Ah, there is nothing better when starting a vacation then a 6:00am flight! Yes, in order to make this whole trip work we had to leave from Chicago at 6:00am to catch a flight to Frankfurt, then only to arrive in Paris in mid-afternoon the next day. That’s the one thing I hate about flying to Europe is that you must kiss off a day. Our flight to Chicago was delayed an hour due to snow in the Chicago area, as a result they were slowing down the incoming flights. I was a bit nervous because we were not given more than 90 minutes to make the connection and I was under the impression that we were going to have to change terminals to catch the Frankfurt flight. Over an hour later we were leaving PDX on our way to Portland. Upon arrival in Chicago we were offered a great reward by the travel gods that our departing flight for Frankfurt was the gate across the hall, doesn’t get any easier than that. After grabbing some quick food and attempting to bribe the attendant to giving us business-class seats, we left ORD for FRA. The flight over was uneventful and 8 1/2 hours long. All attempts to catch some sleep failed, and the movies they offered were lame. God bless the PSP!

After landing in FRA around 6:00am the next day, we tried to figure out where our Paris flight was. The problem with FRA is that unless you are flying on Lufthansa, FRA will not assign a gate number until about 30 minutes before your flight. Normally not a problem, however many of the concourses have split levels with different gates above and below, security control is at the start of the level. So if you gate is on a different level than you are on, you must exit security and go back through on the next level. Natalie and I were getting quite tired by this point, so we decided to guess where the flight was going to be and camped out near the monitors until the gate was posted.  After enduring security, we headed for the gate, and Paris.

Once we got on the flight, I was beat and decided to nap a bit. Natalie called Jean-Pierre (Natalie’s uncle) to inform him that we were on-time and all was good. I awoke about an hour later expecting to be preparing to land, only to find that we have not left yet. Apparently there was a different excuse for why we did not leave every time they provided an update on the PA. Again, over an hour later we finally left for Paris. This is the beginning of my stance that Air France sucks.

Jean-Pierre met us at the airport and drove us to his flat near the Bastille in downtown Paris. We took a much needed nap for a few hours and woke up in time for an aperitif and dinner. Finally, the end of a very long trip to Paris, can’t wait to see some sights tomorrow.

About a year ago we were facing a serious problem of storage. As amateur photographers we want to store the RAW photo along with the fully rendered JPG. Obviously the problem is with the two combined it can easily consume 10-12MB per photo, which adds up very quickly. Previously, the solution was to just buy larger drives for our primary file-server and migrate the data over. With the ever-increasing size this was becoming less and less practical, not to mention costly in terms of finances and time. I also hated the idea of a single file-server that for any reason could fail possibly damaging our data and requiring even more time to repair. We began to play with ESXi (as it was now free) as a means to virtualize all of our home servers that would enable us to better manage the systems and offer a better solution towards fault tolerance. The only problem was, do we really want to virtualize a system holding ~500GB of data?

Obviously no. So the solution was clear, construct a home SAN (storage area networking) or technically a NAS (network-attached storage).

I wanted a system that could hold a large amount of data, plus be scalable enough to support growth without the need to constantly migrate data from one array to another. The solution was using the open-source SAN solution OpenFiler. This offered us a very simple way to scale-up the capacity by growing the RAID array with new drives and resizing the necessary volumes. No more transferring data around and buying all new sets of drives.

I chose to have my guests that needed the increased space to connect via iSCSI to the SAN which offered me the most flexibility and network fault tolerance. OpenFiler supports many other sharing methods including NFS and SMB, which were appealing, but I wanted to have gating control over access on my file server and not the SAN.

This solution has been working great for well over a year now, and I would strongly recommend this form of solution. With the ease of media development, and the ever-increasing ease of media presentation within the home, building a centralized file-server makes more sense now than ever. Rather than putting a large drive or two in your system, you can consider using a SAN to offer better scalability.

Well due to some upcoming trips and our love for tropical places, we were not able to attend Dragon*Con this year. While I definitely missed Dragon*Con, we were able to attend a new convention conveniently held at the same time up in Seattle. The Penny Arcade Expo or PAX, is one of the largest game expos on the west coast. Unlike Origins that focused mostly on games that do not require electricity, PAX is almost exclusively about video games of all shapes and sizes.

Almost immediately up on arrival we attended a short panel on freelance artists for comics, graphic novels, and games held by Wizards of the Coast. From my vantage point the panel offered some good advice, but I was confident that Natalie absorbed far more. After the panel, we headed down to the exhibit halls to see what games were being presented. Upon entered you were first introduced to the independent games being offered for a greatly reduced price.

Now like many of you I am growing increasingly tired of the same search/replace names on screenplays for movies, and studios milking sequels and “reboots” to death. Unfortunately, PAX was no exception. There were very few new games being offered, most of the games that are due around Christmas time are. . .yes. . .sequels. Definitely not bad sequels, in fact I very much looking forward to Halo 3 ODST, Left 4 Dead 2, and especially Bioshock 2. Getting to play and watch a few of them was very exciting, and is making the wait that much harder to bear.

But really, are studios and designers really out of ideas? Seriously, grab a book or two, and I think you may find some new inspiration. Many of the indie games are not focusing on cutting-edge graphics or Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound, instead they are offering the user an opportunity to try something new. Most of the games focus on different forms of puzzle-solving, that at first glance you offer a “that’s nice” and then walk away. It’s not until you start playing that you find the game-play intoxicating and yourself writing down the URL for the game.

The highlight of PAX was no doubt the Saturday night concert. The concert started with a lame Rock Band live duel, but eventually gave way to folks who know how to create their own music. The word during the convention was that first band FreezePop had great music, but was poor on-stage. I found this to be quite the opposite: I thought their performance was amazing, but their CD music a bit flat. After being entertained by FreezePop for close to 90 minutes, the next “opening” band of Paul and Storm kept the energy going for another hour. We have heard them a couple of times, so their performance was nothing new, but entertaining nonetheless. Finally Paul and Storm were relieved Jonathan Coulton who delivered a stellar performance. The climax of the show was no doubt with Jonathan changed the lyrics of his song My Monkey to “Wil Wheaton”. Wil who happen to be in the crowd, found it so amusing that if he had not been laying down already probably would have collapsed. After the song, Wil came up on a stage for a big group hug. Awwww. . .

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It’s that time of the year again, students are returning to U of P to start a new year of: long classes, last-minute exam cramming, all-day Sunday homework marathons, and some of the best parties on the planet. We happened to be in the area yesterday, and decided to visit our alma mater while the rest of undergraduates were moving back in. Surprisingly it was not nearly as crazy as I remember it being. There were chalk markings and signs everywhere welcoming students back to your their “home” dorms, books stacked high in the bookstore, and boxes everywhere. It definitely re-ignited that college desire within, now if only I could negotiate college to include my current salary.

We graduated in 2003, and have made less than a handful of trips back since. In the six short years since our departure, the school had underwent a fairly significant transformation on both the inside and outside. Most noticeably are the new dormitory and complete overhaul of the engineering buildings. The new dorm sits across from Tyson Hall (formally University Court where we spent a year). This new dorm is built using a similar design as Corrado, but appears to be twice as large as it uses a horseshoe layout.

The new engineering building was the most impressive by far. Here was a building that was barely standing, had some seriously frightening environmental items in the basement, and really had some seriously out-dated lab equipment. Started last year, the engineering building was nearly gutted (except for the exterior of the front of the building). Everything inside was completely different, elevator shafts were moved, the CS department was able to return to the building with the new space, the labs were upgraded, and the lecture halls were finally modern. While it was not quite finished, it was pretty close and I was completely blown away with the beauty of the project. This was something that really needed to be done about 10 years ago, but it appears to have been well worth the wait. The part that was disappointing was that it appeared that majority of the lab equipment was still the same old equipment that we spend countless hours troubleshooting (come on HP and Tek, give these guys something representative of the new building).

Aside from the new engineering building, there are other small changes to various campus buildings such as what appears to be a new congregation area in the commons to replace St. Mary’s. Also near the chapel is a new Notre Dame-like outdoor temple. Some other buildings that need some serious improvements like Buckley Center and Old Science still look the same way they did about 10 years ago (and probably well before that).

I have also heard that the CTS department that I had invested 4 years into is no more. Rumor has it that the formerly great IT department has been renamed to Technical Services and is charged with technical support of the student and lab issues only. All infrastructure-related initiatives have been apparently subcontracted out to Verizon Business. I don’t know what the administration structure is anymore, but I can imagine it is pretty simplistic. Most of the people that I had the pleasure of working for were laid-off in the process.  Shortly after we graduated, most of the CTS student help was disbanded as concerns were raised over students having too much access and responsibility. While I have mixed feelings on this, I do believe that this was serious mistake. It is true that we had more access than I think should have (I was the pinnacle of this as at one-time I held keys to the entire campus), and we very lucky that we did not encounter any liability issues. I mean with students have root access to the some of the most critical university systems, this is just inviting trouble, because despite your best efforts you will one day encounter students that are not as trustworthy. On the flip-side, we were good. Not just good, but damn good. The student staff was some of the most effective staff members ever in the CTS department, and in some cases educating their full-time staff counterparts. Aside from their effectiveness, the experience we gained from these positions was invaluable. To this day, I have benefited and applied from the lessons I learned from Telecomm (both the good and the bad) far more than any knowledge acquired from the classroom. It is very concerning to me that the next generation of students will not benefit as did, and be able to offer the same experience back in the future endeavors. With that, a huge thanks to Jason, Mike, and Kerry for their knowledge and wisdom that they passed on and the patience that they showed us.

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Well, it’s close to it anyway. To be honest I don’t recall the exact date I fired it up, but it was shortly after I started my first year of college. For those who do not know, Colossus is currently our primary file server, DNS server, and DHCP server in our house. Colossus has been with us now for 10 years  and has changed its role over the years, facilitating a variety of purposes.

Colossus was built soon after I joined the CTS Telecomm department at the University of Portland during my freshman year, in an effort to better understand Linux. Simply put, I am a kinetic learner, therefore the only why I will understand many IT technologies is to install them and use them on a regular basis. The senior members of the CTS team used another personal server called Snafu which was their project box and home dial-in server. Not wanted to be outdone, I built up Colossus which was named after the supercomputer in the 70s movie “Colossus: The Forbin Project“. Colossus originally ran RH Linux v5.2, and was slowly upgraded on the RH line through the years. Colossus started its life using my old workstation hardware, and it would receive the latest hand-me-down hardware all through school. Originally, a Pentium 133MHz with 64MB of RAM and a 3.5GB HD, it served as fairly reliable hobby server.

As years went on, Colossus became a great refuge for folks wanting to host their website and have a separate email system separated from the University. At its peak it had 23 users on the system. Colossus underwent a lot of scrutiny and trouble during the college years including one Windows administrator concerned that since it was DNS server it could bring down the whole University if it allowed zone transfers. It was relocated more times than I can count including hiding out in dorm data room, enduring a 80-90 degree storage closet, and sitting in a proper rack in the switch room.

A Dogs Breakfast divx After school, the need for private web space dropped off as did many of the users. Even though Colossus continued to host a number sites including our photo gallery and personal blogs, I began to become increasingly concerned about my data. So Colossus was slowly retired from the web hosting service and began to serve our household data. With my post-college paychecks I was finally able to afford a bit better hardware for the server so that it could adequately perform and had sufficient redundancy to safeguard our information.  Despite my best efforts, Colossus has crashed more times than I can count due to hardware failure. At its lowest point, I was in Cincinnati advising Natalie how to completely rebuild the hardware from spare parts after it tanked. That was during the phase where it was blowing up a RAID member every 6 months for no reason.

Finally, midway through 2008 thanks to VMware releasing ESXi for free, I was able to virtualize my whole environment. It was kind of  the end of era for Colossus as it went from being a physical system to a virtual server for the first time. From a management-, redundancy-, and HA-standpoint it is in a far superior configuration now. At the same time, I dumped the less-than-stable Fedora Core distros for CentOS 5. Colossus continues to host our data with over 1.2TB of NAS space available, serving as our DNS and DHCP servers, as well as still remains a place for hobby-development.

For pure amusement, I dug up the original website for Colossus from when it was serving as file-hosting webserver:

old_colossus_site1

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As I was slowly waking up this morning, Natalie asked if I would be going downtown and if so would I be interested in attending the Portland Area VMware Users Group meeting today. I had been wanted to attend for some time now, but as a traveling consultant it does make it a bit hard to plan that far in advance. xxx порно жесть огромные члены и маленькие писки фото

The meeting today was held at the Conway building near NW 23rd St. While I was forced to miss the first presentation due to a prior engagement, I did get the opportunity to see Vizioncore’s new flagship VM monitoring solution, vFoglight, and Tripwire’s latest product, vWire. Naturally, I am partial to vWire

If you have even the slightest interest in visualization, it is well worth the time to visit. Oh yes, and the lunches were amazing!

Is it the 11th Commandment that the vacations must go by so fast? Seriously, it barely felt like we were there a week and then it was over. Needless to say, we have a great time and were able to do most of what we were hoping to do. In short we dove six dive sites including two sites at Lanai: No-Name Paradise and the Second Cathedral.

Day1: Our trip started with arriving at in Maui around 1:00p on Friday afternoon. After getting our bags and rental car we headed south to Wailea to the Marriott Resort & Spa where we were treated a great suite with two balconies over looking the ocean. During the afternoon we headed just south of Wailea to the Lava Shores at Ahihi Bay. The setting was great for pictures, but the lighting due to the large cloud lingering above us made capturing the shot against the bright ocean damn near impossible. After enuring the rough roads out to the park, we headed back to teh resort to tour the beach and lounge at the salt-water pool. Later that evening we headed up into the shops at Wailea at ate at the Cheeseburger in Paradise, which was surprisingly good considering how touristy it appeared.

Day 2: Taking an opportunity to sleep in a bit, which means we awoke around 6:00a because that it is 9:00a PST, we headed over to the Longhi’s Restaurant in the same shops from the night before. All I have to say was the french toast good, the potatoes good, the juice good! We didn’t have to check-out until 11:00a, and when you wake up at 6:00a that leaves you plenty of time for snorkeling. Natalie and I heading down to the point and got in a good 90 minutes of swimming before having to head back. We checked out of the hotel and headed back to OGG to pick up Dan, Sarah, and Katie as they were set to arrive soon.

Day 3: Spend most of the day chilling at the resort or diving.

Day 4:

• порно бабы

Starting the morning by grabbing some more tanks and heading to Mala Ramp for one of the most amazing dives we have ever gone on. We were treated to sharks, turtles, noodle people, and more fish than I could possibly keep track of. Later that day we toured the town, and ate once again at Cheeseburger. That night we ended up playing one of the most die-head games of Gloom ever! Might have gone better if it was not for all the Mai Tais, thanks Dan!

Day 5: Decided to head back to Wailea for the day to do some shopping and of course more diving. Some of the wet weather was coming down from the North Shore, so it was nice to escape a bit to the better weather of the South (well as south as you can get on a small island). We wrapped up the day with a 2 1/2 hour whale watching trip that was incredible. We witnessed a group of males competing for a single female, who herself was with a young calf. Seemed like the female was generally uninterested in the males, but they were quite content to beat themselves up over her.

Day 6: Oh yeah, boat dive day!!!! This year we took a boat dive to Lanai, despite all the warnings about it being a very rough ride. It was a bit rough, but really nothing to be concerned over. We started the dive at Nowhere site which was a massive reef formation just 40 feet down. It featured a few little crevasses and an abundance of life. Our second dive was at the 2nd Cathedral which is a huge rock formation, allowed for some extensive cavern diving. The caverns were home to many fishes, and reef formations.

Day 7: The road to Haha. . .was very wet. The bad weather finally stopped teasing us and went for all its glory. The trip was quite wet, ask Dan. But nonetheless we toured a few falls, and made it to Hana only to discover that there really were no good restaurants there. Since some people we dying of hunger, we had to head but on the mostly-single-lane road to town. This was too bad, Hana was quite beautiful despite the weather, I did wish we could have spent more time there.

Day 8: Time to head home. If we weren’t depressed enough about that, we decided to head to our favorite kabob place only to find out that they were closing up shop due to the economy. Hell of a way to end!

The entire album can be viewed here (login required):

http://www.andyandnataliepics.com/v/andyphoto/maui2009/

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A few months ago our friends Dan and Sarah bought a cabin up in the woods as a great weekend getaway and skiing midway point. Only one problem existed: the wood shed was a rotten piece of sh**!

горячие сексуальные девочки

Last weekend, they asked us to come up and give them a hand building out a new one. Aside from the constraints that the Forest Service imposes, the designed shed turned out pretty well. We were only able to participate on Saturday and Sunday, which means Dan is probably working like crazy over the next few days!

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Okay, so it has been a little while. . .maybe a long while. Natalie and I just got back from Origins 2009 in Columbus, OH last weekend and in short we had a great time! For those who are unfamiliar with Origins, it is a gaming fair every year that offers you the opportunity to match wits and strategies with your friends.

Origins is not a super-LAN party, but a everything-except-computers gaming fair. This was our chance to hook up with the east-coast friends who will not be able to see at Dragon*Con this year (thank you economy). We played a whole assortment of games including “Arkham Horror“, “Pandemic“, “Spirit of the Century“, and “The 3 Commandments”.

On Friday, my goal was simple: depart customer’s site in St. Louis travel to Columbus. Of course, American Airlines went out of their way to make that as difficult as possible. Departed STL for ORD with no problems or delays, however once I got in ORD I was under a false-sense of comfort with my flight was on-time. Once on the plane already to go, the captain announced that we were going to be held to allow 20 folks arriving on a late international flight make the connection. That’s cool if you are like 10 minutes or so late, but not on the order of 90 minutes! The sad part was that there were 20+ people up on the standby list for that flight and more waiting for the next flight, AA could have easily filled the sits. And much to my misfortune the 20 people we were waiting for were middle-schoolers returning from a European trip.Wish airlines extended me the same courtesies when I was running late.

Anyway, finally arrived in Columbus and headed over to the Crowne Plaza to meet up with everyone. Most of our friends were quite drained from lengthy drives to get to Columbus. We all agreed that beer was a cure for this night.

Early Saturday morning, Natalie and I set out on our first quest: locate Starbucks! After some much needed caffeine was acquired, we headed back to the convention center and joined up with everyone else. The first game was “Spirit of the Century“, which I was not able to join since we had too many people already. No matter, I am really not into games that do not have a board or screen, but let me tell you it was damn entertaining to watch. After a short lunch at the North Market, we headed back to play “Arkham Horror” for the first time. Well second, sort of. We tried previously, but after spending 2 hours to setup the game and even longer to try to understand how to play, we kinda gave up. Needless to say, playing with experienced players was extremely fun! Later that evening with headed over to a friend of Mur Lafferty for a BBQ and game of “Pandemic“. “Pandemic” is one of those games that does not take a lot of instruction, but a fair amount of strategy and team cooperation. After the BBQ we headed back to the convention center to swing by the boardroom with John and Laura to get our free game. We ended up with “The 3 Commandments” which at first looked to rank fairly high on the suck-meter. But after playing a few rounds it ended up being one of those very entertaining games that would do well at a party (better if drinks are served).

Not-so-early on Sunday morning, we met up with everyone at Max & Erma’s restaurant for a breakfast. Some of the group had to depart so afterwards, others had the opportunity to hang around for a bit. Finally around noon most everyone had to leave after visiting the Dealer’s room one last time. Natalie and I headed back up to the boardroom to play a round of “The Red Dragon Inn“, which in my opinion was not quite worth the hype (although Gog is awesome). After playing enough games to last a few months, we headed over to Comfest which happened to running that weekend and it was only a few blocks away. Both of us were quite hungry but this point so we treated ourselves to some great BBQ, visited some of the art booths, and could not avoid the people-watching (google Comfest you will understand). After Comfest, we drove over to the Columbus Zoo for the afternoon. Now the Columbus Zoo is like half-zoo and half-amusement park. We definitely regretted not bring our swimsuits, but had a great time nonetheless. The night was topped off with a visit to Schmidt’s German restaurant for dinner which included: 1L of Warsteiner, Sauerbraten, German potato salad, chocolate cream puff, and fudge. Oh yeah!

Finally, Monday morning we left the hotel and headed for home. Of course, that was not a easy as that sounded either. Thanks to the idiocy of Expedia, I couldn’t just adjust one segment of my flight for business, I had to cancel it out and then start over. Of course though we you start over you can’t get the same flight because it is full (yes even with my cancellation, the Expedia rep thought this was ridiculous as well). Needless to say, Natalie and I could not travel together the whole way back. But all was well, we had an event-less return to Portland.

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While the last episode of BSG will remain a controversy forever, love it or hate it, you probably found that having everything revealed in the last eight episodes or so was quite a bit to digest. I found a link to this picture on Twitter, and it helps sum up the history quite well.

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