Yesterday was a great day – no foolin’. 

First, I have been renewed as a PowerShell MVP for my third year running.  This is a great honor and I hope I live up to it.   

Second, I was reminded that my third anniversary as an independent business owner and software consultant occurred in March.  It feels a lot longer than three years, but I think that speaks to how much I’ve accomplished in that time.  Business is good, communities are growing, my life is my own, and I’m doing what I want to do.  What else could I possibly want?

So what will year four look like?  Here’s what I’d like to accomplish:

1. More Iron Scripter! competitions.  I have yet to formalize the website that drives these games, I’d like to spend some time doing that so we can start organizing brackets, have coordinated wider competitions, and special events.
2. More free software.  Code Owls is about ready to push out a beta release of a skunkworks project named “Polaris.”  This is an integration of Windows Explorer and PowerShell that strips down the workflow for extending the windows file explorer to a few lines of script.  It quite literally turns Windows Explorer into a PowerShell-driven dashboard you can use to monitor any data PowerShell can provide.
3. Licensing Code Owls frameworks.  I’ve dumped a ton of effort into building a base framework for creating PowerShell providers and hosts quickly and without fuss.  While these frameworks are available as open source software, my plan is to fork these projects into commercial libraries that include support and customization services.
4. Another PowerShell Saturday.  This time I want more help.  Drop me a line if you’re interested.
5. Maintain speaking engagements.  I still love speaking and want to continue doing so, but this year I’d like to try speaking less about technology and more about career and life management.  We’ll see how that plays out.
6. Maintain volunteer hours.  I spend a lot of time in the local public schools, helping out with tech issues and lending a hand in the classroom.  I love this time and find it very rewarding, and the staff are immensely appreciative.
7. Finally, I want to pick up fiction writing again.  I haven’t touched this hobby in a decade or so, but my father was kind enough to enroll me in a 12-month online workshop for hobby writers that should help get the pen moving.  My hope is to participate in the National Novel Writing Month this year.

Yeah, all that.  So this is me, hanging on for the ride….

Well, I left the caption contest up for a week, and as promised I’ve chosen a winner.  The choice was hard, not because y’all are terribly funny but because most of you chose to go the obvious route and focus on my hair or make some off-hand reference to illicit substances.  No offense, but after 25+ years of looking like a ragamuffin I’ve heard ‘em all.

And the winning caption <drumroll />:

"OK, on to your code review...Oleg and Dimitri here are about to gang audit your code."

The winning caption was supplied by Marc Lyon, who wanted me to link to the website for his employer.  Congrats Marc!

So I get back from CodePaLOUsa with a full head and abused liver to find that the Louisville Courier Journal decided to use my ugly mug in their article on the conference (they managed to misspell my name though – can’t win ‘em all). This picture was taken during an open space on raising geeks.

We’ve already had some fun with this on twitter, but I wanted to make sure everyone has their chance to poke some fun at me. So I’m having a caption contest!

If you want to participate, go here and enter a caption you think is funny. At the end of the week I’ll look over the entries and pick a winner based on lulz. I’ll announce the winner early next week.

Rules: your caption must be publishable on my blog. This basically means that if I consider the language or content of your caption inappropriate it’ll get nixed.

First and only prize: link to your blog from mine. Hey, it’s not as lame as it sounds, I get around 6K unique visitors a month...

So get crackin…

So the last few weeks have been a rollercoaster for beefycode.com.  I apologize if the downtime has affected your powershelling or log4netting or whatever.  I’m hoping the troubles are behind me…

So here’s what happened.  Late last year I updated the backend of beefycode to the most recent version of blogengine.net which required me to update my hosting situation to a server that supports ASP.NET 4.  Apparently I was the last person on earth to do this and received a rude awakening as my new shared server seemed to be VERY shared.  Accessibility of this blog became and issue so I wanted to move it to another shared host I was using that seemed much more reliable.  So I did that.

Things were fine for a few weeks, and then my host suspended my account for “CPU abuse”.  Apparently blogengine.net was spiking the CPU usage to as high as 99%, so they had no choice.  The logs showed nothing unusual, and I was unable to replicate the scenario locally so was a bit blind as to what tactic to take, but I tried a few things.  It didn’t help as the host suspended my account again and refused to reactivate it unless I upgraded to a VPS.  I was miffed – I couldn’t event access FTP with my account suspended and had no choice but to move the blog to another host so I could get my other sites back online.  But I understand their stance – they gave me several chances to address the issue and I failed to do so, so they did what they did to protect their other customers.

Thankfully OrcsWeb provides complimentary hosting accounts for MVPs, so now beefycode.com is hosted there.  I poured a few days into porting the blog to Orchard; unfortunately this time was wasted.  The hosting account limits the virtual memory for the application pool to 600MB, recycling the application pool when it exceeds this value.  I personally thing 600MB is plenty; however, I can’t host the default Orchard site without it spiking this on each and every page view.  That’s right – one application pool recycle per page view.  It was completely unusable - sluggish and nonresponsive.  So I’m back to blogengine.net.  Hopefully updating to a more recent (and less customized) theme will tamper the CPU use, otherwise I may be looking into a VPS after all…