So as most of you probably already know, my girlfriend and I relocated from Connecticut to Colorado about four months ago. No, we didn’t have new jobs or even any friends out here. We were both just looking for a change, and since neither of us really knew the “right way” to make a move like this, we basically just quit our jobs, packed up our cars, and drove across the country. I know, that’s a pretty brave (and possibly stupid) thing to do in the face of a major recession, but hey, we were looking for an adventure! So how did things turn out for us? Well I’m glad you asked, because it was probably the best decision either of us ever made. ;-)

First of all, the technology scene out here simply dwarfs anything we had back home. I’d say the Denver/Boulder area is about as close as you can get to Silicon Valley without actually living there, and that’s perfectly fine by me. Although I actually considered moving to California for a long time, I know how crowded it is there, and after several years of hour-long commutes on the east coast, traffic was something I was looking to avoid as much as possible. So anyway, after living here for less than a month, I was offered the position of Chief Infrastructure Engineer at SocialMedia.com. Now I’m happy to say my commute is only about 15-20 minutes, and the entire ride looks like this! Trust me, the scenery out here looks even more amazing in real life.

But the commute isn’t the only nice thing about my new job. ;-) My offer letter mentioned an opportunity to “push the very boundary of what’s possible” and “get a chance to work side by side with some of the brightest minds around.” This has proven to be absolutely true. Today I’m doing all kinds of fun stuff with EC2 and Chef in order to automate some pretty interesting high-performance distributed systems. But after being the “go to guy” for so long, these last few months have also been a bit of a humbling experience. Guys like John De Goes, Spencer Tipping, Luke Palmer, Kris Nuttycombe, and Christian Parker have managed to make me feel stupid on a fairly regular basis, but I consider that a good thing. It’s a nice feeling to be surrounded by such brilliant people.

In other news, as positive feedback about my RHCE Exam Experience post continues to pile up in my inbox, I’ve been wondering if I should look into getting the now infamous “RHCE Cheat-Sheet” published as some sort of pocket guide. Would any publisher actually be interested in this? Would anyone out there actually buy it? And perhaps most importantly, would Red Hat try to sue me over it? ;-)

K3b Ripped files pattern

%A/%T/%a - %n - %t

LAME command
Advice taken from Hydrogenaudio’s recommended encoder settings:

lame -V0 --tt %t --ta %a --tl %m --ty %y --tc %c --tn %n - %f

K3b external audio encoder settings for LAME
On my machine, LAME will not encode properly unless I enable this option:

• Write Wave Header

I am such an elitist. Hehe…

If anyone out there is thinking of making the switch, be aware that you will need to be available for a DSL tech to come on site to finish the installation. Apparently AT&T will disconnect your current phone service and put the new dry loop on a separate twisted pair that gets sent to your house, but is not actually hooked up to anything on the customer end. This information came directly from the tech that helped me. He said I was the 4th or 5th dry loop installation he fixed, and it was the same problem every time. The twisted pair with the DSL service is just hanging there inside the demarc. I had a friend switch to naked DSL a few weeks later, and she had the same problem, so watch out.