February 2009 Archives

Fences makes a great Desktop

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I happened to be browsing www.stardock.com, looking at their latest 4X gaming offerings, and ran across a product that they claim will help me "clean up my desktop clutter".

If you're anything like me, you keep a ton of links, documents, folders, and other stuff all over your windows desktop (not unlike your physical desktop). I have been manually organizing my clutter for a long time.  PDFs here, Zip Files there, To-Dos up there in the right-hand corner.  My "nightmare" scenario?  Having to do a presentation with my laptop on a projector with less than the native 1920x1080 resolution of my screen.  All of my desktop icons get re-arranged all over the place!

I installed Stardock's Fences about three days ago, and it really has changed the way I interact with my desktop.  For the better!  Here's a look at my desktop with Fences, followed by my favorite feature: double-click on any empty space on your desktop and all your icons are automatically hidden.

Desktop with Fences All desktop icons hidden

I wish I had a picture of my desktop *before* installing Fences, but I never want to go back! It's free for personal use (at least for now).  Here's a short video giving you a demo of the product.

Any other nifty desktop productivity apps you want to recommend?  Shout out in the comments!

A TUPPERWARE Party – take 2

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Joe's excited about powering off Tupperware.A year ago, roughly, we had a major SAN outage; half of all the LUNs on our primary Fiber Channel SAN went belly-up, and  services were down for approximately 36 hours.  That event started us down a long path to a different storage vendor and technology.   

Today, me and some die-hard SAN geeks, met and said goodbye to  the disk subsystem we've affectionately known as TUPPERWARE (in all-caps, 'cause that's how we identify systems, ya dig?).  And yes, at one point we had a ZIPLOC, a HEFTY, and a RUBBERMAID. And PYREX is still humming along in the new DataCenter.

Yes, we had a TUPPERWARE Party. Check below for the festivities!  First up, the storage scene before and after. Our power and cooling requirements just got a heckuva lot lighter in that DataCenter!  Woohoo!

UPDATE: I accidentally deleted my blog directory on GUTENBERG and had to re-create this post.  Sorry for the redundancy!  I'm furiously adding the Backup Client to the server now!

18TB in two racks.... or 54TB in one.  You choose! the cabling mess

More photos after the break.

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This page is an archive of entries from February 2009 listed from newest to oldest.

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