Too many things can go wrong and the unexpected will always happen.

The presentation I gave on MySQL Scaling and Growth can be found here.

Thanks to everyone for the support and feedback provided.

32 was a good year. Got married, went to Jamaica, moved into a kickass position inside Yahoo!, duckiehunt.com has taken off.

I’m not sure what 33 will hold, but if the amount of facebook notifications I got wishing me a Happy Birthday, then it will probably be one of much celebration and appreciation with friends.

P.S. My B-day gift from Kathy is helicopter lessons. Bad Ass.

It was a discussion on how to scale MySQL so that you can support 10-100x your current traffic load. Adding more webservers is a non-trivial task, but I tell ya, you’ve got to know your stuff to make sure that your Databases are able to handle a huge traffic onslaught.

I also have to thank Dave Stokes and Jason Ragsdale for their support throughout the talk.

Here’s the link to the talk I presented.

–Snoopykiss feels geeky. And proud.

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

We were reminicing about the Food and Spirits party when a friend told me that if I were to open a restaurant it would need to be named ‘Nom nom nom yarr!’.

This would of course be hugely successful and need to be followed up with other specialities, similar to the Papa’s brand.

We would have the French: Tres nom and it’s sister Qui est ton nom?
The Mexican: Los Nomos
The Asian: Om Nom Nom
The Indian: Om Om Om

–Snoopykiss might be onto something here.

I learned some interesting things this time around:

• My friends are incredibly diverse. Two of them ran out to get a breaker for the hot tub @ 9:45 and installed it themselves.
• My wife is mischievous. When said hot tub failed for the last time, and people got in anyways. She offered a bottle of Jamaican rum to the person who would last the longest. No jets. No heater. It was ~30 degrees outside. Neil won by lasting for 3 hours.
• You can’t get rid of alcohol by throwing a party. You just accumulate more.
• My friends are willing to drive 8+ hours just to come to the party. We had visitors from Kansas City, Tulsa and Austin. Just for this soiree.

Congrats to the winners! This year, we settled ties by having a “Duck Off”. (Pick random duck with a number on it. Highest number wins. Pure awesome.)

This is the point where I would say that I can’t wait till next year. But I’m hoping to have a new floor by then. That way I’m not embarrassed by statements like, “New Rule: If you make a stain. You have to sign it.”

Till next year!

–Snoopykiss

Anything small enough to fit on one could be emailed and anything bigger than that could be found on a torrent. I found that people usually used them to share Word Docs, MP3’s and/or pr0n. If you were on a computer that had those, you were probably already close enough to email them.

The reason I finally caved and got one was for more of my “ahead of the curve” obsession. Boxee (boxee.tv) is my new toy. I’ve been able to convert an Apple TV from a crippled iTunes box to an internet multimedia playhouse. Hulu, last.fm, Comedy Central and soon Netflix will all be available from one box.

The plan is to also rip our movies to disk so that we no longer have to deal with disks anymore. The world is moving to streaming video. And I like it.

–Snoopykiss is an early adapter. It can be expensive. But it sure is fun.

It’s become obvious to me that a number of people still relate to me as my old party/bachelor-esque lifestyle.

“I thought you’d never marry.”
“Last chance. I’ve got the car running if you want to bolt.”
“I was starting to wonder about you.” — My Dad.
“Wha-wha-what? Can you back up 3 sentences?”

I don’t think of it as much as no longer having the wild and crazy parties. I think of it as having found someone whose company I enjoy in between the “New and (Mostly) Family Friendly Soirees”.

She’s quite a gal. Anyone who’s met her can attest to it. Anyone who hasn’t can probably imagine since she’s putting up with me.

– Snoopykiss now has a ring. But keeps forgetting it.

P.S. When we came back from the honeymoon, some friends invaded our house with ~1000 duckies. It was awesome. Except for the one under the pillow. I’ll get you back, Neil.

PICS!
Honeymoon
Duckie Invasion
Wedding

And now that I’ve discovered what they’ve done to the house while I was gone, I’m really not sure what to do with them!

Duckies. Duckies EVERYWHERE! 300 of them on the bed, about another 100-200 at work. Inside the cabinets, underneath pillows, in the shoe cubby, etc. There’s supposed to be ~1000 total, I figure that I’ll still be finding them till 2012.

Pics forthcoming.

J.F.K.

Charles Darwin

Ducks

Wikipedia

No warm-up comedian. No break. Just laughing till the jam hit the roof. Fantastic.