Easter Island heads have bodies

They aren't just heads, and the office is in Santa Monica CA.http://seeker401.wordpress.com/2011/10/29/easter-island-heads-have-bodies/

Japan summer 2012

I heard Japan is sponsoring 10000 bloggers, Facebook and Twitter users to visit Japan on a free ride, you pay for your stay.  I googled it and found that it is true, cool, hope I can be choosen.

midnight oil

I got my reward for working until midnight on Monday, I now have more spare time :)

ec2 deployments

I spent most of this week working on automating an EC2 deployment.  I want the servers to be run over and over again in a predictable manner.  Get them running in the 5 min, they can run in, the base AMI is mostly done, has lots of packages and the scripting that remains is trivial, however I haven't found a good way to do it with bash and awk, don't have the time to learn Boto or the inclination to use RightScale.  However I feel a bit like I am rewriting Poolparty, but way behind on this.  I would be very interested in others solutions, experiences, frustrations and successes.  Feel free to comment below.

So far I use a spreadsheet as a starting point for what the servers will be, then export the data as a CSV and have bash/awk turn it into ec2-run-instances commands.