Jesper Johannson posted on his blog that he is leaving Microsoft for a position at Amazon.com. I’ve had the pleasure to attend some of his sessions at TechEd and have always walked away having been both educated and entertained. His sessions have always been the kind you hear people talking about afterwards. Hate to see him leave.
Our power came on around 4:30 yesterday afternoon, so we finished packing for our trip, and loaded up the car. We checked out the freezer to see how our frozen foods had done during the outage. Everything that was in the basement freezer was solid, but the items we moved down from upstairs had started to thaw, so we moved it to the fridge and told my parents to eat bacon and hot dogs since we didn’t want it to go to waste. Then we hit the road for Nashville.
It started to get dark around Paducah, so we stopped for dinner at Fazoli’s, and then pushed on to Nashville. We arrived at 11:30 and made it to the room by 11:50. At least we managed to get there before the day ended. The Loews Vanderbilt hotel in Nashville is a great hotel, especially when coupled with a great rate from Hotwire.com. The room was huge, and looking at the floor plan on the room door, it was obvious it was the biggest room on the floor. I think the front desk person bumped us up since we looked pretty wore out and had our sob story about the power situation in St. Louis.
We checked out this morning and headed for Bread & Company, our new favorite breakfast place in Nashville. We discovered this place. I really wish we had these in St. Louis; they’d give St. Louis Bread Company a run for the money (I think). After a tasty egg sandwich for me (and a chocolate chip waffle for Kristin), it was off to Lynchburg and the Jack Daniels Distillery. Lynchburg is a tiny town (population 361), but if you ever have the chance, stop by and visit the distillery for a tour. I’m not a whiskey drinker (or a drinker at all save a glass of wine now and then), but it was a great tour with a lot of history. Here’s a photo of us with a statue of Jack Daniels in front of the Cave Spring where they get all the water used to make their products.
After the tour, we did some shopping at the gift shop in Lynchburg, then made our way to Huntsville where the Dingler Family Reunion is being held this weekend.
We should have been in Nashville by now, on our way to the annual Dingler Reunion this weekend in Huntsville. Unfortunately we’re sitting in our basement keeping cool and waiting for the power to come back on. We lost power almost 21 hours ago at 7 pm. Last night over 548,000 people in St. Louis ere without power. Last I heard, they were down to 350,000 without power.
I upgraded my SMS 2003 Server to SP2 today. The upgrade completed normally, but after checking SMS Site Status, I noticed that the MP upgrade was failing wit these errors in the mpsetup.log file:
<07-16-2006 22:32:36> [22:32:36] @@ERR:25006
<07-16-2006 22:32:36> Setup was unable to create the Internet virtual directory CCM_System
The error code is 80020009
<07-16-2006 22:34:16> MP.MSI exited with return code: 1603
<07-16-2006 22:34:16> Backing up MPMSI.log to F:\SMS\logs\MPMSI.log.LastError
<07-16-2006 22:34:16> Fatal MSI Error – MP.MSI could not be installed.
Searched around and found a recent hotfix for IIS that corrects this problem. Article 913441 covers a problem with IiS 6.0 that causes the upgrade of the MP to fail. Called MS and after installing, the MP install completed normally.
Wow, just found out that Pet Shop Boys are coming to St. Louis! They play The Pageant on October 24!. No word on when tickets go on sale.
