Julie and I got married two years ago today. Yeah, two years may not sound like a lot, especially when you consider how long we dated. We'll be celebrating more anniversaries, though ... interestingly enough things went well everywhere for me today. The servers arrived, I was able to load Windows Server 2008 R2 without any trouble (even though it's not officially supported yet), dinner was delicious. Good stuff.

We've got a vacation coming. I'm off from August 31st to September 8th ... Julie goes back to work on the 7th, though. Not sure what we're doing, though; we were thinking of going to Door County but are looking at other options now. We just want to relax for a week, but we don't want to leave Daisy at home.

Soon after that I'm heading to the other side of the planet to the head office in Sydney. I've never been on a flight that long before and, based on how I reacted to the flight back from St. Lucia, I'm going to be a wreck. Never been to Australia, but I hear it's pretty cool. And no, I'm not going to skydive.

Let's see how Richard reacts when I walk into the office carrying a MacBook Pro

Discovery Channel is hosting Shark Week this week. That means that, apart from a few breaks for Cash Cab and infomercials, it's a solid block of sharks until 2:00AM Sunday.

It's a good thing sharks are awesome. Combine that with HDTV, and the awesome increases. I'm somewhat biased so I'm not the best-qualified to research this, but I'm pretty sure the awesome increases at an exponential rate.

Daisy does not understand this, but she is actually watching her ancestors on TV. Yes, Daisy is a dog ... but only to the untrained eye. Under that soft puppy exterior lies a for of teeth capable of rending flesh and splintering bone. When fully-grown, Daisy will be able to bite through a late-model Toyota Sequoia with the greatest of ease. At this age I have to keep her away from Smart cars and Mini Coopers, but she's a growing girl.

Okay, so that's not going to happen ... shes actually starting to lose her teeth now. Yes, this is normal, as even dogs have baby teeth. The freaky thing is that, even though she's only lost one so far, they're supposed to come out in groups of two or three at a time. Apparently this isn't really known to people who don't own dogs, so first-time puppy owners get quite alarmed when their puppy's toys have blood on them.

So ... if you were handed TWO of the following:

6U worth of server
Dual Xeon E5540
72GB of RAM
6x internal 300GB 15k RPM SAS disks (on a RAID controller with 256MB of cache)
15x external 146GB 15k RPM SAS disks (on a RAID controller with 512MB of cache)
870W redundant power supplies

... what would you do with them? I don't know either, for the record, but I imagine they're going to be loud, hot enough to grill hot dogs, and more powerful than most of our customers' database servers. We've got the "loud" and "hot" parts bottled up -- they're going into an air conditioned server room -- but as for the unknown purpose and power, I haven't quite figured that out yet. I'm guessing there will be a bunch of virtualization going on.

Saw the 6th Harry Potter movie last night. Overall I left the theater on a positive note, but I have mixed feelings about the differences between the book and movie.

I'm not going to sit here and bitch that the book was "so much better" ... no, unlike a lot of movie critics and Harry Potter fans I understand that there is no way to condense the Half Blood Prince into 150 minutes without taking some creative liberties. However, there are a couple of things that would have been great to see.

For example, the movie would have benefited from the huge battle for Hogwarts at the end of the book. Instead, we were given a small tantrum.

But ... as I said, overall positive impression. Wish I saw it in Imax, though ... stupid Transforms exclusivity agreement ...