travis' brain dump

SO, where to begin?

After going on a serious technology sabbatical, at least from a personal stance, I am back. I think. 😉

After working so much during the summer, I tried to get back into my usual personal technology quests (blogging, mobile modding, gaming, home server/network stuff, etc) but just found that by trying to dive back into my personal time with technology, I came to hate it even more… so I just quit for a couple months. It was actually a pretty nice “break” for me. I still couldn’t avoid it since technology is my career, but not engaging in activities involving it after hours helped to smooth over my jaded feelings towards all things tech.

And… after a few days of “hitting it hard” again, I actually feel pretty good about technology once more. I’ve upgraded the blog site software running on this server, updated the VMWare installations for the hosts, updated the VSA software, rooted my Cliq, loaded a vanilla android installation on it, reloaded all the apps I wanted and pruned out 66 bogus user entries… Oh, with that, if some of you notice that the email coming to your inbox for notifications has switched out mysteriously to another mail account, my apologies. I was playing with a little tool that links up Facebook accounts to WordPress blog accounts and accidentally pulled down the email address you have posted in your Facebook profile. If you want to change it, just log in and update it with another email account. 🙂

I’m also pretty stoked about the beginning of my favorite time of year… SNOWBOARDING SEASON!!!!!!!!!!!! *happy sigh* This is my time to relax, my time to destroy myself on the mountain and feel like I really do something recreational besides a routine daily workout. Can ya tell I’m excited? 🙂 This season should prove interesting since two more members of the family are now geared up and ready for the fun. Arwen got a gear reload this year so she’s all set and Amanda got geared up right at the end of last season so she’s all good to go as well. Hopefully plenty of funny stories and good pics ahead!

With that… updates on the family. Family is doing great… Travis Jr is two now, I can’t believe how big he is. I seem to remember him coming home from the hospital just a few weeks ago, where has the time gone!? Hopefully I’ll get around to updating some recent pictures in the gallery today or perhaps tomorrow. Today will be consumed with cleaning, grocery shopping and a lot of XBOX Kinect. 🙂 That seems to be our new fun thing to do around here… I think it has something to do with the fact even the kiddos can play it. No controller gaming, a 7 year old girl’s absolute dream, especially when she gets to play with virtual tiger cubs for hours. *rolls eyes* lol. I’m still torn on what my favorite game is. I would have to say independently playing I’m partial to Kinetc Adventures and Dance Central. Group playing I would have to go with Kinect Sports and Dance Central. Those are just really fun “party” games to enjoy with a group of people. Kinectimals is a pretty cool idea, kinda fun for the kiddos and Biggest Loser Workout is a workout, so I can’t count that as a ‘Game’ per se. Between our collection and my buddy Randy, I think we’ve got all the games and reviews covered.  We’ll probably pick up another game or two over the next couple of weeks as these start to lose their “new car smell”.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it. Nothing really dramatic going on and life is slowly returning to “normal”, whatever that is. Busy day ahead so I’m going to end this for now…

July to September… there’s a gap. *shrug* only two months I guess… It’s been a busy couple months…

I think between work trying to kill me and trying to get caught up with stuff around the house it’s a wonder I’ve got time to post even now.

Finished the bulk of the migration at work… only a few servers to move over/virtualize and the creation of a new Citrix environment and we’re pretty much done. Just wish people would recognize what was done and quit complaining about the little things that we’re still having quirks with. It’s not like we didn’t complete 6 months of work in 2 and a half or anything. You’re bound to have some issues to work through, right? 🙂

So, I sold the Corolla. Done with it. I needed to focus on just one car to work on and I just want to work on the Camaro. It’s been sitting too long and it needs some love. I’m going to try to be good and not get another car until I can put the Camaro back on it’s wheels, at least that’s my goal. We have the Highlander so it’s not like we don’t have another car or anything but we’ll see how it goes.

I was at least able to take a week or so off work, although I don’t think it was long enough. I spent most of it getting caught up on projects around the house that needed my attention during that two months I was getting destroyed at work. Installed the stair rail by the door finally, cleared out the bulk of the junk we had under the house (almost 2/3’s), cleared out the garage of all junk not needed, cleared all the limbs/stick piles out of the yard, etc. I was surprised at how much crap there was and how little of a dent it put in a 30-yard dumpster. At least we got a couple neighbors in on it and it only cost us each 100. That’s a good deal to me. 🙂 We also ended up replacing the washer and dryer in the house as well which is pretty much awesome. Judging by the performance thus far, I’m pretty optimistic about how much water and power these new units are going to save.

I’ve been on a total energy savings kick the last few weeks. Bought a new virtual server to host all of my stuff in the house so now I’m down to just 4 1U units, the switch, firewall and router in the rack in the garage. 3 SAN storage units and 1 VMWare host to run all 9 systems including the media center. So far it’s pulling only about 600 watts/hr to run EVERYTHING but that’s still better than the 900+ watts/hr it was a month or so ago. That alone should drop the power bill quite a bit a month. I also went through and replaced all the flood lamps in the house with CFL Flood Lamps which are using a ton less electricity and again with the replacement of the washer and dryer things should definitely look better. I’m hoping for at least a $50 drop by the time I get this all figured out. We’ll see in a month or so once I’ve run a full 30 days.

It’s kinda nice though… between cutting down on all the servers, rummaging junk, etc… I also found a ton of stuff to put up on craigslist and ebay so some of the money i’ve been dumping to get all this stuff is coming back to me at least. yay for balance!

Now that I feel all caught up with that stuff I just need to figure out some way of getting caught up with my personal life… June through August kinda killed any summer time with the family. 🙁 I feel like Arwen’s summer vacation time was a blink of an eye to me. I can’t believe she’s started 2nd grade already. Where does the time go!? I swear yesterday Travis was a newborn and she was in Kindergarten. Today she’s in 2nd grade and Travis used the toilet for the first time. Definitely going too fast.

Well, anyway, enough with the blogging for today. Hopefully I can get more time to vent out things on here and do more “me things” in the near future now that things are slowly returning to “normal”. We’ll see.

fun?

So I finally get a day to sit down and take a look at emails, computer stuff, etc around my house and I realized it’s been over a month since my last post… time for the July update.

Nothing really new to post unfortunately. I think that’s mostly due to the fact I’ve been working myself half to death the last month. I can’t say it’s been horrible, but there have been days. I think mostly the worst days have been when I’ve spent the whole day working on progressing the new domain structure forward then something critical breaks towards the end of the day which keeps me working. Those days went from an acceptable 10-11 hour day to 16+ in an instant. All in all though it’s been kinda fun I guess. It’s not all the time that you get to recreate an entire environment from the ground up. The best part will be once we’re all moved over and sitting in the new environment. Seriously, the existing one is a wreck. It’s a lot better than it was when I started a few years ago but still – it’s hard for two different IT teams from basically two different companies to share one domain forest without some serious problems presenting themselves. Oh well… not an issue so much anymore. 🙂

Sadly, that’s the bulk of what I’ve been doing the last month. At least I’ve been forcing myself to get out of work at a decent time this last week so I’ve been able to spend some time with my family again. I hope I can keep the trend up but since I worked so much in June it’s hard not to feel guilty like you’re not doing enough work when you’re used to pouring in a ton of hours and cut the throttle back to normal. It’s like some sort of withdrawal, how lame is that?

Well, with that said there is much to be done around the house today…

ahhh the latest and greatest… ok, maybe not the greatest… lol

Nothing too crazy to report. I finally got off my rear and posted up more pictures and such. I think the only thing I’m lacking at this point is the finished photos from doing this last round of remodel action. I’ll get to it. Just need to take them. I think we were so thrilled to be back into all our rooms and have the house back after that week long nightmare I haven’t cared much to take the time to take more photos. 🙂

I finally ran the Bolder Boulder again. For being 9 years later and about 20 lbs heavier I think I can be pleased with my time. In 2001 I ran a 1:20:57. Not too bad, but not the best time for someone who was 22 year old and weighed 210 lbs. LOL This year I’m pleased to say I came in at 1:14:50 pulling a total time drop of 6 minutes and 7 seconds. If only we didn’t get stuck in the walk/jog heat I might have pulled an even better time. We ended up adding just over a half a mile in extra steps dodging folks which made it a little difficult to keep a good pace. However, that being said, next year it’s ON! I’ll be going in for the qualification run or hopefully run another race before hand to log as a qualifying time and get into a jogger heat or something. My goal is to bust the hour mark next 10k I run. I was sad that Amanda couldn’t run with me this year but she was having some problems with her leg while training which kept her out. I ended up running with my neighbor Cristal who did an awesome job as well.

Aside from that, the last three weeks have been uber crap for me working out. I really need to get some workout time in before I end up plumping up again. I looked at some pics of me from 2 yrs ago when I started working to drop the weight and the me at 270 compared to the me at 232 is nothing if not motivating to never let myself get back there. 🙁 I’ll get back to it but it’s been hard with work lately. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear that I’ll be having much time the next month or two. Work is going to kill me, I’m convinced. We’re incredibly busy right now trying to bust out a pretty large project in a pretty tight schedule. It’s an improbable schedule which of course we’ll knock out. We’ll see how positive my next monthly update post is now won’t we?

All in all everything else is going well. Finally getting the Camaro restored. It only sat for about 5 years with no work on it… At the rate I’m going I think I *MIGHT* be able to drive it in a couple years. The only thing slowing me down now is money and I’m about 10k from finishing it, lol.

Anyway… that about does it. If something else comes to mind i’ll certainly drop another update (if i can find the time, lol)