Overdue Update

It’s been almost two months since my last post here.

An update:

• Work: We launched online enrollment at work. It was one of the last phases of our ERP implementation. Our old phone based registration is over.
• Geek/Work/Professional Accomplishment: My virtualization site Virtual Andy is now listed on PlanetV12N, a VMware blog aggregator.
• School: I completed my 4th semester of graduate school. This was the first time I’ve gotten a 4.0 GPA with Murray State. Two semesters left.
• TMI Alert: In late May, I had a colonoscopy. It was painless. The night before wasn’t pleasant. PS: Everything Is Just Fine. (TM)
• Geek Update: I got a sweet new machine at work. Some of my coworkers call it “Andy’s Server”. 12GB RAM, 1TB+ Storage, Dual Quad Core Xeon Processors, 2 22″ Dell LCD. I love it!
• Sad News: My parents are selling their condo at the lake, and I’m not buying it. This Is Not A Good Thing. (TM)

More On My Health:

I’ve been having some health problems, but I’m taking steps to have them fixed. The whole “eating whatever I want” isn’t a sustainable model. Hopefully this ordeal which has been going on since February (and its related costs) will be a wake up call for me. I’ve been doing good (aside from a weekend in St. Louis) and working out on an elliptical machine.

Aside from the change in eating habits, the hardest part of this all is saying “no”. My coworkers go out to eat a lot and so do my friends; I usually have to say no to them. Or I have to just go and have a water. I think most of them are understanding, but I don’t want to lose the social connections.

The Summer Reading List:

I recently finished The Lovely Bones (my GF requested I read it). My summer list:

• The Broken Window (in progress)
• I Will Teach You To Be Rich from one of my favorite bloggers Ramit Sethi
• Suze Orman 2009 Action Plan
• The Entire Harry Potter Series
• The Dark Half

The Summer Travel Schedule:

• June 13 – Wedding (Paducah, KY)
• June 19 – PHISH Concert (Nobelsville, IN)
• June 21 – Father’s Day (Owensboro, KY)
• June 23 – Taking a friend to Nashville
• July 3 – Visiting Friends in Kansas City, MO
• July 10 – Family Stuff (Owensboro, KY)
• July 11 – Pool Party (Kevil, KY)
• July 17-19 – Visit to GF (Gravel Switch, KY)
• July 26-31 – Vacation (All Around Pennsylvania)
• August 19 – Graduate school resumes

I’d better get those tires checked and the oil changed! Oh, and a vision check! It’s going to be a packed summer.

This Post Was Sponsored By The Non Existent Blog Of UnNecessary Caps, A Subsidiary Of Apostrophe Abuse, lowercase L, And The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.

Internet vs. DVR

First, some monthly costs:

• Internet: $37.50 (I have residential Tier 3)
• Netflix: $8.95, I mainly stream tv/movies from this service. Rarely watch the 1 DVD a month.
• Cable: “Free”, it’s included in my rent

I only have a laptop set up at home – it’s hooked to my TV and I mainly stream video from Hulu, South Park Studios, and NetFlix.

I use the web quite a bit, but it’s almost all for work or school purposes. The office is < 5 miles away, and I have a desk and two monitors at work… so if I need to browse the web/buy something/do email I go to the office anyway.

DVR service would cost me $22.50. DVR can replace my internet service and Netflix. That’s a savings of $23.95 a month for $287.40 a year. I’m looking to my readers to let me know if there’s something I’m missing. Comment and vote!

26

Here’s a list of things that have happened since I last posted:

• We went to Nashville for our 1-year anniversary and visited BB King’s and the mall. It was a great time.
• I read How To Castrate A Bull. It’s a good book about risk taking and IT management/philosophy.
• I fired a gun for the first time. Correction: I fired several different types of guns for the first time. The guys at work had a shooting day out in the middle of nowhere.
• I turned 26.
• I spent my entire tax refund on a large car payment. It’s bringing me 5 months closer to having it paid off.

In other news, I’m still going strong on the Master’s program. Two more semesters left. I’m considering taking an investment class this summer, just for the hell of it.

My Account of KY’s Ice Storm 2009

Here’s my account of the earlier parts of Ice Storm 2009. The times aren’t entirely accurate, but are sort of close.

Tuesday, late afternoon and evening -

Classes officially cancelled for the night. I have a bad feeling about this one.

Wednesday -

4:00 AM

Barely got any sleep. Power’s gone. Cell’s gone. I’m going to scope out our setup at I&T building. Hopefully it is still operational and we have a place to go.

4:30 AM

Servers are all up, I&T is whirring. The power is on upstairs in the E-panel outlets and that looks like it will be our home base. Headed to dorms to see if GF is ok.

4:45 AM

Can’t get ahold of GF. No land line, no cell, and desk worker won’t let me in and won’t go check. I don’t think they realize how serious this situation has become. I am not amused. Headed back home to pick up supplies and JB, a co-worker who lives nearby.

5:30 AM

JB and I have set up at I&T. He has packed up a lot of stuff. Coffee is on. He is setting up some kind of stove that runs on gas used for camping. Internet is operational, but quiet. No one is online. Still trying to figure everything out.

Snow has started to pour down.

6:50 AM

We just ate some Ramen noodles. I called public safety, letting them know I can update http://www.murraystate.edu and wrote down a statement from our emergency coordinator. The university is closed today. Wow, this is bad. Called my manager – he will be heading this way. Can’t get WPSD online, can’t pick up any radio stations (or their websites) besides WKMS.

8:15 AM

Frantically trying to get ahold of someone who can inform us of our generator’s power. How long will we be on until we fail to battery? More co-workers are here. We apparently have a water pressure problem. None is flowing. We are heading around campus to pick up friends and family that will be huddling up in the I&T building.

9:00 AM

Loved ones have been rounded up. They’re a little confused (it’s still early) but I think they understand what’s going on. We have made contact with most of our group, but not everyone. I hope they’re okay!

The new public safety building is called the Emergency Operations Center and is serving the entire area. Apparently the generator has 6 hours left unless it is refueled. We are starting to make a list of essential servers that have to remain up (and their dependencies) along with a server shutdown order. All I can think of is our DR meetings. And payroll.

9:45

Generator is being refueled. YES!!!!!!!! 350 Gallons of Diesel should keep us up for a good amount of time.

10:00

Making a run for more supplies now that we understand how bad things really are… we need food, trash bags, disposable utensils/plates, blankets, pillows, everything.

—————————————————–

We eventually headed to Owensboro (my hometown) and camped out at my mom and dad’s house. Two weeks prior, they had skipped town and went to Florida.

The Setup

I posted a long time ago about having a new setup at home.

The trusty Onkyo stereo


The Acer Laptop, connects to the net wirelessly and the TV via s-video output

And of course, two wireless Saitek controllers

A wireless mouse


A wireless ergnomic keyboard

Final VMware Post

…on this site, anyway.

Per a suggestion I’ve opened a new site: Virtual Andy. If you’re interested in the VMware side of things, it’s your place to go. I’ve also updated all of the VMware related posts on here to link to the posts on that site.

2008

A day late… but here’s my traditional end of the year post.

My past end of the year posts:

• 2003
• 2004
• 2005
• 2006
• 2007

2008 was pretty stable. I started the year with a lot of weight lost, but gained it all back during the summer. I’m pretty close to my wit’s end with that whole process. More on that later. I also started dating my current girlfriend in February, and we’re still going strong.

• A year ago I was single. Now I’m in a committed relationship.
• A year ago I had no idea what a virtual machine was. Whoa.
• A year ago I had never been to an NFL football game. In November, we went to Packers vs. Titans.
• A year ago I had never been in grad school. Now I’ve got three semesters left (6 courses)
• A year ago I was exhausted from staying up all night playing designated driver. This year I had three drinks (in 6 hours) and went home when the bar closed. This felt pretty good – being able to exercise control without completely sheltering myself from temptation
• A year ago I was an adamant fiction reader. I didn’t read nearly as much for leisure in 2008.
• A year ago I never imagined going to a hippy festival. ROTHBURY happened in July and it was a great time.
• A year ago I just started budgeting seriously. Now I’ve got a cool savings account and an emergency fund.

Survey Says…

No more delicious links.

More personal posts.

I’ve also toyed around with a VMware/virtualization only site… we’ll see if I ever get that off the ground.

How to Undelete a WordPress.com Blog Post

Yet another reason to love Google Reader…

Like any self-absorbed blogger, I subscribe to my own website’s RSS feed (and RSS feed for comments)

Through an error on my part, I deleted the most recent 15 posts on this blog. I was wanting to clean up category 2781 (the delicious links) and potentially quit posting them.

Google Reader to the rescue. I found my site’s feed in Reader, and did some Firefox Voodoo and pasted my entries back in and appropriately datestamped them in WordPress.

It’s really too bad you can’t schedule an export with WordPress.com, but that’s one of the few downsides of having it hosted elsewhere.

Essentials, Late 2008 Edition

Another draft I saw lying around. Here goes nothing…

An homage to Dive Into Mark’s Linux Essentials list (2006, 2008) and My WebDev Essentials (2007) here’s the update on cool software that I am using.

Note: All webapps/software on this list is FOG (Free or GTFO) and for Windows…which, ironically, is not FOG:

1. VLC – essential for playing video files
2. TweetDeck – it’s where I post to twitter
3. FoxIt Reader – my work life has be reading tons of PDFs – Adobe Reader is too large and slow, FoxIt is great and has Firefox integration — did I mention it does tabs? and doesn’t suck?
4. Firefox
5. GMail
6. Web Developer Toolbar – most of the time I have this hidden, but it comes in handy on random occaisions
7. delicious toolbar – my work life also has me bookmarking an unbelievable amount of material and having to keep it organized; across many machines… delicious and delicious toolbar are the way to go
8. Stack Overflow and Ask Metafilter are great question and answer sites for random geek and nongeek questions
9. Mint.com provides great personal financial data gathering from multiple sources (savings account, checking account, credit card) and aggregates them all, essential budgeting tool
10. Seahorse – Linux only, but great GPG/PGP key management software – couldn’t ever get WinGPG to work
11. Google Reader the obvious RSS reader choice
12. VMware Player
13. Pidgin – instant messaging
14. mIRC
15. mRemote – gracefully handles multiple remote administration sessions in tabs (SSH, RDP, VNC)
16. Winamp – classic mode only
17. Google Toolbar – I am a very serious Google searcher and the toolbar provides a lot of killer functionality while on result pages (find being the #1 with the “up a level” at #2)
18. Nagios – system notifications for our boxes here at work (Linux)
19. CNN and Reddit for nongeek and geek news.
20. KeePass – password vault
21. PuTTY oh PuTTY, where would I be without your quick SSH goodness?
22. Hulu – watch Family Guy, Arrested Development and Firefly online
23. Paint .NET – still without a doubt the best lightweight image cropping/low level editing app
24. Facebook – obvious
25. AdBlock Plus – ads are annoying

No longer using (absolutely refuse to run):

1. iTunes
2. Quicktime
3. Safari for Windows
4. Anything Apple
5. Myspace
6. Digg

The Apple apps running on Windows were awful. I am sure they are great on Mac OS and hardware, but their products on Windows are sluggish at best. I felt dumber after each visit to Digg or Myspace, so no more.

Gone, but not forgotten:

1. Last.FM – just stopped being practical, and stopped working in Winamp
2. Eclipse – no longer doing development…
3. OpenOffice – Use Google Docs for docs that I share, and Office 2007 for everything else. Office 2007 is too nice.
4. RescueTime – stopped caring about the fact I’m on the web most days writing email or in Excel
5. Greasemonkey – I either don’t visit the sites that I used Greasemonkey on anymore or the sites have changed
6. Filezilla – for the few times I’ve got to FTP