For those reading this that do not know, I'm the CTO of Nashville-based startup Dataium, LLC. Dataium is the largest aggregator of Internet automotive shopping activity, and I'm looking to hire a Database Administrator and a Senior Software Engineer. Both of these positions are critical to the success and technical direction of Dataium and each will join our already amazing team of engineers, systems administrators, and business analysts.

If you're interested in learning more about the DBA position, please click here to download the full job description (PDF).

If you're interested in learning more about the Senior Software Engineer position, please click here to download the full job description (PDF).

Please note: Interested and qualified people should show their interest by emailing their resume to gethired AT dataium DOT com.

I'm a platform pedal kind of guy except for a short stint riding my brothers Cannondale racing bike during my high school days. Clip-in pedals have always scared me for some reason and wearing clip-in shoes isn't my style nor are they very versatile. Given I've been riding hard core MTB for a year now I decided to invest in a set of platform pedals and new mountain bike specific shoes.

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I drove to Columbia (south of Nashville) yesterday to participate in a Trek demo day. This is where biking enthusiasts can test ride the latest Trek bikes in the woods and on the street.

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One of the worst things you can ever say as a developer/programmer is "It's working for me." Unless of course that is immediately followed by "..but let's dig in and figure out why it isn't working for you." This type of thinking is a cancer within development teams and certainly isn't customer focused. Software breaks, apps don't work properly, and if you're a developer it's your responsibility to do whatever it takes to resolve your customer issues. A few years ago one of my dev teams was having tremendous difficulty replicating a customer-reported issue. One of the developers started the whole "It's working for me" thing and my manager heard it. He jumped in and quickly asked my developer if he was going to package up his computer and ship it to the customer. What a great response.

When you're up against tough issues, try not to think about how hard or how long it might take you to resolve the issue, but resolve to fix it no matter what it takes. Then, and as early as possible, assure your customer that you will do whatever it takes.

We redesigned our business cards at Dataium and the new ones came in today. It's embarrassing how long it took us to decide on a design and I bet people wonder why when they see the result. We wanted to go the super simple and clean route and the final result is quite nice even if anticlimatic.

I thought it was pretty cool big sites (and in some cases competitors) like Google.com and Amazon.com posted tributes to Steve Jobs on their home page. I looked around to see which other sites were doing this and have posted some screenshots after the break. If you know of others please let me know in the comments.

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On a whim today I picked up Gavin's Lego space shuttle and headed outside to take some photos. I got a little carried away and had a ton of fun posing the shuttle against a blue sky background. If you're interested you can check out the entire set here or watch a slideshow of the photos here.

For those interested in watches I just published a set of photos on Flickr of my Omega Seamaster Planet Ocean. There's a lot of amazing tech that goes into an Omega dive watch and the Planet Ocean is no exception. It features a decompression system that allows the watch casing to off-gas helium after the watch has been in a pressure chamber for a long time. Also on board are Omega's own self-winding Caliber 2500 automatic movement (or the Caliber 9300 if you have the new 2011 edition) with a 48 hour power reserve, an anti-reflective, scratch-resistant sapphire crystal, and a self-locking screw-in crown. All of this in a watch that can go as deep as 600 meters (2,000 feet). View the photos here or watch a slideshow of the photos here.

I decided to take some time today to clean up old sprint branches that have been resting in Git unused. Some for well over a year. I had two goals I wanted to accomplish when trying to come up with a workflow. First, I wanted the list of branches that display with the command git branch -a (which I have conveniently aliased to just gb) to be shortened. Second, I didn't want to lose any of the commits part of old branches. Sure the commits were already merged into the master branch, but I didn't want to lose commit chain that was stored as branches.

My solution was to archive each branch as a tag then remove the branches from Git on my local machine as well as the Git origin server.

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I received an e-mail this morning from Seth, who was having difficulty getting his initial Time Machine backup completed. Seth graciously agreed to having his question posted here in another edition of Aaron Answers. Below is his question and after the break is my response.

Hi Aaron,

I really appreciate your blog, and wonder if you'd be willing to answer a Time Machine question i've run into. My old backup HD failed, so I bought a new 2T Iomega eGo desktop HD. Partitioned it into 3 partitions, including a 1.1T partition for my time machine backup. All seems to be working fine, except that the backup is too slow to get done unless I leave the computer running for 3-4 days, which I can't do as it's a laptop and I use it all the time. After the first night (8 hours of so) it had only done 20 Gb (out of my 400 Gb). After the second night, it did about 120 Gb. i don't know if I just need to find a 4-day window when I can leave my laptop backing up or if something is wrong with the software. I'm using the new USB2 cord, and it works nice and fast for manually backing up video files etc to other partitions in the drive. The drive seems to work quite fast. If you're able to offer any advice, that would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks, Seth

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Tomorrow evening (April 21) the Nashville ColdFusion User Group and Dave Ramsey / The Lampo Group are sponsoring a stop on the Adobe ColdFusion Builder 2 tour. If you are in Nashville tomorrow you should head to the Brentwood area to hear Greg Wilson talk about CF Builder 2, ColdFusion, and Flex on mobile including iPad/iPhone.

Food and drink will be provided and prizes will be awarded to some who RSVP. Hit up the NCFUG site to submit your RSVP and get the full meeting details.

My son has taken a strong interest in Legos since Christmas. A few weeks ago the Nashville Public Library sponsored a Lego building competition grouping entries by age. At the close of the competition the entries were put on display at the downtown library. We took Gavin to see all the creations and I took photos of a bunch of them using my DROID X. The photos aren't great quality, but you can see them all in a Flickr gallery here.

There were a bunch of really cool Star Wars themed creations and some included Woody and Buzz from Toy Story. The most intricate was a giant spaceship perched on a stand. I think it was from Star Wars too but I can't be sure.

Earlier this week I was trying to create a new ColdFusion Builder snippet that would insert the current date and time along with my initials into an open template. After inserting the snippet I wanted my cursor to be positioned in the middle of the comment so I could immediately begin writing some notes.

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For the past few months I've been planning on writing a post about the services that make this site possible. I've read these sorts of posts on other sites and they seem very marketing heavy. They're often titled "sponsor post" or something equivalent. This post is different. I'm genuinely a fan (and customer) of all of these services and in most cases I pay for them monthly. After the break I discuss each service/app I rely on to power this site. I put each service within category blocks such as: the server, the app, backups, uptime, etc.

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Hugh MacLeod's latest book, Evil Plans: Having Fun on the Road to World Domination was recommended to me last week so I purchased the Kindle edition. It's a short book (192 pages) I was able to knock out in four days. I do recommend the book but don't expect to be given a step-by-step list of todos to create your own Evil Plan. More of my thoughts are after the break.

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