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Our family is a heavy user of Pandora.  I use it most of the day at work, Bec uses it a lot of the day and it is on pretty much till we head off to bed at night (dinner, relaxing, etc).  So I was saddened when I read the news today on the Pandora Blog that Pandora will being capping usage at 40 hours for free accounts.

If you didn’t know, Pandora has been in fights with the music industry for years about royalties.  According to the blog post they finally came to an agreement with the music industry.  Unfortunately the fees Pandora has to pay are higher than normal radio.

Going forward you can pay (or “tip”) $.99 if you hit 40 hours in a month to get the rest of the month activated or pay $36/year for Pandora One.  So will this change how you listen to radio?  Will you just use multiple accounts?  I’ll wait and see but I use Pandora enough that I can tip $.99 if I hit 40 hours.

The bigger problem is that the music industry is still trying to get money any way that it can instead of going with a model (like noisetrade.com) that work harder at connecting artist with their fans.  I have no problem buying music directly form an artist or paying for their shows.  I’m just tired of paying the middle man.

When installing the Windows Software Update Service (WSUS) role on Server 2008 SP1 you are prompted to either install the database using the Windows Internal Database or a remote SQL instance.  However, you are never prompted to specify the database name and the WSUS  installer will use the database name ‘SUSDB’.  If you have a larger environment and plan on installing multiple WSUS servers (downstream servers) and want to use the same SQL backend, you have a problem.  Trying to use the same instance for a second WSUS install will result in overwriting the first database, thus hosing your first WSUS install.

In order to install a second WSUS install, you have to first rename the database from the first WSUS install.

First, go ahead and shut down the current WSUS install so that all database connections to the SUSDB database.  Once the server is shut down open up SQL Management Studio and detach the SUSDB database.  Dig into the file system and find the SUSDB.mdf (data file) and SUSDB_log.ldf (log file) files and rename the files to something like SUSDB01.mdf and SUSDB01_log.ldf. 

Next reattach the database with the new files and a new name (like SUSDB01).  You have to browse to .mdf file and then also set the path of the data file and log file to the new .mdf and .ldf files.  The database should now attach.

Finally, the WSUS server needs to point to the SUSDB01 database instead of the default SUSDB database.  Start the WSUS server and use regedit to locate the registry key:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\MICROSFT\Update Services\Server\Setup\SqlDatabaseName

Change this key from SUSDB to the new database name (SUSDB01 in this case).  Go ahead and reboot again and startup the WSUS Admin Console.  If you don’t get a database not found error then everything worked.

Yeah, I know "staycation" sounds kinda cheesy and I have never been open to the idea much in the past.  However, with a 7 month old and facing a possible 20 day furlough, it is an idea that the Whitworth family is entertaining this year.  I couldn’t stand not getting any time away from home, so it looks like we are going to take a kinda-staycation.

I read a great blog this morning: Tips for the best Staycation Ever.  In it Matt Wixon was interviewed and his words really helped reinforce  some basic "rules" that we need to follow:

"It’s so important to treat the staycation as much like a traditional vacation as possible. It’s a good idea to give the staycation a start and end date and devote as much of the time in between to relaxing, having fun, and breaking out of a rut. For any vacation, staycation or traditional, you have to unplug. Unplug from work, from your chores, from the daily compulsion to get things done."

We are still kicking around ideas for this year and so far it probably means taking a weekend trip without Eli (sorry bud) to somewhere close by (the beach, the mountains) and then coming back to Greensboro and spending time at the pool. 

Hopefully I can spend time catching up on some things I really have wanted to do but just haven’t had time (reading, writing. music, etc) and just relaxing.  Maybe a couple day trips to the zoo or a good mountain biking trail.  I also like the idea of going out to eat some of the time like we were on a vacation (no cleanup = no stress).  Plus it gives us a chance to try a few restaurants that we just never get around to trying. 

So if you didn’t know, I headed up to Redmond, WA for a Microsoft conference for higher education.  I was supposed to leave on Friday, but 30 minutes into the flight they captain  informed us that we were turning around due to a mechanical failure.  Turned out I got bumped to the next day, which stunk because it meant I lost the better part of a day in Seattle.  But anyways….

Once I got into Seattle I headed to the hotel before checking out the Experience Music Project.  A little while into it I realized I wasn’t supposed to be taking pictures.  Opps……

The cone of guitars made me sad because I wish I had just one of them.  The other guitar is one of the first Fender Strats.  Pretty awesome.  I also got to see Hendrix’s guitars.  Well worth the trip.

The next day I hit up Pike Place Market.  I decided to do it as part of a tour, and I recommend checking out Savor Seattle Tours.  It seems kind of expensive but you really get to eat a ton of food and I tried things I would have never found otherwise.

After that it was time to head to the conference.  The kick off was at Red Hook Ale House, which was pretty awesome. 

More to come tomorrow from Microsoft….

As my wife gently reminded me a few days ago, I had promised in an earlier posting that one of the topics that I promised to write about was being a dad.  Although there is a ton to write about (learning to be patient, learning to sleep less, learning that I can’t always do things the way I used to) the thing I have grown to cherish the most has been our new weekend traditions. 

Bec has been amazing in putting in the most sleepless nights (by far) since I have to work.  One way that I have tried to repay her for that is to take Eli out of the house at least one morning each weekend.  What started out as a way to give Bec a break has turned into something I spend all week looking forward to. 

We typically get up around 6:30 (now 7:30 with the new time change!), Eli eats and then I load him in the car and head out.  I decided that actually getting out of the house is the only way that Bec will really get good sleep since she can’t hear Eli or do anything to help me (plus I can’t ask her for help!).  So far I usually load Eli up and drive around.  He tends to like the car seat for a little while, especially when the car is moving.  Early weekend mornings are great because there is no traffic so no stops.  Sometimes we just drive through neighborhoods looking at yard sales, other times we drive bike routes so I can track my mileage, but we almost always end up at a coffee shop.  Thanks to a large number of gift cards for Christmas that coffee shop has been Caribou most of the time, but I’m pretty sure it will become Tate Street Coffee once those cards run out (I only have about $8 left) thanks to the Green Mug (buy a $5 mug from Tate Street Coffee and get refills for $1). 

I’m excited about spring time coming because hopefully that means getting out of the car more and hitting up things like the farmers market or actually getting out of the car at a yard sale instead of driving by.  So far this is my favorite tradition with Eli: spending quality one on one time together. 

More to come.

Need a free place to backup your files?  It’s worth checking out the Windows Live SkyDrive service.  SkyDrive is Microsoft’s online drive, offering 25GB of free storage to anyone with a live (or Hotmail) account.  But first, a couple quick notes about online "backups".

There are more and more services such as carbonite.com that offer a pay for use personal backup service.  Most services start around $50/year and offer "unlimited" backups.  Depending on your needs these services can be great because they update automatically on a schedule that you choose.  One thing to remember is that most high-speed internet provide great download speeds but pretty miserable upload speeds (this discourages you from running your own server since most internet browsing involves lots of download but little upload.  For example, Time Warner Cable’s Road Runner Standard service offers 7Mbps download speeds and only 512Kbps upload speed: 1/14th the download speed, there are 1024Kbs in 1Mbs (also, notice that we are using "little b" instead of "big B" when talking about speeds which means Megabits instead of MegaBytes, there are 8 bits in a byte so bits are much smaller - hence it takes longer than 1 second to download a 7MB file on a 7Mbps connection).  All this to say: if you backup 10GB of data it is going to slow your internet connection down to a crawl while you do this, and it will take a long time (you do the math). 

If you want to control how much and when you upload (and you have a pretty organized file system where many folders don’t change - ie - organized by year), you may benifit by using something like SkyDrive for online storage.  You do have to manually kick off the uploads, but with the help of a tool called Gladinet this is pretty painless.  Gladinet offers a way to mount your 25GB of SkyDrive space like it was a local drive.  So then you just copy and paste the files that you want backed up to the Gladinet drive.  Gladinet also manages the uploads so that you can close the program if you need to use the internet, and then re-open Gladient to resume the upload.  For more instructions on how to use Gladinet check this article from LifeHacker. 

SkyDrive + Gladinet = free online backup