9 out of 10 monkeys believe they are not behind glass

My wife doesn’t know it, but she is actually the subject of a reality show called The Great Baby Experiment. Every year they pay me to make sure she has a baby and document the results to the hilarity and joy of audiences everywhere.

Today was day 1 for baby 3. I get to head home and review footage. Is she insane? Has she decided to throw in the towel? Will she be begging for baby 4? It is a mystery!

But not really. I know what is a waiting me. Chaos. A FEMA disaster site. The background for many wartime photojournalists. Dietrus and rubble spread around in liberal amounts, the shaken survior looking bleakly at the horizon of what tomorrow will bring.

Horror in black and white. Oversaturated colors and underlit spaces. A white flag fluttering softly in the wind, raised upon a push-along duck sitting in a pile of unfolded laundry.

Hopefully I will be able to get a peck on the cheek before I am taken by the typhoon that is my family and circumstance.

• Surrogates trailer reminds me of david brin's kiln people. With a touch of snow crash. #

• Proliant server keeps throwing ilo errors. Log into ilo, no error. No errors in log. Wtf. #

I am running Windows 7 Enterprise x64, and I just deployed my first vSphere box into my production environment. I have a smattering of 3.5 boxes out there, and the previous client works just fine on Windows 7.

Not the vSphere 4 client. Piece of crap. Throws up errors on login:

Error Parsing the server “host ip” “clients.xml” file. Login will continue contact your system administrator.

The irony there is that I am the system administrator. Click ok… then:

The type initializer for “VirtualInfrastrcture.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy” threw an exception.

Thankfully a quick Bing/Google search popped the answer from the VMware communities… it is all because of a single dll in .net framework that the client relies on.

Browse to the install directory of the client: C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\ and create a folder called “Lib”.

Obtain a system.dll file from a .net Framework 3.5sp1 install on a XP/2003 machine (found in %SystemRoot%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\system.dll).

Copy the system.dll to the folder you created: C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib\system.dll

Then open the client app vpxclient.exe.config file and add a element with a development mode set to true within the bounds of the element (be sure to enclose each line in <>).

configuration
...
runtime
developmentMode developerInstallation="true"/
/runtime
/configuration

Then create a batch file to start up the app… like vpxclient.bat and put these lines in:
SET DEVPATH=C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\Lib
"C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher\VpxClient.exe"
exit


Start the client with the batch file… works like a champ.

Found this on mefi today. And all my memories of meeting youth leaders struck a more ironic note.

Hilarious. Click around on the site and if you have spent any time in the last 20 years inside your standard nondenom mega church wannabe, a ton of this is too true.

And then I stumbled across this and I was sure that I was going to bother my coworkers with my loud barks of laughter.

What really gets me about the last link, is just how bad design permeates church media materials. Bad logos, bad colors, bad layout, horrific type (comic sans shows up too), and just the piss poor decisions made on marketing. A church is a business deep down. Perhaps not to make money, but regardless if you are saving souls or teaching others, you have to be solvent. That means paying your staff and your mortgage.

Faith is one thing, and even if god shows up with a suitcase full of money, he will probably only do it once.

Dear fledgling pastor: Hire a marketing grad. Jesus may save their soul, but the grad will save you from yourself. Plus they are cheap. They work for peanuts.