Mike’s World

Ok, lets fire this blog up again. I am going to shoot for weekly posts, but we will see how that goes.
Well, first off, I have enjoyed my summer a bit too much, and fallen off the wagon with my weight lost :-(

about 1/3 of my hard work is now gone. My hope is with the correct help and motivation over the winter, I can fix that.

Quite a bit of my summer has been just thinking of the past, and work. I had a very large project at work which was on my mind for most of the spring/summer, which was the design, costing, buildout and now support of an e-commerce environment utilizing solars 10, and solars zones. This has help save our costumer at work some money, as well as hopefully long term, save some manhours on our side.

Right as that project was coming to an end, I started being involved in another project that will go well in to the winter. A business unit in our company has been struggling quite a bit for man power as well as experience, and I was volunteered to help them out. For me this is both good and bad, I am going to California every other week, but it is allowing me to become involved with more of our company. I am learning quite a bit, and I am feeling very useful which is very, very nice. The travel is a bit much, as I am going out to California every other week, but I hope I am providing the help the folks in CA need.

Now on to the outside-work stuff. This summer In spent many weekends in my house, going to <a href=http://www.al-anon-alateen-msp.org/>meetings</a>, doing house work, or relaxing. I have finished 2.5 major projects this summer. The first was to fix my livingroom. I had a mirror wall, which was so seventies. I got rid of the evil wall, and painted the sucker, so it looks a bit better.
The second project was my stupid plumbing, which was a bit more than I was expecting, I had galvanized steel pipes throughout my house which started to rust from the inside out. Some started to drip, and most had started to close up, affecting water pressure. This spring I replaced most of the steel pipes with copper pipes. I am quite proud of myself that I managed to replace most of the plumbing without burning the house down, and I now have water pressure in the bathroom again.
Third is my patio. The patio in my back yard. The patio was built over a tree stump that had been rotting away for a good 20 years, and this cause the sucker to start to sink. This spring I pulled up the patio, this summer I had gotten rid of the stump, and with luck, this fall I will get the patio back down again. We will see if that happens :-)

This summer I continue to struggle with friendships, but on the positive side, I have re-discovered family. It was very, very hard on my loosing my sister to an internship in IL 3 years ago. The only person I had felt real close too had left, and I was all alone in this world, it seemed. This was very hard on me, and I still somewhat can not figure out to do with my sis gone. This summer I started hanging out with one of my cousins a bit more, and have truly enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) her company. She can not replace my sister, but right now it seems like someone I can trust more than some of my previous “friends”

Well, that about sums up my summer in a nutshell, with luck I will update this more than once every 3 months, if for no one else, for myself to reflect someday.

So I am not much for gadgets but I did some looking around for a MP3 player. I wanted something small, with a decent amount of storage, and long run time. The YP-MT6 fit the bill.

This sucker is light, small and has a 41 hour runtime on one AA battery. The audio quality is very good (I have been using it for podcasts) and it has a built-in FM tuner which is very nice. As I mentioned it has a very long runtime, and is fairly easy to use. Only downsides is that it does use its own USB to special connector, instead of a standard mini USB port, and it does tend to scratch easy. Those do not bother me all that much, so I still love it.

Compact, light and long lasting, what else can you ask for.

Well, today I worked on getting monitoring setup. I had used Big Brother in the past, and have not been very happy with it. This time I went with Nagios which used to be Netsant. I have looked at this product in the past, but the configuration has scared me away each and every time. Today I decided to sit down and get the thing working. I worked with the config for about 6 hours today, and man was it time consuming, it reminded me of doing the veritas cluster config.

All said, I have 10 hosts and 53 services setup. Tomorrow I will work on getting qpage up and running again.

I have ran across a podcast called This Week in Tech. This is done by the old Screensavers crew and is not all that bad. If you like it, send in some cash so they can continue to work on the project. They do a tech broadcast every week.

Well, my ISP switch is complete. This morning at around 3:30am my ATM connection dropped, and came back up, but the virtual dialer interface stayed down as expected. I woke up at 6:30am, and started reconfiguring everything, starting with the router config and ACLs, then DNS, and then web server config. an hour later. the switch is complete.

I have had the TTL dropped down to about 10 minutes on all my zones, so that will go through quickly.

Several months ago, the folks that have ran visi, a local ISP up and running jumped ship, and started a new ISP, iphouse. VISI is still a solid, reliable ISP, but the customer service is just not there anymore, something that made VISI one of the best ISPs in the local business. VISI was a true home for geeks, but managed to remain competitive, so it was also a good home for your grandparents. Over the last several months, everything that has made VISI special has gone away, and now it is time for me to go away. I have placed my ipHouse order, and my DSL switches over next Monday.

Well, today I managed to break my server i use for backups. Had read errors on the root drive, system hung, I rebooted, and fsck removed /dev. Makes for an interesting boot. Looks like I get to spend tomorrow rebuilding it.

Well, ran across a product called CherryOS. It looks to be a Mac G4 emulator for the PC. I have downloaded the demo, and I am installing it now. For now, I have read quite a bit of comments about how it may be a ripoff of the open source PearPC project. If it is, shame on them,

Well. with the news last night, we all got a bit liberated last night. For someone that does fairly good, I did get in to work a bit late and had a bit of a headache. Today was moving day for several people at work. They are doing some cube re-locations, and many folks are moving upstairs. Luckily our group did not need to leave our nice area.

Not much productive work done today, some storage stuff and that’s about it.

At home, I managed to get my windows box back, it involved:
1. getting the box restored from netbackup IDR
2. doing an overlay install of Windows XP
3. Apply service pack and updates
4. rename my accounts “documents and settings” folder
5. re-add my user
6. remove the newly created docs and settings folder, move mine back
7. boot off recovery CD, copy backup registry in place
8. still no werky.
9. replaced the rebuild “system” registry file with the one I had put in place
10. system works, for the most part.

man am I happy.

Well, I am still working on getting my Windows back box, and man is it getting annoying. I have recovered the box from netbackup, and not it refuses to boot. I think next is to disable drivers, and try some registry hacks. At least I can get to it from the recovery console.