Got to spend Christmas in Cleveland with the family, which was a trip long overdue – been over 2 years since I’ve been back.  So great to see everyone and have a chance to hang out.  Any family reading this, I had a blast and you guys are great!  Do me a favor and hit the guestbook to let me know you’ve been here, eh?

Pictures from the trip have been uploaded to the gallery, here .

So, another year has passed, and for all the craziness, job changes, moves, and all the fun, I’m pretty much right back where I started.  I’m good with that though, right where I want to be.  All things in their right place!

So I guess my token new years resolution will be to actually keep the site a bit more up to date.  Been sorting through pictures, so hopefully more updates to the gallery coming in the near future.

Here’s to a great ‘08!

So I’d like some way to take that important data, and replicate it off site.

I’ve been mulling the thought of using my hosting provider as off-site storage space, but hadn’t come up with an easy and reliable way to do it. Then I changed providers (now using dreamhost) and I now have full shell access to my host. This means I can rsync the entire set of my data to my web host and store it there.

While doing a bit of reading on rsync, I came across this post detailing setting up a Mac to use rsync with DreamHost. Exactly what I’m looking to do, except I need to do it from windows.

I also came across an application called DeltaCopy which is basically a windows friendly wrapper for rsync that doesn’t require cygwin libraries or anything.

So, the plan is to organize all my data so its’ easily backed up, then setup rsync to my dreamhost account using DeltaCopy from my home server.

After I get all that going, I may add on a web-enabled file manager to access the data with. We’ll see.

More to come…..

aaaaaaand, a test of dropping a g2 image into a post….

edit: hmmm, the embedding isn’t working either if not logged in, or if the album is hidden, not sure which. album now publicly visible, we’ll see what happens.

edit2: album can’t be hidden, visible now as guest.  now to figure out how to make the lightbox show the resized image instead of the full one.

Few things to clean up (css tweaks, gallery embedded urls, theme cleanup, etc), but everything looks good so far.

Also need to find some sort of file management app to run…methinks this would be great for offsite storage of all my important datas….

I’m back in Albuquerque…Back at DOE… Everything back in it’s proper place, I think.  Well, at least I’ve got the city right finally.  Not sure how I’m feeling at the moment about being back at DOE though.  If nothing else, it’s a paycheck, and it got me back here swiftly, so is all good for now.

Managed to find myself a gorgeous house in Uptown, 3 blocks from Sheila and 1 block from Sarah.  Pic’s in the gallery, and eventually linked from this post when I get the embedded gallery URL’s straightened out.

I guess that’s new too – new hosting provider, new overhaul on website.  Latest ver’s of WP and G2, and everything seems to be running smoothly.

New hosting provider is Dreamhost , who are just absolutely fantastic.  Tons of disk, tons of bandwidth, unlimited email, unlimited domains, and full shell access to my vhost.  Very very happy with Dreamhost so far.

And I think that’s it for now.  Not that anyone actually reads this crap, but there should be more useless mutterings in the near future as things get cleaned up and I swap over DNS to the new provider.

I suppose a quick summary of goings on is in order…Since I last wrote, the following has taken place:

-I moved to Colorado Springs
-I worked for HP’s hosted messaging (Exchange) division on incident response for 6 mo’s
-I quit HP about a half hour before I was to be laid off
-I’m currently working on contract for the US Olympic Committee
-I’ve built a new data center for USOC and implemented a new EMC Celerra NS80 and an IBM BladeCenter H Chassis (pictures here)
-I’ve done tons of work on my HTPC.  Now have HTPC case, surround sound, 47″ LCD, OTA ATSC, and HD-DVD drive
-I skied alot this winter
-I went snowmobiling this winter
-I almost took Ben’s head off whilst golfing with him this last weekend (sorry Ben!)
-Some bastard broke into my car this last weekend and stole my iPod.  Had to drive back to CoS from Abq with no music! fuckers!
I think that about sum’s it up.

Hopefully some updates coming to the site soon, more pics to upload to the gallery, site/theme re-design in order,  WP upgrades, etc.  Only time will tell I suppose…..

It’s snowing! Snowing I tell you! The beautiful fluffy white is falling in Colorado – enough that people are already out hitting the passes with rock skis.  9″+ so far, and expecting another 12″+ up high over the weekend. Loveland and ABasin have both been blowing snow for the last 3 days, and both getting a nice dump of natural.  Be interesting to see who opens first.  My bet is both will be open by 2nd week of October.

I have been officially searching for employment in Colorado with plans to move as soon as possible.  Unfortunately, it looks like working for my friend at his place of employment isn’t going to work out – HR playing games, politics abound, etc, etc.  That would be my preference, but what’re ya gunna do?  I had an interview this past Friday for a fairly intriguing and very well paying contract position in CoSpgs, working on a massive WITO messaging project – something like 76k users, many sites, tons of consolodation, etc, etc.  Interview went well, and I should hear back by Wed of next week what the deal is.  Should I get an offer, the next bout of excitement will be trying to figure out when my start-date will actually be.  Gotta give 2-3 weeks notice, gotta somehow/sometime actually *move* up to CoSpgs and find a house, the job will require some early up-front travel to Detroit for info gathering, ski season will be starting mid to late October, and…..

Sheila and I have just started remodeling the second bathroom.  I’m confident it’ll be ready to lay tile in 2 weeks or less, but it’s just one more thing to add in to the mix.  The walls in this house are plaster, and in this particular bathroom, all around the shower the walls are essentially rotting.  The tile in the shower was replaced by the previous owner as a condition of sale; the reason for this being it was nasty and the walls were rotting.  It was supposed to be cleaned up and fixed.  Well, not only did they do a half-assed sloppy job on the tile, apparantly they just tried to cover up the rotting mess!  As we’re tearing down tile, huge chunks of rotted plaster wall from behind are coming down with it.  Fun!  At least with this project, I actually know what I’m doing, shouldn’t have to wait on help, and can just bust ass and get it done.

Pics of the bathroom remodel here. Obviously no “after” pics yet, but they’ll be there eventually.

I think that’s about it for the moment.  Still need to sit down and actually spend some time w/ the silly blog and clean it up a bit.  Still needs some TLC and some design work.  All in due time I suppose.

So, I started searching for a way to save the streams for later viewing, and I came across this:
Streaming Download Project

It’s a program called (obviously) Streaming Download Project, or SDP. It allows you to give the address of a Windows Media stream (next version should support real/rtsp as well), and save it locally.

Good stuff!

Construction on the site is obviously a bit slowed – I guess it’s fully functional for the moment, but there’s some quirkies in the G2 layout that need to be fixed, and a bit too much meta crap that needs to be pared out of the WP presentation.  Of course, gotta get some photoshop love goin on as well.

I seem to have somehow stumbled upon the darkside, and I’ve become my own worst nightmare – management! ack! I find myself suddenly thrust into the position of Manager, Mission Operations.  It’s been interesting so far, but all it really means in the end is less geeking and exponentially more bullshit to deal with.  And meetings.  Lots of meetings.  Meetings to plan more meetings even.  On the whole, I’m not a very happy camper at the moment.  Oh, but things will change.

On the upside in the world of pointy hair, I just got back from a trip to our site office which is conveniently located in Las Vegas.  First trip out, and had a good time.  Work was lax, mostly meet’n'greet, few meetings, and evenings were spent schmoozing, drinking and gambling.  Not sure I could stomach an actual multi-day vacation to Vegas, w/ nothing to do but spend money on shows/drinks/gambling, but going for business and farting around in the evenings was pretty pleasant.  I’ve learned to play blackjack, and actually did decently well – walked away with $70 in my wallet that wasn’t there when I arrived – not bad for a newbie I’d guess.

We’ve been getting a shit-ton of rain here in the burque, 64% humidity today! The rain is welcome, and certainly helps cool things down in the afternoon/evening.  Hopefully a wet summer will lead to a wet winter – I’d prefer not to repeat last season.

That’s it for now, expect more changes on the way if I ever get off my lazy ass and pull myself away from GuildWars.  =)

In an attempt to cram as much crap as possible, as cleanly as possible, into the limited space I’ve alocated for the embedded gallery, I’m trying to customize the CSS layout of some of the text, objects, doodads, etc. The problem is, the css defining how some of these objects are placed/formatted, isn’t explicitly defined!

It appears that G2 will insert some default values/formatting for stuff that isn’t explicitly defined in a themes’ stylesheet, but I can’t for the life of me figure out where the info is coming from, so I can’t change it. doh!

Ohwell. Instead of continuing to pull out my hair, I’m going to go drink beer, eat pizza, and play Guild Wars instead. =)