Wake me when it's all over

What a tiring weekend.
I'm writing this from the CalTrain, and struggling to stay awake.

Saturday we had a very nice 4th birthday party for Shealyn, my second child. She asked for a party at the park with her friends and to have a rainbow cake. She had both, although my wife and I were up until midnight frosting a rainbow on her cake. Anyway, a nice time was had by all and the party lasted almost 4 hours.

Sunday we were out and about with the visiting in-laws. They took Shea shopping at Toys R' Us for her birthday presents, and there was 1.5 hours of her exclaiming "Oh! Look at that!" in her sweet little voice. Several barbies and pegasus stuffed animals later and she was completely overwhelmed.

We finished off the evening with a nice dinner (and margaritas) at Left at Albuquerque.

Today is my birthday, and as a birthday present I have a Sox (Sarbanes Oxley for the blissfully unaware) Auditor in this whole week. Our auditor is a really nice guy, but when you are as behind as I am on compliance, it's a bit painful to see it all documented for managements review.

So, I think I'll just go to sleep on the train. Will someone please wake me when the week is over?

Bye Bye Bob.

Well, my close friend Bob (link) was laid off yesterday at our company.
He wasn't alone, as his boss and some European staff went as well.

I'm in the IT department, and had the unpleasant responsibility of shutting down his accounts and network access. I know I'm just doing my job, but it's tough.

Bob and I have been working together for 13 years, and it's certainly going to be strange not having him there to discuss movies, music, social issues, systems design, business process, symantics, and generally fixing all the problems of the world.

Also, without Bob's regular correction, I'm afraid my grammer is going to steadily devolve <g>.

Good luck Bob!

Amazon S3

Spent time over the weekend reading up on Amazon's new(ish) S3 (Simple Storage Service.)
Basically it's web based storage priced at $.15 / Gigabyte Month and $.20 / Gigabyte bandwidth. It's only accessible via their APIs (SOAP and REST) but a number of front ends have been created (including the S3Organizer Firefox extension.)

I think this as potential as storage and processing for the PACT project at work. I was able to create a proof of concept script that uploads files via http using the curl utility. I think this could replace the Autosubmit via ftp logic.

S3 combines very nicely with the new Amazon EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud) service that just went into beta. It basically allows you to have on-demand computing (ala Sun Grid) for Linux systems. Storage is provided via S3 and computing is prices at $.10 / hour.

EC2 might be a solution for our data processing and analysis needs. We currently run some fairly heavy hitting (especially in memory use) R scripts to analyze the data and generate html based reports. The EC2 hosted systems could do the analysis and web serving.