews that get into that level of detail. To me, it seemed like it would be more interesting to share my experience over the past year regarding the type and quantity of data I have in my Mozy backup set.

Jason’s recent post titled Online “Backup” got me thinking about my own personal backup solution. Over the past few years, the amount of data that I have collected seems to have grown exponentially. For me, my main goal for whatever backup solution I settled on was to ensure my data existed off-site.

I wanted to be safe from some of the following dangers:

• my house burning down – taking my collection of Ethiopian stamps, computer and all of my data with it
• a space rock falling from the sky and crushing my computer (and probably my house)
• Arizona experiencing freak super-floods and my computer gets washed away

As you can imagine, any one of these possibilities frighten me to think about. My digital existence could be wiped out in the blink of an eye.

My data consists of three major types – photos, video, and music. I have very little documentation that isn’t already on Google Documents, so losing school papers and such is not a huge concern for me. A rough estimate would indicate that 75% of my data is made up of photos, 13% (and growing) is made up of video, and 12% for my music collection.

(continues after the jump)

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Many exciting things this week:

• Upgraded stoopad.com to WordPress 2.7
• Created my very first screencast! I used Snapz Pro for OS X. Exceptional application, highly recommended.
• We settled on a primary comic format. Not that anyone cares, but we presented it on Friday. Hope you all enjoy!

Also, from stoopad.com: On its way, a year with Mozy! Part two of our git introduction screencasts! And more! Please check back with us and make sure you subscribe to our RSS feed!

Everyone, have a great weekend! What exciting things are happening in your lives?