- Drink coffee by the gallon.
- Hit F5 repeatedly on the the relevant thread hoping for some shred of a fix.
- Organize your photos (again).
- Throw Capt’n Crunch at your dog and marvel at how he catches it on his tongue without moving.
- Plan what sleeping position you’ll assume when you get back to bed.
- Start pricing Engine Yard.
Tag Archive for 'Work'
My morning started innocently enough, grinding away on some contract work as well as juggling my regular day-night job duties, but found things quickly melting down into a surreal nightmare of short term memory loss. It culminated with my desperate search for my car keys, late as usual to drive the baby to my parent’s house for the day, to discover I left them in the ignition all night in the on position. My focus has been so hard on my work that the most practical and menial of tasks, like remembering to turn off the car, have begun to escape my grasp.
To pull me back to reality and give me some a much needed break Management took me into West Hartford for her hair appointment and I spent the better part of the afternoon off-line taking pictures. While raw and damp it was a fine way to get my head reattached.
Yeah…that little girl is hitting my wallet hard.
Just before the site re-launch around midnight.
Salary negotiations later that night.
So yesterday’s Amazon Web Services presentation went so much better than I could have ever imagined. We had a blast meeting so many new and interesting people who are dedicated to delivering some truly unique products. Two that stood out were AideRSS, which provides intelligent filtering to umanagable piles of RSS feeds and boasted the most amazing scaling of 100+ instances processing in parallel, and SeeMeWin.com, which has this quirky Japanese game show hook of watching people scratch lottery tickets. Part Jennicam, part “WTF seriously!?”, lead by a very engaging personality–Breck Yunits–SeeMeWin has the potential for localized traction among the 18-24 demographic.
The cap, though, was finding a link to this post, Amazon Web Services - EC2 - Wow!, in my email this morning.
There was also a lot of creativity leveraging EC2 to support production environment. Geezeo, located in Boston, have put everything on EC2: Front-end, app-servers, and database. Because MySQL replication and clustering is relatively easy, they could set up a small MySQL farm and then do frequent off-site backups to S3 (Amazon’s Simple Storage Service — you pay for that, but it’s not too expensive). Geezeo is sort of a mix of Quicken and Facebook. I’d been very leery of Geezeo because I don’t think I want my bank data up in the cloud. But after this presentation, I think they may have a good architecture for security; I might actually try them now. Which is saying a lot, because if you had told me their service was in EC2 before I saw their presentation, it would have actually increased my worry. They have SSL in the right places, and, apparently, private IPs running in EC2. Nice job.
Makes me feel real good about what we’ve built so far.
Here’s a copy of what we ran, Geezeo AWS Presentation and here’s what we built in EC2 (the part I’m crazy proud about!):
