I recently stumbled upon a blog called The Brick House via a post  on Lifehacker detailing DIY pipe shelving:

This guy is painstakingly documenting his renovation, design and styling of a run down piece of foreclosed property with amazing results. It has inspired me to get working on interior projects now that the major renovations (windows, kitchen, master bedroom, master bath and nursery) are complete. First project is to implement my own version of the pipe shelving in the upstairs living room – which originally looked like this:

and create a full-length shelving unit with space for all my dad’s records (yes, I said _records_), books, paintings, etc.

I have also started the craigslist hunt for contemporary, mid-century accoutrements, more to follow…

As a divine club member (membership to which I would highly recommend) I received a shipment of two bottles of 2001 Dollarhide Cabernet Sauvignon. Erin and I opened one up that evening, as we are both impatient people ;-). Immediately after tasting Erin gave the elusive two thumbs up (loosely translated = BUY MORE). At some point, I twittered my excitement about the Dollarhide…

Now the fun part, I got a call from a rep at St. Supéry this past Saturday. The rep led with “I received an email mentioning that you loved the ’01 Dollarhide and would like to purchase some more bottles.” I had been meaning to re-up my order anyways so this was a welcome and convenient call. A case is on its way and I can’t wait. Did I feel “stalked”? No. Would I have felt that way if I was not already a member? Probably. Further, it is always possible that my intentions to purchase more could have slipped through the cracks if the rep had not called me directly. At the very least, St. Supéry increased their chances of a sale by reaching out.

Here’s the question, from St. Supéry’s point of view is this a repeatable pattern? If so, how much can they make from it (i.e. what is it worth to them)? Further, can this be replicated across industries in some way, shape or form?

From Twitter’s point of view, do they want to go the customer service route? If so, how much can they charge for it? What tooling would be necessary to build on top of Twitter’s base functionality to make this easily repeatable for other companies?

I know. Lot’s of questions here, but no answers. These questions are not mine to answer — simply things that came to mind after the experience.

Nonetheless, someone at Supéry knows about Twitter, knows how to use twitter search, knows enough about RSS use it effectively and helps make great wine.

Couldn’t resist including a photo of Mike Cannon-Brookes “sleeping” on the lawn of St. Supéry winery last year before JavaOne…

The Coherence Incubator

• Coherence Common
• The Command Pattern
• The Messaging Pattern
• The Push Replication Pattern

Thus the journey began. Brian Oliver (the driving force behind its creation) announced it at the London Coherence User Group. Gojko Adzic wrote a very succinct blog post after attending the event — which subsequently got picked up by Highscalability.com. Cameron blogged about it. Brian then flew over from London to present the Coherence Incubator at the inaugural New York Coherence Special Interest Group event.

On November 10th we released new versions of all four of the original projects.

On November 24th we released version 1.0.0 of The Functor Pattern.

Nicholas Gregory and Stephen Price published an article entitled “Extend the Data Grid With Hub-less Messaging” on TheServerSide (discussion here) on December 23rd.

For more information on what’s going on and what’s in store for the future come join us at either the next London Coherence SIG on January 22nd or the next New York Coherence SIG on January 29th.

All in all, it has been a fantastic year for the incubator with over 1000s downloads over just 2.5 months, 4 new projects in the pipeline and many many more being proposed. We are looking forward to 2009 being a huge year in extending the horizons for what Data Grids (e.g. Oracle Coherence) can be used for across all verticals, problem domains and environments.

“just remember that somewhere your dad is the shining light on a northbound train” — a friend

The only downside so far is that if the list of blogs change (as the most certainly will – i.e. grow) we have to update the JS for all of the blogs that are participating in the “network.” Which leads to a feature request – find a way to have clustered consensus of the information that makes up the “network” across the blogs in the “network” itself.

Getting back to the title of this post, “blog rolls” have always been horribly hard to maintain. With a small amount of work it would seem easy to tie the PartnerBar concepts into GoogleReader (perhaps narrowed by label, trend, starred, etc?). Therefore having a dynamic and easily maintainable “blog roll.”

You were faithful, playful, honorable, energetic and just a damn good friend.

I only wish I could have seen you one more time… safe travels.

Brian (4:45): e@
Me (4:46): Huh?
Brian (4:47): e@
Me (4:47): Huh?

Then nothing…

This morning over coffee I was asking him what the txt was all about – seems it was just his phone screwing up and sending random “e@” txts to random people. I commented that at the end of the txt conversation I ended up feeling stupid for not knowing what “e@” was short for (assuming it was some sort of l33t-speak), so of course I googled it and found nothing relevant.

Jon happened to be with present for the conversation and commented “That must be Web 3.0!”

Jon might as well be British given his proficiency at dry humor.

Update: Brian moved his blog here

Secure VPN Connection terminated locally by the Client.
Reason 422: Lost contact with the security gateway. Check your network connection

Check out this thread.

Basically, you need to disable disable Parallels’ networking:

1. Apple > System Preferences > Network
2. Double click “Parallels NAT”
3. Change “Configure IPv4: Using DHCP” to “Off”
4. Click the “Show:” pulldown to find “Paralells Host-Guest”
5. Change “Configure IPv4: Using DHCP” to “Off”

At first read I didn’t even consider trying it as it seemed completely outlandish, after getting more frustrated I decided to give it a go. Worked immediately. Obviously, I created a new “Location” with these settings.

Also, if you can’t connect at all and see these errors:

Output size mismatch. Actual: 0, Expected: 237.

Check out this thread. Make sure to either reboot or restart the cvpnd process.