After my workout at the gym on Friday, I checked my vmail to find a frantic message by my wife. Apparently, our next door neighbor's house was struck by lightning and was on fire!

My wife was upstairs in our house when it happened. She heard a loud "boom" and thought it might have been our house that was struck because it was so loud. She went outside to look at our neighbor's house:



Yikes! She called 911 and checked to make sure no one was in the house. The homeowners pulled up shortly thereafter. I can imagine their surprise to see their house was on fire.

I rushed home, but by the time I got there the fire was already out. The Cary and Morrisville fire departments arrived within 15 minutes and put it out. They were awesome.



They cleared out the top floor of the house to ensure nothing would catch on fire after they left. They even stayed around to help us carry our neighbor's valuables to my garage for storage. After the smoke had cleared, the 3rd floor was completely burnt up and about half of the second floor had serious smoke/fire/water damage. Most of the things stored in their attic and 3rd floor were destroyed.

It looked like a small bomb had been dropped on the roof:



My neighbors are going to be displaced for 4-6 months while their home is repaired. In a blink of an eye their whole summer was ruined (they have 3 kids to boot). It really makes you think how fragile life is!

A reader of Windows Server Cookbook wrote in the other day to tell me he enjoyed the Japanese version of the book. The Japanese version? I didn't know there was a Japanese version. As it turns out, yes. One of the interesting quirks of the publishing biz is that foreign subsidiaries may translate and publish a foreign edition of your book without you even knowing about it! I've already received German, Czech, and Russian editions of some of my books. However, none are as cool as the Japanese edition. Here is a low res picture of the cover:


One of the interesting things about the book is that it comes with a dust jacket. You know, the kind that are usually found on hardback books in the US. Well I guess in Japan they put them on paperback books too.

The much awaited second edition to the best-selling Active Directory Cookbook is now available at Amazon. This edition has over 500 recipes (up from 325 in the first edition) with new chapters covering ADFS, MIIS, ADAM, and Exchange. The lovely Laura Hunter provided most of the additions and we had another strong group of tech reviewers. You can get more info about the book here. Source code coming soon.

Fred has been working diligently to find a venue and date for BarCampRDU. It didn't take him long! Red Hat is kind enough to host it (great location btw) and the date is set for July 22nd. Sign up on the wiki. Great work Fred!

UPDATE: I've signed up to be an "organizer" for BarCamp RDU.

I haven't used a Mac in over 10 years. In 1996 I ditched my Power Mac in favor of Solaris for development and Microsoft Windows for office apps. Now I find myself coming full circle after purchasing a MacBook Pro last weekend. Over the last couple of years I've seen more and more of my colleagues in the web community using Macs.

Now I'm using my Thinkpad T42 along side my new MacBook Pro. It is unlikely I'll fully switch to the Mac in the near future due to lack of support for some applications I need at work. However, I did install Parallels which lets me run Windows on the Mac. So far so good and you don't have to reboot to get into Windows like you do with Boot Camp. Parallels is very similar to VMWare or Microsoft Virtual PC on Windows.

As my Mac journey progresses, I'll post updates on how I'm doing. There are some things I already like a lot better and there are some things that are really annoying. The learning curve is pretty steep to become as proficient with Mac OS X as I am with UNIX and Windows. I can do the basic stuff, but I still have to look up how to do simple tasks (such as doing a screen capture).