Cryptic Apache Error

Each night our webmail servers automatically restart httpd to clean up memory and start fresh. Last night one of our servers hit this error upon restart:

[crit] (28)No space left on device: mod_rewrite: could not create rewrite_log_lock Configuration Failed

I had never seen this error before and had no idea what it meant, but Google helped me out:

http://www.goldfisch.at/knowledge/224

After some testing, I found that Apache leaks a couple of semaphores after each restart and eventually w/o a server reboot will run out of resources. So I changed our restart script to clean up these semaphores each night.

ipcs -s grep nobody perl -e 'while () { @a=split(/\s+/); print `ipcrm sem $a[1]`}'

In case you are wondering, it's not a big deal if a webmail server doesn't restart properly. Our load balancers quickly take a down server out of rotation so that customers are not affected. Thank you keepalived.

Development Releases Last 30 Days

Over the last 30 days we have released some really great additions to our platform. Here is the high level list I presented at our management meeting on Monday:

* Webmail Lite w/ Calendar / AJAX
* Control Panel Security Additions (IP Based Restrictions)
* 20+ Webmail Bug Fixes
* Webmail Import / Export Enhancements
* Company Directory
* Website Search
* 30 Day Free Trial

You can read the details on our blog.

OpenLDAP Replication

Today I setup a new LDAP slave machine, the process is fairly straight-forward, but a good thing to know about replication is how to do it without shutting down the master for an extended period of time. Let's take a look at how to do this:

First, let's verify we have a few things:

1. The LDAP ssl port is open from the master to the slave:
ldap-master> telnet ldap-slave 636

2. Make sure the slave has a valid SSL certificate. If you are using a self-signed cert you will need to make sure the master has the slave .crt file installed. If you have multiple slaves, you need to create a combined.crt file and concat all of your certs into one file. Then add an entry to the master ldap.conf (not slapd.conf) like so:

TLS_CACERT /usr/etc/openldap/certs/combined.crt

OK, so now we need to get all of the data from the master to the slave without losing anything during the transfer. Normally this would require the master to be taken offline for some period of time while you zip up the data files and scp them over. But, luckily I have another slave that is not being used for queries, so I can follow these steps to get the data moved without having to shut down the master for an extended period of time:

0. Stop the new slave.
1. Add the necessary

replica uri=ldaps...

lines to the master slapd.conf file.

2. Restart the master.
3. Stop the old slave.
4. Tar/Zip the data, scp to new slave.
5. Start the new slave, verify replication works to the new slave.
6. Bring back online the old slave, verify replication is still working.

That's it, really simply. One trick you should know about replication is that if you have multiple LDAP databases being replicated, slurpd will not replicate the second database to a machine with the same hostname as the first database. I have to create a fake host entry in /etc/hosts so that slurpd doesn't get confused. It took me awhile to figure this one out.

Bench Press Update

I've been working out consistently this month, pretty amazing, but I found that going in the morning is the only way I can do it. Today was the last chest workout for the month, so I thought I would log my progress here.

Today I did:
135 x 12 reps
155 x 6 reps
165 x 3 reps

165 is a long ways from 200, but I think I made good progress this first month. I started the month doing 115 x 12 times.

New Webmail Lite and Control Panel Features

We just finished releasing the next version of Webmail Lite. This version has a calendar, task list, and uses AJAX for speed improvements.

We also added a feature to our control panel that allows administrators to use IP addresses to restrict logins.

Read all about these these enhancements on our company blog.

2006 Goals

It's that time of year for resolution and goal setting, so here is my list for 2006 (in no particular order):

1. Blog More
I'd like to use this blog to record interesting things in my personal life and to document any research or technical details about the work I do at Webmail.us.

2. Go to the Doctor
Since we have great health coverage at Webmail.us, I better start using it. My dad has had a lot of health problems recently and let's just say it's been a wake up call for me.

3. Get my weight to 175 lbs
I think it's a perfect weight for me, and this goal will force me to attend the gym regularly.

4. Oversee the creation the fastest webmail client on the market.
Speed, speed, and more speed. We are working hard on this problem and it is the focus of our development efforts this year. I'm relying on the great developers we have to help me accomplish this goal.

5. Become the best hitter on my baseball team.
The past two years I have been the second best hitter on my team. This year I really want to take over that top spot.

6. Shoot a round of golf under 110.
I would say under 100, but that might be a bit unrealistic since I never have time to practice.

7. Take my family to Disney World.
Velvet and I work so much that we rarely take family vacations, so I would like to take the kids to Disney World this year. I know Jordan will love it almost as much as Velvet. :)

8. Successfully manage our ever growing group of developers.
I think this will be my biggest challenge this year. It's also the challenge I'm looking forward to the most.

9. Bench Press 200 lbs one time
I use to be able to do this, then I stopped working out. I'm probably at 165 right now (I use to do this 8 times w/o problems), but I honestly haven't tried a low number of reps in a long time.

10. Find more time to spend alone with my wife.
For obvious reasons... ;)

Understanding memcached memory management

memcached is a very fast program that can be used to cache data stored in a database for quick access and dramatically reduce the load on your database servers. It's one of those "must haves" if you develop a highly trafficked website that has a database backend. Understanding the internals of memcached may be a bit confusing at first, the details aren't documented well, and there are some tools that aren't that easy to understand what they do. I'll try to explain here by example.

Let's say you have a memcached setup and have allocated 256MB of RAM to the program. memcached works hard to avoid memory fragmentation, it does this by taking the memory and dividing it into classes, numbered 6 through 17 (don't ask). As you insert into memcached, it will take the size of the data you are inserting and inserts it into the class that is big enough to handle the data. See the chart below. The classes in the below memcached are of size 128B - 16KB. Ignore the Max_age column for now. Each class that has data is allocated at least one 1MB page. So, class 7 has 4 1MB pages, each data item in that class is using 128B and the class is full, so there are 32767 items in the class. (If you insert an item into memcached of say 100B, the class uses all 128B to avoid fragmentation.)

Now if we try adding to this cache, we won't necessarily get an "out of memory" error because memcached uses a LRU (least recently used) algorithm to kick out the item from the page that has been accessed the least. But, if we attempt to insert an item of say 15B, we will get an "out of memory" error because class 6 (the class would be of size 64B) has no items, and thus no pages have been assigned. But, all pages are currently being used, and memcached cannot allocate a 1MB page to class 6. In order to make this happen we would have to move a page from another class to class 6.

Let's examine how this is done:

First, let's get a snapshot of our current allocations:

[root@sql-slave1 bin]# ./memcached-tool localhost
# Item_Size Max_age 1MB_pages Full?
6 B 0 s 0 yes
7 128 B 742942 s 4 yes
8 256 B1175448 s 2 yes
9 512 B1279471 s 1 yes
10 1 kB6493931 s 1 yes
11 2 kB 434740 s 71 no
12 4 kB 917212 s 140 yes
13 8 kB 794005 s 30 no
14 16 kB1373021 s 7 yes
15 B 0 s 0 yes
16 B 0 s 0 yes
17 B 0 s 0 yes

Now, let's go ahead and try to insert 2 bytes of data:

[root@sql-slave1 bin]# telnet localhost 11211
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1).
Escape character is '^]'.
set key1 0 0 2
SERVER_ERROR out of memory

OK, just like I thought, memcached can't allocate a 1MB page, so let's help it out:

[root@sql-slave1 bin]# ./memcached-tool localhost move 14 6
Success.

Now, let's look at our pages again, as you can see 1 page has been moved from class 14 to class 6. The LRU items in class 14 go bye-bye.

[root@sql-slave1 bin]# ./memcached-tool localhost
# Item_Size Max_age 1MB_pages Full?
6 64 B 0 s 1 no
7 128 B 743011 s 4 yes
8 256 B1174812 s 2 yes
9 512 B1279618 s 1 yes
10 1 kB6494078 s 1 yes
11 2 kB 434887 s 71 no
12 4 kB 917208 s 140 yes
13 8 kB 794152 s 30 no
14 16 kB1373168 s 6 yes
15 B 0 s 0 yes
16 B 0 s 0 yes
17 B 0 s 0 yes

Let's insert our data again:

[root@sql-slave1 bin]# telnet localhost 11211
Trying 127.0.0.1...
Connected to localhost (127.0.0.1).
Escape character is '^]'.
set key1 0 0 2
aa
STORED
quit
Connection closed by foreign host.

Cool, it worked. Looking at our stats shows the item is aging:

[root@sql-slave1 bin]# ./memcached-tool localhost
# Item_Size Max_age 1MB_pages Full?
6 64 B 14 s 1 no
7 128 B 742970 s 4 yes
8 256 B1174852 s 2 yes
9 512 B1279658 s 1 yes
10 1 kB6494118 s 1 yes
11 2 kB 434918 s 71 yes
12 4 kB 917228 s 140 yes
13 8 kB 794192 s 30 no
14 16 kB1373208 s 6 yes
15 B 0 s 0 yes
16 B 0 s 0 yes
17 B 0 s 0 yes

Conclusions, you better keep an eye on the data in your memcached, and knowing what type of data you are storing will help you maintain it. Writing scripts to automate the moving around of pages based on data should be fairly easy.

Also, there are some little known commands that I use a lot:
stats
stats items
stats slabs
stats sizes

memcached is a great piece of software, many thanks to the Danga team.

Newsworthy

Looks like my wish came true:

http://www.hokiesports.com/football/recaps/2006016aaa.html

and Google has bundled some common software and made it easy to download and install, I haven't tried it, but it looks pretty useful:

http://pack.google.com/

Maybe I'll wait for them to release their operating system. I'm very skeptical this will happen anytime soon. It would have to be built on some sort of Unix flavor and the bottom line is that most of the applications they have built don't have Unix versions. Of course, it is Google, so I'm sure it's on their drawing board somewhere.

529 Savings Plans

I just finished signing Andrew up for a 529 savings plan. For those of you who don't know, 529 plans are a great way to save for college. They invest in stocks, bonds, etc, just like normal mutual funds, but the money has to be used for college. The funds have to be sponsored by a state, so each state has a fund. My financial advisor, Clark Howard, has some great tips about 529 plans, including his "Dean's List" and "Honor Roll List" of states with the best plans. One piece of advice that I don't listen to, even though I agree with is

"But first remember my rule that you don't save a penny for college unless you are already saving the maximum you can for your own retirement. College can be paid for with grants, loans, scholarships and work. Retirement happens only if you have saved the dough."

I don't think the whole "saving the maximum" thing will happen until Jordan is about 33, a little too late to start saving for college. I guess I'll just have to work a few more years, but I like working so no big deal. When I enrolled Jordan, I picked the Missouri state plan because it was on his Honor Roll list ( I don't think he had a Dean's List 4 years ago) and you could sign up for the plan online. This time around I wanted to chose one of his Dean's List plans so I went with the New York plan. The plan is managed by Vangaurd and you can sign up online.

Both the Missouri and New York plans let you invest in "age based" options, meaning the plans become less aggressive as the beneficiary gets older. This is exactly what I want plus it requires zero maintenance on my end, a big-time bonus because I hardly have time to pay attention to it.
I looked into the Virginia 529 plan too (my home state), but their so-called website looks like something a 2 year old put together with Microsoft Frontpage '98.

Va Tech Football 2005 Year in Review

The Virginia Tech football season has come to end and it certainly was a season filled with ups and downs. I enjoy attending the games and have seen the football program grow from being just awful to exceptionally good year after year. Becoming a winning program does, apparently, come at a cost. If I had one wish for next year's team, I wish that Frank Beamer would get some guts and bench players that cause more trouble than what they are worth. Some players just behave in a manner that does not reflect well on my alma-mater. I guess discipline and sportsmanship are far less important than winning. I suspect Frank has so much riding on winning these days that he can't afford to bench players that are obviously a poor reflection on the entire program. I completely understand his position, and our program is certainly not the first program to have such issues.

Perhaps Va Tech can start offering a new class for all incoming recruits "How not to look like an immature spoiled kid on national television 101". I guess if you want a squeaky clean program, attend Vanderbilt...Which bowl did they go to this year? And when is my season ticket application due? :(

Update: Since writing this post (I saved it as a draft yesterday), the athletic department at Va Tech released this statement.

Java Schools

Joel has a great blog post about "Java Schools", it's a good read and I agree with every bit of it. The test we give programmers on their first interview has questions regarding both pointers and recursion. They are two of my favorite questions, most people think they are too easy, but the fact is if you solve the recursion problem using a "while loop" it tells me a lot. If you solve it using binary operations, you're hired. ;)

I don't use a test as the determining factor for any hire, but I like to see how people go about solving problems. Some struggle, some work fast, some love it, some hate it, some even give up and leave without even trying. If you can't handle 6 simple problem solving questions though, chances are you can't handle developing software applications that are critical to the success of tens of thousands of businesses.

MySQL Replication

This morning I setup MySQL replication for two of our user / spam databases that we use internally. This is about the 10th time I have done this, so I don't even have to look up the instructions anymore, but I have to admit that the MySQL team has made the replication process ever so easy. We setup our databases in a master-master configuration with multiple slaves. Slaves can span geographic locations, for instance, from Dulles, Va to Blacksburg, Va, some 300+ miles apart. It's a very nice setup and I always have so much fun setting it up, I don't know why, but for some reason that type of work is fun for me, especially when it works the very first time I try it (and the last two times it has worked right off the bat). Thinking back to the first time I setup MySQL replication it took a few tries to get it right, and so if you are having trouble getting it to work, here are a few suggestions:

1. Read High Performance MySQL by Jeremy Zawodny
2. Turn on logging (vi /etc/my.cnf, log=/var/lib/mysql/log.txt)
3. Make sure every server has a unique id (server-id = 1)
4. I had a pound symbol (#) as part of the password, for some reason this didn't work.
5. Make sure you can telnet to the mysql port on each machine.
6. Make sure the username/passwords are correct.
7. The "show slave status" and "show master status" commands are very helpful.
8. Only replicate the databases you need, make sure there is not a lot of unnecessary traffic.
9. Testing is easy to do, so do it.
10. The /etc/my.cnf file is not used after the first reload of mysql. You need to run the 'change master to' command from that point forward.

Jeremy's book was very helpful, so I highly recommend it for the first-timer.

The best tip I can give is to setup a slave server that does nothing but replicate from the master. This is important because some day you will want to setup another slave without bringing down a live master. This is nearly impossible if you are using all of your machines for queries. To setup a new slave without any downtime, do the following:

On the slave that is doing nothing but replication:

1. Run 'stop slave' from mysql prompt
2. Run 'show slave status\G' from the mysql prompt, record the following two lines:
Master_Log_File: rss-master1-bin.000082
Read_Master_Log_Pos: 993448778
3. Run a "mysqldump" to get all of the data to a text file.

On the brand new slave, do the following:
1. Setup the databases, users, and import the exported data.
2. Run the following command from mysql

CHANGE MASTER TO
MASTER_HOST='master-server',
MASTER_USER='repl',
MASTER_PASSWORD='xxxxxxxx',
MASTER_LOG_FILE='master-server-bin.000082',
MASTER_LOG_POS=934159359;

3. Run 'start slave' from mysql (on both slaves).
4. If you have logging turned on, you will see all of the queries coming through since you stopped the slave process on the first slave machine.

That's it, it should work fine, but testing is encouraged. :)

Webmail.us 2005 Development Year in Review

This past year, thanks to the hard work of our entire team, we were able to launch many improvements to our email hosting infrastructure. Below is a partial list of what we accomplished over the last year:

An improved billing system for our accounting team
Faster, more reliable statistics for our customers
Control Panel 2.0
Control Panel API 1.5, 1.6
Webmail API 1.0, 1.1
Centralized Logging System
Revamped Webmail.us Website
Webmail Lite
An Auto-Configure Tool for POP3 clients
An Outages Alert System for our customers
Improved Migration Process
Improved Anti-Fraud System
Webmail 3.1
Webmail w/ RSS Reader
Webmail w/ AJAX, Calendar, and Company Directory
Webmail Help Section

This list doesn't include all the work required to help get the new infrastructure up and running and any custom development work we did for our customers.

We were able to accomplish so much because of our great team. I thank everyone involved in the process.

Another Tailgating Season Completed

It's hard to believe that the home football season for the Hokies is over and in the books. I've never had so much fun tailgating and it's a shame the season is over. The main reason the tailgating was so great this year is the great group of friends and co-workers that come out to eat, drink their favorite beverage, play cornhole, and chat about an unimaginable number of topics. A big thanks goes out to David and Jenny Catalano. They are the ones who actually paid for the great spot and we owe them big-time. Also, a big thank you to Bill Boebel who let us use his truck all season, got up at 6:30A.M. to secure the spot, and probably paid for lots of food and drinks out of his own pocket. There are many other people that helped out with the tailgates each week and I'm sure I am going to forget someone (it's a long season, and I didn't exactly take notes) but here it goes:

Velvet, thanks for the awesome taco-dip and most importantly, putting up with me.
David and Megan Lawson, thanks for the great food, beverages, and putting up with all of us.
Gary Francis, thanks for introducing us to the great game of cornhole.
Matt, thanks for getting the food several times and bringing Velvet a birthday cake.
Mike, thanks for being a great cornhole partner and let's just agree never to wrestle again...
Brian Matthews, thanks for the great phone call at 2:30AM, sorry the girl never showed up. :)
Pat, thanks for being so supportive of our efforts and trying your best to make sure that everyone has a good time.
Jilian, thanks for being so sexy. ;)
Justina, thanks for ... well, you know. ;)
Brian Hartsock, thanks for putting up with Velvet and Justina :)
Beth, thanks for taking care of Bill.
Tammy, thanks for being a designated driver.
Vinny, thanks for being a designated driver.
Huey, thanks for calling Vinny.
Marissa, thanks for hanging out until 4:30AM (or later) twice.
Bill (again), thanks for leaving the truck running for 12 hours straight so we could listen to your great music. :)
David (again), thanks for the great wood-burner.
Totally random people, thanks for stopping by and hanging out.
Virginia Tech Police, thanks for not stopping by. :)
Hokie Football Team, thanks for winning so many games.
Everyone else, thanks for coming by and hanging out!

If I forgot about someone or something, I'm sorry in advance, and feel free to leave a comment. Me and Velvet will probably skip on the ACC Championship game, but are planning on attending the bowl game. Let us know if you are going too!

My Thoughts on Microsoft Live

Microsoft announced last Tuesday their plans for Windows Live and Office Live, you can read about it here. I sometimes like to give Microsoft a hard time, but I really don’t have anything against them. In fact, I think they are an excellent company. Anyone who doubts their ability to take over any market is forgetting what history has taught us.

Let’s take a look at some of the companies they have conquered in the past:
* Netscape (browser)
* Apple (Operating System)
* Borland (C++ Compiler)
* IBM (Operating System)
* Lotus (Spreadsheet)
* WordPerfect (Word Processor)

I think jumping into online services is a great idea for Microsoft. I think they need to do two things in order to really succeed at this strategy:

1. Integrate their services tightly with their applications
2. Develop API’s so that developers can build applications on top of these services

It sounds like they are going to do both, but I think #2 is especially important. If they provide access to a large web service API that would be a powerful move. It opens the door to a lot of possibilities for the development community out there and I think that’s important for wide-spread adoption. For those people who think they are getting into the web service game a little too late, think again. Being the first to do something has never been a part Microsoft’s strategy and I don’t think they will let their late arrival bother them this time around either.

How will this affect companies like Webmail.us? It's a good question but I don't think it will have much of an impact on what we do. Our company has been tremendously successful because we provide superior service and support, we continuously innovate our product, and we are focused on one thing - email. Our customers love us for our attention to detail, quick response times, and our passion.

If anything, I think the move by Microsoft into the web services space justifies our business model. We have known for a long time that offering software as a service makes complete sense and it's great to see that Microsoft is finally recognizing that fact too.

My Daily Routine Part II

It's been almost six weeks since Andrew's birth and I just have one word to sum up the whole experience...”WOW”. He is growing so fast (just over 9 lbs now) and he will start going to day care this week. My routine for the last 6 weeks has changed very little. I tried going to bed early and getting up really early (like 5:30am), that lasted about one week. It's just too difficult for me to become that hard core at this point. I would wake up at 5:30, do work for about 1.5 hours from home and then take a shower and head into work. What I have found works best is for me to get up at 7:00am each morning. I have been able to do that consistently for the last 3-4 weeks. If I wake up at seven I can get Jordan to school between 8:00am and 8:30am. I arrive to work shortly thereafter, work through lunch and leave the office around 5:15 to go pick up Jordan from school. I get home around 5:45 or 6:00 and eat dinner, play with kids, etc. I usually do work between 9:00pm and 11:00pm and try to get to bed before Midnight. For some reason, even if I end up staying up until 1:00am, I have no problems waking up at 7:00am when the alarm goes off.

The only part about my day that I don't like is that I have no time to workout. I'm hoping that I can find some time to get back into the gym sometime soon. At work, it seems like I sit down at my desk in the morning and before I can blink it's time to leave and get Jordan. I hate the days that I forget to pack my lunch because I don't like having to go out and get food, it's such a waste of time.

Before we had Andrew everyone asked how I was going to handle the lack of sleep. Thus far, it's been easy, Velvet handles 99% of the work. She's been great and has really made it too easy for me. She starts work this week and I have a feeling the next six weeks will be harder than the first six. So stay tuned...

My New Laptop

I finally broke down and had the company buy me a new laptop. My first laptop was a Compaq I bought in 2000, it was an awesome machine. It lasted until December 2003. Finally the hard drive died, I believe it was a 600MHZ Pentium or something. I then took Velvet's old Compaq that we bought in December 2002, it was a 950MHZ Pentium. I used it until about 3 weeks ago. It was a terrible machine. Velvet bought a Dell about a year ago that has performed reasonably well.

I'm really stubborn when it comes to getting a new computer, I try to get everything I can out of a machine until it dies. I think it comes from my poor background. Hell, I used my Commodore 64 from the 2nd grade until my junior year of high school, no joke. That computer was definitely the best computer I've ever owned, but that's a different story.

Besides the Compaq being dog slow (which I really didn't mind because I use SSH for almost everything except email), it had the following issues:

1. The battery only lasted 23 minutes before it would shut off the computer, losing all work.
2. The computer would shut off randomly if the CPU got too hot. I never figured out what made it run so hot, but I did notice that when I had the AIM window open and an advertisement ran with animation the CPU would spike to 100% and shortly thereafter the machine would shut down. Needless to say, I now have a habit of keeping AIM always minimized.
3. The monitor part of the laptop would not stay up on it's own. It would fall back when you opened it, so I had to always prop it up with two pillows. Jordan even knew to put two pillows behind it before opening it, I hope she doesn't grow up thinking that's how *all* computers work.
4. The fan was so loud that I had to turn the TV up about 4 notches to hear it. I remember whenever we would watch movies I would turn off the laptop for a better movie experience.
5. The last straw for the Compaq came when the power cord would no longer stay in socket, so it was impossible to charge. This was the second adapter I bought for it, the first had a different problem that was replaceable, this problem was impossible to fix

Now, my new Sony Vaio is great. The screen is bright, you can actually put it on your lap without worrying about 2nd degree burns, it's quiet as can be, and it's extremely fast. The power cord is a little short, but I don't really need it since the battery last about 2.5 hours (not great, but beats 23 minutes). My only complaint was the crazy amount of software pre-installed. Software? Who uses software? All of the software I actually use, I had to download:

1. Putty
2. AIM
3. Open Office
4. Firefox
5. Programmer's Notepad

Oh, wow, somebody remind me again why Microsoft exists? OK, so I still use them for a window manager, but maybe I don't need to.....

Andrew Ryan Minnick

On September 28th 2005 my second child, first son, Andrew Ryan Minnick was born. It was an awesome experience and impossible to explain in words. I would post a picture here, but blogger sucks and won't let me right now. See Velvet's blog for more pictures and more details. Everything has gone great so far, it helps that he enjoys sleeping as much as he does, hopefully everything will continue to go smoothly. Jordan loves her baby brother and has not been jealous at all, she's a good little helper. Velvet is doing good too, but I think she's getting very anxious to get back to work.

My Daily Routine

I can tell by the amount of cleaning that Velvet is doing around the house that the greatly anticipated birth of my second child is coming soon. I’m not quite sure how I am going to juggle everything but I thought documenting the daily routine before and after the birth would be an interesting exercise, so here goes the before:

My weekdays begin with the alarm going off at 7:00am sharp. Most mornings I lay there for a few minutes hoping that Velvet will jump into the shower first so I can grab an extra 15 minutes of sleep, it’s usually a 50/50 chance of that happening. Before showering, I open up the laptop, read my morning email, answer all the support questions that I can, read the blogs I follow, and check my Webmail Lite account. (All of this can be done in 15-20 minutes). After showering, shaving, and ironing; I grab a donut, pop-tart, or anything else that is quick and easy and gobble it down. Hopefully by this time Jordan is up, in a good mood, and requires only a moderate amount of teeth pulling to convince her to get dressed for school. (I won’t talk about the days that Jordan is in a BAD mood, LOL) Jordan generally has only two requests: Mickey Mouse pancakes (in a baggie so she can eat in the car on the way to school) and some chocolate milk.

Jordan’s school is only 5 minutes from work and right on the way, so it’s very convenient. I listen to my favorite sports talk show “Mike & Mike in the Morning” on the way to drop off Jordan. Jordan is generally very quiet during the ride to school, eating her pancakes and drinking her milk. But she does like to point out every school bus that she sees (and she has yet to miss one). I usually drop Jordan off at 8:30am and arrive at work shortly thereafter.

I eat lunch at my desk really quickly and try to leave the office by 6:00pm. (Although I have managed to find time to workout twice this week I would hardly consider it part of my “daily routine” at this point.) I come home (Velvet picks up Jordan from school), fix dinner (50/50 chance Velvet will handle this), read a book to Jordan, and give her bath. By this time it’s 8:00pm and I once again open the laptop, check my email, answer support questions, read my blogs, and begin working on whatever issues I didn’t quite have enough time for during “business hours”. After another 3-4 hours of working I close the laptop, grab a few late night snacks and head to bed. I usually toss and turn for 30 minutes or so thinking about servers, code, scalability, infrastructure, hiring, planning, or whatever other issues happen to be on my mind at the time. I force myself to sleep because I know 7:00am will come fast and furious.

Hopefully in a week or two I will have an update on the “routine” or lack thereof. I have a strong suspicion that this may be my last blog for awhile though.

Baseball

Baseball

As a kid growing up I had two passions, baseball and computers. I got my first Commodore 64 when I was in second grade and was hooked. I started playing baseball not long after that and if I wasn’t in front of a computer I was outside playing baseball. (A chick magnet I was not.) My favorite memories growing up all revolve around those summer days when my brother and I would spend endless hours playing toss, scrimmaging the neighborhood kids, and heading to the town park for the big game. My brother (Scott) is three years younger than I, but that never stopped him from playing with the “bigger” kids. It didn’t take long before everyone realized he had exception baseball skills; an obvious result of the early start and having to always play with kids older than him.

Little league lasts three years where I grew up and Scott was simply playing in a league of his own by year 2. He dominated on the mound as a pitcher, and was a terrific hitter as well. His third year his team went undefeated with Scott pitching every game. He pitched 3 no-hitters that season, and struck out all 15 batters (little league is only 5 innings) twice. I’ll never forget watching his games and dreaming about his potential future. Unfortunately, like so many young kids, by the time the next summer rolled around he was no longer able to pitch. Basically his arm gave out, probably a result of overwork at too young of an age. He never pitched again after those two years in little league and I’m sure the game was ever so boring to him from the outfield. Scott continued to excel at hitting, however, and was the star of his JV and Varsity teams throughout high school. He went on a played two years of ball at Bluefield State College.

Our age difference always meant we never played on the same teams. When I was in Pony League he was in Little League, when I was on Varsity, he played JV. I always wanted the chance to play with him on the same team. The last two summers I have had the opportunity to play with my little brother on the same through a local adult league. We play on Sundays and some Thursdays with little to no fan-fare. The league is a large mix of guys who either want to get back to their childhood glory days (I’m in this group) or guys who are either in college or just got out of college. Our team is pretty much the worst team in the league, but we have a lot of fun and give it our all each game. It’s good for me to get out and socialize with people outside of work and I get a good bit of exercise at the same time. But, perhaps the part I enjoy the most is being able to play alongside my kid brother.

Thursday night was our last game of the regular season. We were playing one of the better teams in the league and we were pretty desperate for a win. Mannin (our best pitcher and coach) had talked to Scott about pitching a few innings and my brother said he would give it a shot. Scott started the game and was a bit rusty to start, but by the second inning I saw the magic start to creep back into his body; the same magic that decided to leave him 15 years ago. He stood on the mound with a confidence I remembered ever so clearly. He didn’t have a great fastball, but he remembered how to pitch. He began to work hitters and even struck out a few, and before I could blink my eyes it was the end of the 5th inning and Scott had only given up 2 runs! We were winning 5-2? Could this be? Could the worse team in the league pull out the upset?

At the beginning of the 6th (our league plays 8 innings or 2.5 hours max), Mannin takes over as pitcher and Scott moves to centerfield. As we take the field I tell Scott that no matter what happens from here out he pitched one hell of a game. He looked at me and said “I gave it my all.” I said “we know”. Mannin gives up 1 run in the 6th and we are informed that the game will only last 7 innings due to time. Perfect! No way could we blow that lead with just one inning to go.

The opposing team scores one run and then puts runners on second and third with two outs. The batter hits a lazy fly ball to centerfield, a routine play by any measure, we are going to win, I’m sure of it. But then the unthinkable happens, Scott loses the ball in lights, the ball hits right in front of him as he makes a dive for it from his knees. The two runs score and we end up losing 6-5. The team was devastated and I put my brother on suicide watch. Just kidding, but it’s not far from the truth. He takes the game way to seriously, never one to joke about mistakes, even if it’s a silly rec. league game.

That’s the thing about baseball; the team that should win doesn’t always win. We were beating a better team for six and two-thirds innings. But it’s that last 1/3 of an inning that makes all the difference in the world. (I’m sure there’s a lesson about life in there somewhere.)

Before the game Thursday night I was seriously considering giving up baseball. I really don’t have the time, even though it’s only once a week. And it’s really not a lot of fun to lose almost every game. Thursday night changed my mind though; I’m definitely playing again next year. As I watch my brother on the mound I knew moments like this are what life is all about…and why would one ever give that up?