In our last episode, you may have heard that it had been 50 days since I quit smoking, kicked the habit, butted out my last butt.

Well, today I bring you fabulous news.  I have been officially smoke-free for SIXTY-NINE days.

You might be tempted to say, “whoa”, as in Keanu Reeves’ grandiloquence in the Matrix trilogy, but you might also pay homage to one if his ill-begotten first round movie choices in Bill ‘n’ Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

I give you, my friends, WILD STALLIONS!

Today brings a double-whammy in the “Life of Joe” category.  After languishing in the realm of Post-Secondary-Degree-land, I’ve finally bitten the bullet and enrolled in a Post-Post-Secondary-Degree program.

In other words, I’m getting my Master’s.  I’m a freshly minted student in the Executive Master’s in Technology Management Program at the School of Engineering at Penn, also known as EMTM.  I’ll end up with an MSE, but since the program is co-sponsored by The Wharton School, there’s a decidedly business slant to the curriculum.

Case in point, my first two classes as said fresh-mint-student: Decision Models and Statistics.

I spend the last half of today going through Math Boot Camp.  I have to say, the Prof. was terrific, extremely engaging and personable, and surprisingly attuned to his audience of “haven’t done college match since…well…college” students.

I have to say, I came away with a better understanding of Derivatives and Integrals than I did with two semesters of Undergraduate Calculus!  Take that, Math Department!

So that’s the Day 1.  What’s with the Day 50 you ask?

Well, today also marks the 50th day since I decided to quit smoking; the 50th SMOKE-FREE Day!

And the crowd goes wild!

I just got this link from my Crutchfield.com newsletter (Crutchfield being one of my favorite electronics retailers because they have exhaustive stats and specs for all the electronics they sell).

In a nutshell, on average, LCD flat panel TVs use less power than Plasma flat panels of roughly the same size.

Check it out.

http://www.crutchfieldadvisor.com/I-rEUPcUHH/learningcenter/home/M-UG835/TV-power.html

Happy New Year, all!

Just got through a rough few hours upgrading to the latest version of the VMWare Virtual Center server product (that was just released yesterday!). I know, right? I’m a glutton for punishment.

Anyway, just wanted to throw some notes up there in case there was anyone else out there who could benefit from the experience I just had.

We have two VCenter servers, both connecting to the same SQL 2005 Database server. With that setup in mind, here’s where I ran into trouble.

Started the upgrade to the first VirtualCenter server, with a full install of all the components including the VMWare Update Manager and the Converter Enterprise Edition.

The database connectivity step failed right away because the SQL Login I was using didn’t have “db_owner” privileges in the MSDB database. This is documented as a necessary permission for SQL Server in the VMWare Installation Guide, but I discovered the requirement in a roundabout way by looking at a SQL Profiler trace of the traffic being sent to the DB from the installer program.

I didn’t realize it needed that permission from a previous installation because we had initially installed VCenter using a local MSDE database.

NOTE: According to the documentation, the MSDB database permission is only needed during installation/upgrade, and can be removed after setup completes.

The next wackiness I encountered was installing the VMWare Update Manager component. It kept failing on install with a cryptic error message. I ran through the setup a few times and realized that the VMUM product has a TCP port conflict with the VirtualCenter Web Access components! We ordinarily don’t install the WebAccess components, but the “suite” installer program apparently automatically installs the Web Access business, silently.

So, Add/Remove programs, and modify the VirtualCenter Server setup to remove the Web Access components, and I was able to successfully install the VMUM components.

After my experience with the first upgrade, I foolishly thought upgrading the next server would be a breeze! The previous dot-revision upgrades for VC 2.0 were completely painless, so I had high expectations.

Little did I know that because of the SQL jobs that are created by the installation process (can anyone confirm that those jobs are part of the database install in 2.0?), there would be a naming collision and it would cause the database upgrade to fail.

Quickly reading through the DB upgrade log (found in c:\documents and settings\<username>\Local Settings\Temp) revealed the problem.

Luckily, we have two SQL 2005 databases in production (and remember, I had backed up the VC 2.0 databases before performing the upgrades). Restored to the second SQL 2005 database server, re-ran the installation routines (skipping the VMUM install!), and everything ran without a hitch.

Anyone else having some troubles upgrading? Next steps for the environment are to plan the ESX Server upgrades to v3.5! Hopefully those won’t be as painful.

Saw this outside of Wegman’s in Cherry Hill over the weekend. Boyfriend and I couldn’t stop laughing.