Sam Soffes

Life Updates

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Life has been crazy. I’ve been putting off writing about it until some of the final details were finalized. Everything is happening all at once. It’s hard to get anything done on my blog, two companies, freelance, and everything else I have going on besides work and doing stuff I don’t want to do like get car insurance renewed or deal with a mistake I made on my taxes in 2006. (I think taxes should be a flat rate by the way. The IRS is stupid because they seem to enjoy over complicating something you already hate - giving money to the government so they can waste it on their ridiculous salaries. Sorry for the rant.)

I guess I’ll just list what’s going on and talk about each of them. Here I go: I’m engaged, I just bought a new car, I quit my job at Southeast, I just moved out of my apartment, (here’s the big one) I’m moving to Oklahoma in two days to start a new job at LifeChurch.tv.

I just asked my girlfriend of a year and a half, Bethany, to marry me on December 2nd. I got the diamond ring and everything. In short, I made her one of her favorite meals, ravioli, (when I say made that means I heated up some sauce on the stove, and boiled the pre-made ravioli) gave her a box of chocolate from Godiva with the ring in the box, got down on my knee when she opened it and asked her to marry me. After all of that, we went to her house where all of our family and friends were. We all celebrated together. It was good.

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Google Is Awesome

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I saw this on Digg. It's some engineer that works at Google giving a 50 minute presentation on how their data center works. They have hundreds of thousands of machines that run their filesystem (Google File System or GFS). They can recover from one machine failing in less than 2 seconds.It's pretty crazy. You should check this out. The first few minutes are a bit slow, but it gets awesome pretty fast.

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My Name is Kevin Smith… Only at GameStop Though

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So I got Halo 3 for Christmas. I learned a very valuable lesson the other day. NEVER STAND YOUR XBOX 360 ON ITS SIDE! It will fall over eventually. Mine fell over when I was moving stuff while it was one. It scratched a ton of circles in my Halo 3 disk. Later I was playing Guitar Hero 3 and I started to move TV and stuff, knocked it over, tried to catch it, and then dropped it again. Both of Halo 3 and Guitar Hero 3 are unplayable.

So now I'm really angry because I have to buy two Christmas presents again because I knocked over my 360. Who knew that bumping it while it's on it's side scratches the crap out of your disks… ugh. I went to GameStop to see if they would do anything for me. The guy at GameStop was like "Did you buy it here?" "No." "Do you have a receipt?" "No." "Hold on Mr. Smith, let me look up your account. Here you are. How are you feeling today Mr. Kevin Smith?" "Fantastic!"

He just returned some guy named Kevin Smith's Halo 3 disk and gave me a new copy for free! I was pretty happy to say the least.

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I Love Panic

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I’ve been using Panic‘s Coda app for awhile now. It’s so awesome. I defiantly recommend picking up a copy of Coda if you do any web coding at all. It’s the best by far. For a while, I used Adobe‘s Dreamweaver. All I really want from one of those apps is nice code coloring, good SFTP/FTP, and a way to manage multiple sites well. Dreamweaver wasn’t designed for those things. It was designed for people who don’t know how to code and want to drag and drop stuff. The features in Dreamweaver that I liked seemed like second thoughts rather than intentional features.

Coda does a really good job of integrating all of the things that I want and not adding much else. I’m a big fan how simple the app is. I rarely use the books feature or CSS tool, but they are cool anyway. In the newest version, they really improved how the terminal tab works. I like it a lot.

Speaking of version 1.1, they added a ton of Leopard features. It’s really nice. The sites animation finally looks good on my MacBook Pro now. I like the glow on the buttons at the bottom. That wasn’t there before. It looks nice. You should give Coda a try. They have a free trial.

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