I hate to add more to the disaster porn but this is a crazy video of the Tsunami:

It’s amazing how quickly the water move whole buildings. It must have been really scary watching the water get that close.

One of the things that I LOVED about having an evaluation copy of vCenter (other than Storage vMotion) is the use of Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). I loved the fact that I could let my VMs live on their own and vCenter would intelligently balance the load across all the VM hosts (and shut them down if they weren’t needed). When I finally had to move from the eval mode to a licensed server I felt a little let down because some of my VM hosts would be at 30% memory utilization while others would be at 70% memory utilization. Maybe it’s just me but that seems like a real waste of resources.

I recently found out it’s really bad when you need to power off a host for maintenance and then need to move the VMs back to the original host. To make my life a lot easier I created the following script. It balances memory usage across all the hosts to about 10% of the average. I also make certain specific VMs always placed on certain hosts (my vCenter server is always on the first host and my SQL servers are always on different hosts). This feature is enabled if a CSV is located in the same directory as the script (named balanced.csv) with a Name column and a host column that have the name of the VM and the host it should be placed on respectively. The script assumes you already have a connection to your vCenter server (using Connect-VIServer).
Continue reading this post…

NYC – Mindrelic Timelapse from Mindrelic on Vimeo.

via fstoppers

It’s a little scary what’s possible with commercially available robots…

Every year I like to make something for my loved ones and friends for Christmas. Usually, it’s just cookies but I make six or seven batches of different cookies (Molasse, Sugar, Thumb Print, etc.) so there are a lot of ingredients both in the number of different ingredients and quantity of ingredients (it’s amazing how fast you can use up a bag of flower ). The downside to this type of large scale baking is that it’s very easy to forget something and need to make multiple trips to the already crowded grocery stores. The other problem is overestimating items or buying stuff that you already have. My goal for this year was to come up with a system that would keep me from having these problems.
Continue reading this post…

While it’s slightly nauseating it’s a really cool view of part of the city.

Via Make

An article on Lifehacker (link) yesterday discusses an article on The Simple Dollar about creating meal exchanges.

On a certain day, everyone in the exchange meets for coffee and brings along a laundry basket full of frozen meals, one for each family, along with any needed instructions taped to the lid. The members of the club just swap the meals so that everyone takes home one of each meal that they didn’t prepare.

As someone who likes to experiment with new foods, I find this concept very interesting but as a vegetarian I wonder if it’s possible for someone like me to participate. I larger cities you might be able to create a vegetarian food swap but cutting out and handling the varieties would be a pain to handle. You would still have to deal with the different varieties of vegetarianism which could be overcome by creating a meal exchange for just ovo-lactos or vegans (although a raw vegetarian food swap seems counter productive). This would continue to decrease the potential members but might be beneficial to everyone. Still it’s a good idea.

Just when I thought I could escape the draw of caffeine someone comes out with pure evil…

http://www.thinkgeek.com/caffeine/drinks/e687/

Another OK Go video just for you Stephanie.