For those that might not be familiar with Dwolla, here is a brief run down.

Now, for some time I’ve been using the app for small transfers here and there. I think the service is great, easy to use, and their spots feature makes it really easy to find vendors that are accepting Dwolla. This was once a pain point but now I can easily pull up a map and find a local coffee shop and for my morning cup of joe. With all the ease of transferring money and extremely low transfer fees, it still has a few areas of improvement.

A few months back I had a little bit of trouble with an upgrade in our corporate VMware cluster that I thought I would share. The details of this upgrade was to add a new host to the mix and bring everything up to vSphere 4.1 update 1. It seemed pretty straight forward at the time but there were a few unexpected issues that sucked up more time than expected.

So the iron went kaput a few weeks ago and we being the modern american consumers went out and bought a new one. They’re highly disposable and an iron is an iron right?

WRONG!

We liked our old iron. It worked great and always produced massive amounts of wonderful steam. The replacement, well, let’s just say it has some areas of improvement. The old iron didn’t completely die either. It simply had a lose connection of some sort and wouldn’t stay powered on for the duration of your ironing. Well, it would stay on right up to the point when you needed to iron and only if you kept the cord really really still. Just what everyone does when they iron, keep really still.

As I wrapped up the migration from vSphere 4.0 to 4.1, I had one host that for the life of me wouldn’t upgrade. It kept giving me the following error:

I can see the ESX host just fine. Nothing out of the ordinary there. The firewall ports look exactly the same as the other 6 hosts in this particular cluster. Why the hell won’t it download the updates.

I’ve been out of college now for more than a decade and have worked for only a handful of companies. For a lot of people my generation, I’m probably seen as a dinosaur by not changing jobs every year once my stock options were vested.

But seeing as I’ve had a chance to move up in companies and produce multiple products, I have a different appreciation for product lifespan and code rot.