Mike’s World

Week has still been a bit tough, but next week will be the real trial. I have been focusing on work, so that has helped.

Last week and this week I have been in Foster City CA helping again with out Digital division. This week I am making more progress on backups. I still need to get NDMP sold, but will tackle that one next week. The last trouble spot is the netapp backups. I have been integrating a DL4200 VTL in to their environment, and it has been interesting.

Yesterday my friend Lisa sent me a text to checkup on me. That made me quite happy that they are still thinking of me. It sucks that I have not been able to see them.

Ok, that is enough random thoughts for one day.

Well, my week long vacation is coming to an end soon. In four short days, I am flying back out to California for 2 weeks. I am looking forward to the work, but I am going to miss home. I am flying my cousin out over the weekend, and I am glad she decided to come out, it will be a blast playing tourist for 2 days.

Yesterday was a nice day. I got my backyard leaves taken care of, but I hope that I get another run at it before it snows. I still need to do a final mowing of the back yard. Yesterday evening my father came over to avoid all of the Halloween kids. It was nice having him over, we ended up watching a crappy remake of the shining.

Today I did the annual car detailing taken care of, and that was my main off-work accomplishment. This afternoon I went to meet up with what I think is a new friend I first met on Saturday. Me and her seem to have quite a bit in common, so I am looking forward to getting to know her better. It was amazing how much in common we have, everything from geek things, to movies and tv shows, to life experiences (or in some cases lack of experiences) to god knows what. What a day.

Man, it is hard for me to think that October has some and gone so fast.  The fall leaves are falling (and in my back yard, the warm late summer has gone to somewhat chilly early fall, and in days Halloween will have come and gone.

I am still spending much of my time in California, and the  time I have been in Minnesota I have tried to keep the house keeped up, relaxing and spending time with my Cosin, which has been very enjoyable.

So far in the past month or two we have gone up north to hang up with one of my cousins close friends, and have gone to a fun pre-Halloween party. It is great being like, social and stuff!

At work I have still been dedicated to my project in San Mateo, CA and have been traveling quite often to CA. I am enjoying the work quite a bit because its a change of pace for me, but the travel also gets tiring real fast.

As I mentioned, yesterday I went to a bar party with my cousin  and one of her friends. I am not normally a bar person, but I do need to admit it was fun. I attempted to dance, which was very embarrassing and my cousins friend was a very nice person, and I enjoyed hangin out with her.

This week I am taking off of work to get the house in order for winter, and take care of some things that have just gone to the way-side.  I am looking forward to taking it easy for a week, and then its back out to CA next week.

I spent last week at home, and it is amazing how busy the week gets when I spend half my time away from home.  All of the little things like mowing the lawn just build up. Kirsten stayed over these last two weekends again, and I am finding my time with her very, very special.  She is such a nice person and we just “click”. It is like the relative I have not had. I miss her when I am out of town, not something I am use to.  It is nice to have such special relatives, who cares for me, and I care for her.

The previous weekend we had gone on a shopping trip to Ikea to get a bed frame, and then off to Sams Club to get a mattress, so I now have a real guest bed. I had gone to her church, and hung out with her after church normal thing, which was a bit of a change for me.

Last week at work was also busy with just playing catchup.  I had done some miscellaneous work on my CA project, but nothing substantial. A good chunk of work as also  just getting back in the loop on some of the normal Minnesota work I had done.

Last weekend we had gone shopping at the MOA for a bit, and for some reason I can not remember what else we did. Silly me. All I remember is going to target, but I am sure after some time my memory will come back :-)

This week I am back in CA, and already looking forward to doing home. the folks out here moved to some new office space, and it is quite nice.  I do have some decent projects coming up over the next day or two, which will show some progress at work for this week.

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.

Yesterday afternoon I went to a holiday outing with work, at a bowling alley, and it was fun. I did not get much bowling done, but I did hang out for a bit, and watched others bowl.

Yesterday evening was kind of laid back, I got some xmas shopping done, and got some things wrapped before heading off to bed.
Today I went back to work, after having my surgery, and it was a bit different without my friend being there any longer, just was not the same. I spent the day working on a upgrade proposal, and trying to figure out how to do some SAN stuff. Overall not very exciting.

This evening I went to a going away party for someone I worked with at a prevous job. It was fun seeing people I had not seen in years it seems. Half of the people did not even recoginze me.

This week at work we had some on-site training arranged to go over Solaris zones, Solaris SMF and patch management with Solaris 10. On the first day, Monday, we went over basic Solaris zones. How to create zones, how to configure zones, how to remove zones, etc. Solaris zones are a unique feature in Solaris, that allows for several isolated Solaris instances to be run within one physical server. It does not have the physical constraints of Solaris domains, it is described to be like BSD jails.

The next day, Tuesday, we went over backing up and restoring Solaris zones. Each zone has its own isolated  directory structure, so to back it up is very straight forward.  The next topic we went over was resource management, Each zone can have CPU shares, CPU caps and memory caps assocuated with it, to prevent one zone from taking over the entire server.

On day three we went over the solaris SMF, or Service Management Facility which has been integrated in to Solaris 10. SMF is a whole new framework that has been added to Solaris to manage the starting and restarting of daemons in Solaris, which replaces the old rc.* method of managing daemons.

The final thing we discussed was Solaris patching. With Solaris 10, they redid patching, to be more like what redhat does and whatnot, where the OS talks to a central patch server for managment. It is very cool, if it works.

Overall I found this traning to be very useful, and puts our team in to a good position to support Solaris 10 long term.

Today was an interesting day. This morning a friend from work called me to see if I wanted to go see the Body Worlds exhibit at the science museum of Minnesota Saturday evening. I was up for it, as I have heard lots of good things about this exhibit. We looked in to going, and we found out that advanced tickets are only sold in advanced, and a set number of people can attend during any given time period. We went on-line to see that the only openings at 3:00am and 4:00am. We talked over it a bit, and decided why the hell not, and got our tickets for 3:00am.
I went over to a friends house for Saturday night movies, and we watched Team America. I had forgotten how offensive that movie was, but what else do you expect from trey parker. After movies, I went to meet up with the work dude for the body worlds show.

We started off going to Mickey’s Diner in Downtown saint paul for some food. This is the first time I had gone to Mickey’s, and it was very interesting, a old school dining car with good food. After eating we made it to the science museum by 1:00am or so, and walked around a bit to some of the exhibits. It was amazing how busy the place was at 1:00am!

We then went to the Human Body omni theater show. This was a  show on how the human body functions, from how cells develop, to things how the brain functions and how the body reacts to the environment around it. After the omni show, we went off to the Body Worlds exhibit. I was very impressed with what they had on display, it is amazing how much work went in to putting this together. I know that all of the body parts are real, but I just do not want to think about that.

We went around Body Worlds until 5:30am or so, and had left the museum by 6:30am. I then dropped my friend off, and grabbed a bite to eat before heading in to work. Today we had to upgrade a production server from AIX 5.1 to AIX 5.2, and overall it went very smoothly. We ran in to one problem with the backup, but overall it could have gone worse. This morning I worked with the coworker that is leaving us later this week, so it was nice to have the time to hang out as well. The team at work is changing quite a bit, and I think I am going to miss the great team we had spent so much effort to try to build. It is hard seeing people go, but they all have their reasons.

After the work, i got back home at about 1:00pm, and laid down for a short nap. I was up by 4:30pm, and was able to get my car cleaned up a bit. Headed out to the gym, then headed out to the MOA for some christmas card shopping.

That wraps up this weekend. I thought this was going to be a real rough weekend for me, but getting to the wild game on Friday, then going to Body Worlds on Sunday morning and being able to spend a bit of time with my friend Sunday at work made the weekend bearable.

Today was a interesting day at work. It had been a very easy going morning to start with. Lee was getting ready to leave to his new job, the weekend was coming up, so not much was going on. I just spent the morning closing tickets from being oncall and whatnot. Next we have training, so i am trying not to get to much going on. When the afternoon hit, man did things change. First I had a interesting meeting with my boss at work, which I am not going to go in to the details about, then a server puked on me.

A server had filesystem errors on two filesystems /opt and /usr. We brought the system down to fsck the filesystems and it they had tons of errors. After bringing the server up, it crashed again within 5 minutes. I ended up ripping out Solaris Volume Manager, and after I did that it looks like it is staying up. Looking at the sun case this morning, it looks like a known bug, but I will deal with that on Monday.

I was at work dealing with the for-mentioned server until 5:30pm or so, and just as I got home and pulled in yo my driveway Paula calls me looking for Lee’s phone number. They had plans to go to the Wild game this evening, and Lee was missing in action. She then asks what I am doing tonight, and mentions that her Mom has an extra ticket. Sure, I am up to watching a game in real person instead on tv, sign me up!

Got to the game to watch the wild loose 3 to 0, but I am always up to social events, for me any social event is better than  sitting at home alone.  I got to visit with Paula’s mom a bit, a real sweetheart and Paula’s boyfriend as well. He so reminds me of my brother in law.  After the game, went out to Wild Tymes bar and visited with Lee and his nephew for a bit. Other times I have gone to the bar after a wild game, they are just packed. This one was not very busy at all, which I liked. I am not much of a bar person, but I I think it is because I do not like the need to yell at the top of your lungs to carry a conversation. Last night Lee did a good job of pacing his drinking at his party, but tonight he did not do as good of a job. It is always fun hanging out with him, he just has a ton of stories. His nephew can do a good job of talking your ear off as well.

Today after work was the going away party for one of our team members. This fellow has been a mainframe guy for years, and as the mainframe side of the house was not looking to hot, he switched over to UNIX. Now that the company overall is not looking very hot, he is going back to what he loves, MVS. This evening at the Blue Fox we had his going away party, and he had a great turnout! People he have worked with for years, and who he has not worked with for years showed up to send him off to his new opportunities. It was nice seeing people even I have not seen in years. His party lasted until 8:30 or so, which is one of the longer ones I had been to.