Mike’s World

Well, I feel kind of bad. Apparently early this morning they needed some DNS help. Work tried paging, calling my cell and calling my home at about 3:00am. It turns out one of my co-workers most likely got things taken care of, but I feel bad she had to get called.I also feel bad they tried to call me.

Today was spent being Lazy once again. I spent most of the day watching the extras DVDs for LOTR:TT. Some very good content on this one, they discuss in detail some of the WETA digital stuff and some of the gollum stuff, which I find very interesting. I was also going to watch the Philly eagles football game, but I heard on the radio that they won before I had a chance to watch the game. Guess that’s one disadvantage to TiVo.

Well, as expected I got to fire up the snow blower this morning. Last year when I moved in to my new house, I picked up a top of the line snow blower, a Toro 1028XLE 10HP powermax because A, I live in Minnesota, and B, I hate shoveling. Lucky for me it was not very windy. After I was done with that, I watched tv for a bit, took a nap, then off to my friend Jon’s house for some bad movies. We watched Catwoman, some Blue Collar TV, and some back to the 90’s.

Well, it is a snowy day up here in Minnesota. So far I have about 5 inches and counting on my driveway. It was a very interesting drive home from work today. Slipping and sliding all over the place. This is the first good snow fall we have had all year, so I am looking forward to firing up the snow blower tomorrow morning.

Well, we ran in to tons of fun at work today. We are working on implementing Active Directory. The folks doing the active directory implementation went against our advice to make active directory a sub-domain of the main DNS domain. Instead we made the company zone file dynamically up datable. Well, would you have never guessed it, this made the production main DNS zone un-usable for about 1 hour today, and on top of that, idiots are using the master DNS server as a client. Wonderful.

Well, I managed to get through today with only doing about 5 minutes of work. Yesterday I decided that today would be a good day to take off (only have 1 day left to burn now). I started the day by sleeping until about noon. After waking up, I finished up my disk work. So far after replacing the SCSI terminator and shortening the SCSI bus on my main server (Nerta T1 AC200) by about 8 inches, it looks like I have solved the SCSI error problems I have been seeing. The bus is a single ended Ultra2 SCSI bus, and now has four drives on it. With each drive you add to a SE bus, the overall length capabilities of that bus shorten. With the 4 drives on the bus, I only have about 4 feet to work with on cabling. I finished re stripping the file-systems, and I now have a 932GB file-system on a 1U Nerta. I think that is quite impressive. Man disk space is cheap!

After playing with the disk subsystem on my server, I relaxed to some TV, then once the sun started to go away, I continued to watch my LOTR DVDs. I stopped at chapter 17 of TT during my last viewing, now I have finished up that DVD, and on to the last set when I get a chance. I forgot how much I like the idea of Ent’s. The big beasts that tame the forest.

One thing I noticed on my TV (a 57″ rear projection HD Hitachi). I used the AVIA home theater DVD to re-tune it, and I ended up turning down the contrast quite a bit. as I get use to it, it is amazing how much more crisp the colors are. The contrast is still a bit higher than NTSC standards, so I will retune again in about 6 months after I get use to things.

I went through quicken today, and entered my latest pay stub. With taxes going down, and insurance going up, I now get another $11.00 a month on my paycheck. Interesting how that works out. I also noticed that I have another 4 payments left on my grand prix.. yay!

At work I get to be involved in yet another database environment we are building up. This one is going to be a Sun E2900 oracle server and a Sun V1280 app server. They also require about 6TB of disk. Fun! No top of that, I get to refresh an environment that has been around for years. Going to start working on that on Thursday. Looks like I might be able to give my friends at datalink some business.

Today was a cold start in the morning, about -10 outside.
Today at work, I got quite a bit done. Today I decided to start using a to-do list. I found it very useful. I finished out two server build, speced out two more servers for a new application coming in, got email cleaned out and got a network problem figured out.
As normal tonight is going to be spent relaxing and watching TV.

Most of the day was spent watching the Minnesota Vikings loose the NFC division game. They did a great job at beating the Green Bay Packers last night, so that is good enough for me. Today they played the Philly Eagles, in Philly. The game should make interesting conversation during Disaster Recovery next year.

After the game, I went for a nap, and next I had to find something to eat. Yesterday for dinner I went to David Fongs for some Kung Bo Chicken, which was very good. I with they where open on Sunday so I could go for that again. Tonight it looks like the only thing in the house is .

Tonight is going to be washing clothes, and watching a bit of TV. I only made it up to about chapter 17 of LOTR:TT last night, and I do not think I am going to be up to much more, so it is going to be the normal Sunday night line up of Simpson’s, MITM, L&O:CI, and I think I added a new show to the tivo (thinking), yep, Iron Chef America.

I spent most of today sleeping. I woke up this morning, made some toast, watched a bit of TV, then went to take a nap. I woke back up at about 3:00pm. I woke up to find out that a good friend of mine went to the hospital with some heart problems. It looks like now she is doing better, but it is kind of scary to find out about that kind of stuff. I spend the rest of the evening watching (link) LOTR:ROTK, before heading off to work for an outage. The outage was a power outage, so they can do some UPS work. We shut down 40 or so UNIX servers, waited for the NT team to finish up, they ran 20 minutes late, before doing a final checkout and going home.