UrbanDude

I was just listening to my favorite podcast - Deeper Shades of House podcast by Lars Behrenroth. In the 2 minute voice intro, he says "Enjoy this. Skin one up. If you don't know what that means, look it up. That's what Google's for."

So I did a Google search and didn't find what I was searching for on the first page. Hmmmm, that's odd. Must be so cool of a saying that even the Googles doesn't know what it means.

After clicking "Next" a few times, I stumbled on some verbiage from this site that makes sense:

Tiger then handed me a heavy sandstone pot. Inside was a roll of extremely thin cigarette paper and some really pungent weed.

"Skin one up," he said.

I realised that this was the practical part of the interview and that I would need to pass this test to prove myself as a proficient pot-manager. Unfortunately, I’d never learnt to roll joints terribly well.

So there you have it... it means to roll a joint. The next time someone's talking about pot, I'm going to throw that phrase out there to make myself look like I'm from the streets. Yeah, that'll work. Maybe I'll add a "bra" in there, so I sound Cali. "Skin one up, bra!"

I was cleaning out my huge pile of magazines in the bathroom and found myself reading Maxim's 300 Movies You Must See Before You Die. 

I'm not surprised at how many movies I've seen - I worked at a video store for a summer when I was 16. Lots of time + minimum wage money + free movies = seeing most of the movies on this list. That made it really easy to notice what movies I haven't seen.

I've seen bits and pieces of a few of these, but watching 10 minutes of The Fly (edited for TV) doesn't do it justice. With the magazine in hand, I got on Netflix and queued up the following fims:

1. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971)
2. Raging Bull (1980) 
3. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
4. Less Than Zero (1987)
5. Vertigo (1958)
6. Taxi Driver (1976)
7. The Fly (1986)
8. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
9. Time Bandits (1981) not on Maxim's list, but some coworkers said it should hold up over time. We'll see...

Occasionally I'll need to migrate a WSS 2.0 site into a MOSS 2007 farm.  From what I understand, the only way to do this is to upgrade the installation to WSS 3.0, then backup/restore it to the farm.  Here's some tips I wish I knew about before getting started.  But what happens if the upgrade goes horribly wrong and the only backups are FWP files?  This happened to me recently - the database upgrade failed, corrupted the WSS 2.0 DB schema, and there were no DB backups.  All I had as a backup were the nightly FWP files that are exported. The site was down, users are screaming, and there's no hope for getting that server back to a working state. What to do...

I uninstalled the WSS 3.0 installation, uninstalled WSS 2.0, then installed WSS 2.0, bringing the server back to a state where it was as clean as a fresh install.  But when I attemped to use STSADM.EXE to restore the FWP files, I got this message:

"Your backup is from a different version of Windows Sharepoint Services and cannot be restored to a server running the current version."

Huh?  They're both running WSS 2.0, but I didn't realize that it has to be the EXACT same minor version (service packs, hotfixes).  There no way of finding out what version of Sharepoint it was from the FWP files, which makes the backups all but useless.  After reading this post, aptly titled "Adventures in Migrating from WSS 2.0 to MOSS 2007", I started to panic (a little), but with enough tinkering, I was able to get the site back to a usable state.  Here's how:

1. I erased the default empty team site
   stsadm -o deletesite -url http://XXXX
2. Created an untemplated site
   stsadm.exe -o createsite -url http://XXXX -ownerlogin domain\username -owneremail bryan@urbandude.com
3. Used smigrate to restore the site
   smigrate -r -w http://XXXXX -f d:\backup\spdaily.fwp -u domain\username -pw MyPassword

This post is mostly a note to my future self, but hopefully a desperate/hopeless person out there finds this and it helps them out of a jam.

About a year ago, my boss has us go through a goal-setting excercise of identifying 20 things we wanted to do before we're 'done'. This was before the movie Bucket List came out, so it's wasn't that cliche.  The first ten were easy, but the last ten was a bit of a struggle. Since this was over a year ago, some of my priorities/desires/dreams have changed a bit, so I'll need to create a new/fresh list at some point. 

I've crossed through the ones I've completed.  In no particular order:

1. Get a six pack
2. Go on the honeymoon I never had
3. Quit smoking
4. Eat sushi in Japan
5. Get LASIK
6. Visit all 50 states
7. Read Kurt Vonnegut
8. Get drunk and shave my head
9. Fly a kite in a park and not care how I look
10. Take a vacation in St. Whatever
11. Climb an artificial rock wall
12. Learn how to ski
13. Take my OWN car to the race track, which means I need to own a race-worty car
14. Attend a developer conference in another city
    
15. Find a way to show my parents how much I appreciate the way they raised me, then surprise them
16. Buy back my grandma's '65 Mustang Fastback
17. Ride in the MS 150
18. Make a toast in front of a large audience
19. Go to a live taping of the Daily Show
20. _______________________
    Post this on my blog and let someone else recommend my #20

In case you're wondering, I've already written up "20 things I've done", and will post it soon.

The Weekend has Landed!

All the exists now is clubs, drugs, pubs and parties

I've got 48 hours off from the world, man

I'm gonna blow steam out of my head like a screaming kettle

I'm gonna talk codshit to strangers all night

I'm gonna lose the plot on the dancefloor

The free redicals inside me are freaking man!

Tonight I'm Jip Travolta, I'm Peter Popper

I'm going to never never land with my chosen family, man

We're going to get more spaced out than Neil Armstrong ever did

Anything could happen tonight, you know? This could be the best night of my life!

I've got 73 quid in my back burner

I'm gonna wax the lot, man!

The milky bars are on me! YEAH!