I’ve learned that “mamka mu” means “Oh Shit!” in Bulgarian. However, I learned this after we spent 4 hours in a restaurant agressively toasting “mamka mu!!” and drinking large quantities of rakia.

I’ve learned that shaking your head means yes and nodding means no in Bulgaria. Fortunately, I was warned before I did my talk.

I’ve learned that when you ask the locals how to say “thank you for the beer” in Bulgarian, they might tell you how to say “my mother is a sheep” or “I have three testicles”, so always get a second opinion.

This is a photo (click to enlarge) taken by Sahil Malik at what was our best night out since we got here. We went to a great restaurant up in the mountains of Sofia, which we got to by taxi. The road turned to cobblestone as the grade increased, and the driver was absolutely booking up this road. Potholes be damned. From left to right are Goksin Bakir (the Golden Boy RD from Turkey), Mire Ivanova and Svetlen Nakov (See Julie Lerman’s Blog later in the week for a video of this crazy Bulgarian Chalga man), and Stephen Forte… all doing the Chalga dance.

The DevReach conference was two days (October 9 and 10, 2006) in Sofia Bulgaria.  I did a talk on RSS, Podcasting, and Syndication, and we also recorded a live .NET Rocks! at the end of the first day. Listen to next week’s show for more stories from Sofia.

In this episode of Dot Net Rocks, one of our earliest guests returns to talk about the power of (and problems with) the patent process, and the growing complexity of intellectual properly law in the Enited States, Europe, and the world.

http://dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=200

the Bluvaries Show

Carl, Richard, Mark, Karen and Geoff are back once again! The recurring theme of this week's show is not unlike the infamous Hawaiian Lackanookie syndrome. Bluvaries.

We had some technical and timing issues this week, but Lawrence is fast at work editing Mondays, and it WILL BE ONLINE sometime today…. we hope.

What I Learned at Sea World: Part 2

Mark brings some yummy churros to Sea World's shark tank. What could go wrong?

Ultimate Power

Autospelunking, and special times in the night. Children need ways to keep themselves busy...

In response to my last post, I just got a very happy email from Newegg.com:

Dear Customer,

Thank you for contacting Newegg.

Your RMA number  for a replacement is XXXXXX, I sent you a separate email with all the instructions how to send the item back to us and I issued a $10.00 credit to cover the shipping fee. Thank you.

If you have any further questions or concerns, please visit our FAQs page.

Thank you,

Darlene Gutierrez

Thanks, Darlene! You guys rock!

No, I’m not talking about Don Henly’s 1990 masterpiece, I’m talking about the PC to beat all PCs. Yes, I’ve decided to build the biggest damned machine I’ve ever seen anywhere for my new Workstation.  This is to be my PC for development, testing, gaming, and audio, and video production. Of course, I am looking forward to Vista 64–bit. I’ve played a bit with the beta, but the state of drivers was not all that good, so I'm waiting for RTM.

OK, I’ve seen some pretty amazing machines, but never this much power as a workstation. First of all, here is my parts list:

Case:  Thermaltake Armor Series VA8000BWS Black Aluminum/Steel ATX Full Tower

Power Supply:  PC Power & Cooling TURBO-COOL 850 SSI T85SSI SLI, EPS12V, SSI 850W!! Continuous @ 50°C Power Supply 90 - 264 V UL/ ULC/ CE/ TUV

Motherboard:  TYAN S2895A2NRF Dual Socket 940 NVIDIA nForce Professional 2200 + 2050 + AMD8131 SSI EEB 3.5

CPU: 2x  AMD Opteron 285 Italy 2.6GHz 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket 940 Dual Core Processor

System Drives: 2x  Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial ATA150

SATA Controller:  Areca ARC-1220 PCI-Express x8 SATA II Controller Card RAID level 0, 1(10), 3, 5, 6

Data Drives: 8x HITACHI Deskstar 7K500 HDS725050KLA360 (0A31619) 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s. That’s right. I said 8 of them!

Hot-Swap Backplane: 2x Athena Power BP-SATA3141B 3 x 5.25"Bays to 4 x 3.5"HD (SATA) Back Plane

RAM: 8x  Patriot 1GB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Desktop Memory

Video Card:  XFX PVT71UZDF9 Geforce 7950GX2 1GB 512-bit (256-bit x2) GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Xtreme

Monitor: Dell 30” UltraSharp Widescreen Monitor

The Story:

So I have been buying this machine in pieces over the last 2 months. I finally got it all together last night, flipped the switch and… nothing. No beeps. No video out. Nothing. Fans were going. Power supply was pushing juice. Drives spun up. No output.

Geoff and I removed everything, stripped it down to one CPU (trying each in turn) and only 1 GB of RAM. Only the CPU fans. Nothing. Took out all the RAM, unplugged the keyboard and all the hard drives. No beeps. No posting. DOA.

I then went to the Tyan website and read this quote:

I have a DOA motherboard, what do I do with it now?

Any DOA motherboard should be thoroughly tested to insure that there are no basic components that are responsible for this behavior (i.e. power supply, chassis, CPU's, memory and video).  If the motherboard does indeed turn out to be DOA then the board should be immediately returned to your vendor/distributor for swap out.

So I went to RMA page at www.newegg.com, and (lo and behold) I can’t return the Motherboard which I only bought 17 days ago. Here’s what it says:

Unfortunately, our records indicate that the manufacturer's parts warranty for this product has expired. Please contact the product manufacturer for additional service options.
Unfortunately, our records indicate that the manufacturer's labor warranty for this product has expired. Please contact the product manufacturer for additional service options.
This item is still eligible for replacement.

That last sentence sounds encouraging, but yet I cannot select the Motherboard as an item to return.

So, I sent off a letter to newegg. I will let you know what they say. Meantime I have a $10,000 door stop.

Juval Lowy on .NET 3.0

Juval Lowy introduces us to .NET 3.0, clearing up misconceptions and showing off the power of Windows Communication Foundation with a few choice demos.

http://dnrTV.com/default.aspx?showID=39

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Scott and Carl discuss the current state of Hi-Def Television.

http://hanselminutes.com/default.aspx?showID=46

Rob Conery talks about the appeal of Ruby on Rails and Subsonic, his ASP.NET productivity tool with Rails-like features.

http://dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showID=199

Yes, you read that correctly. Audio guru, technology wonk, amateur photographer, excessive hair donner, noise-band musician, Pwop sound engineer, and saviour of the world, Geoff (Jesus) Maciolek has committed an act of shaving off nearly all of his facial hair. I, for one, have never seen his upper lip before today.  Here is a photo I just snapped of him at the helm. Click the picture for the complete image.

Does this event mark a significant life change? Is he casting off his worldly attachments in pursuit of more spiritual endeavors? Is he finally moving out of the first chakra?

When asked why he shaved, he said “I got tired of it’

A likely story.

The Goat Show

Carl, Richard, Mark, and Karen are back! Goats are prominently referenced in this show, thanks to Mark Miller. Come to think of it, only a small part of the show has to do with goats. It's just that, well, you'll never forget it. This is for better of for worse. We don't know. Just listen