The whole thing with balance I am trying to find with the jump between the 8 to 5 grind and TN/FH is tough, not that it isn’t possible, it’s just a change in mindset, as well as making sure to take a break, relax, breathe, you know that sort of thing - and tonight a much needed break was had, a game of Catan, 2 Nephews, a Niece, 2 friends and 1 Solomon.
Such a beautiful baby, got to hold him for a little bit, he’s got some good muscles already pushing around as he laid across my chest more or less as I held him on the couch - just honored to get to meet him, hang out with the Poon’s - my buddy Lanie was there, as well as Blaine and Cameron, apparently Gavin had some sort of prior “thing” with a certain “lady” friend, geeze, what’s so special about a lady friend when you have cool people playing Catan? he was missed, but it was a fun evening, got to even give a piggy back ride, so I mean that alone sum’d up the evening.
It was a great break, and I have actually taken most of the night off, I do have some spot work here to do shortly with some domain renewals, cancelations, and I am also looking to move forward on some alternative email options for both FH/TN that are just standard POP3/IMAP (no fancy Exchange) but simple alternatives and see if I can’t package it with standard accounts over time and absorb the cost in and offer email managed off server, vs. on server, would let folks store more on box - but before I go into business mode, I want to find a snack, and relax a bit more, as tomorrow is Friday, which means every little project people forgot, will hit my desk!
Speaking of work though, the backup server is as such:
ABIT IP35 Pro (Fancy)
Intel Core 2 Duo (E6420) 2.13ghz (Conroe)
4 GB GeIL Ram (2 x 2GB sticks)
5 x Maxtor 500GB SATAII Drives (4 in RAID5 - other will be primary OS aka nothing critical for backups)
4 HotSwap Enclosures for the Drives
Promise FastTrak PCI SATAII Controller (mixed feelings, but some positive reports)
750W Power Supply
Other Assorted Goodies: ie. cdrom, floppy, Radeon X700
A nice little rig, but more I read about the promise card the more mixed I feel about it - but we’ll see how it goes probably Tuesday at this point since most stuff is shipping from CA, so it’ll be here probably Monday/Tuesday.
Anywhoo - sleep is nearing, so work must be done, I’ll write more tomorrow after bowling! Night folks!
Well I beat my last 2 years time in making a plan for my birthday! Hooray! This morning I sent out word of the gathering this evening - Denny’s is the place, may seem odd, but its last minute, mid-week, and I know many folks will be maybes at some point, but already we have 4 for sure, and some folks as maybes - the real-deal is Saturday at Ming, in what looks to be sunshine and lovely weather - so one step at a time.
Today I got pictures of Mr. Solomon Poon, good looking baby! So that brightened my morning after surviving a marketing meeting… I and about 3 other people nearly fell asleep at the meeting, it was hilarious, but all in all today has been a good day, I am hoping to squeeze in some private work here for a bit, I hate my auth scheme for EE - so I am going to do a quick swap and see if the new idea I have in mind works, I just backed up the code so going to give it a whirl.
All in all though for 4 days straight here at the new job, it’s going well, things are smoothing out, even got a few folks thanking me for my hard work, just a lot of little things I am trying to iron out, Charlie did some good work out here, but as he said I am a salesman, and a few things I have sold them on are taking hold, Google Apps vs. Arrival (hooray!) and I put in for a quote for on a entry level dell server with 1TB of storage/no-os/2gb ram/mid-range drives - so I may have a big dell order, who knows maybe they’ll hook me up with a dell XPS laptop ah a man can dream can’t he!
Anywhoo! Off to code, if anyone would like to come out to Denny’s to celebrate with us, 7:30pm @ Weedpatch, buzz my cell so I know how many seats to ask for, you know that place get’s packed out! More later!
A quick entry before I head out to hear my dad preach - at 11:30am on Feb. 23 (5 days shy of my birthday!) Mr. Solomon Poon was born! The final details as we knew he had been born, but no specs. are 8lbs 9oz, 21 inches tall! Val and Solomon are doing fine, healthy and good - hopefully some pictures to follow (Dan, my camera is at your disposal if you need it!) but BIG congrats to my good friends in their wonderful new bundle of joy!
So here we are, Friday. A day of things it seems, a migration of email, that has some folks worried, no no not TN/FH related, but rather MLS - my 8 to 5 job has been having issues with the local ISP when it comes to email thus we looked at options and are going to Google Apps, so tonight the MX rolls out, and we switch over and online - a piece of cake really, tomorrow I’ll come in for maybe an hour or two and setup a secondary email account for them to check. Should keep things rolling smoothly, then in a week we can clear the old one and use only the new one.
Now of course what Friday wouldn’t be complete without a baby! Dan and Val are having their first, and the plan was to induce today so I hope to hear something more on baby status here soon, but I may call the Gavin and see if he can give me the skinny here in an hour or so since he has a cell phone, and like any good teenager it’s always on but I am looking forward to meeting the latest member of the Poon family!
So far this week though has been good, some fun challenges, but I get tired around Wed. and can’t sleep well, thursday drags on and on, then here I am whammo - Friday, only 3 hours under my belt, but strangely I am operating pretty fair (at least I think so) - but things are moving forward, I’ll probably post something more complete later tonight or tomorrow, but for now I am going to get back to it, reading Postini docs to see the best way to deploy.
Have a great Friday folks, thanks for the continued prayers and the occasional check up - I appreciate it!
I have a amazing core group of friends, they are more like family to me, they are supportive, good company, and always a open ear, tonight we tried to get as many of us together, granted I know some folks Monday is not a good night, but the Foster’s were in town but leaving at 5, the Poon’s had a due date for baby, and yet somehow from a lunch with Matt we got ourselves together at Cindy’s for some grub, good company, and Uncle Chuck the Human Jungle Gym.
It was a good day overall, got some more stuff cleaned up in the office, organized a bit, got a laptop finalized and ready to go, all in all it was pretty nice - throw in the lunch and the dinner - a great time, and while I am exhausted and then some I would do it again in a heart beat - we sat, we ate, we talked, I played with Ethan, Evan and Carlie - even Jake had some fun with Evan, it was a good day that just had some really great high points to it, I hope the rest of the week has good stuff in it like this! If only everyone could of made it, Scott had plans already, and some folks have class on Monday’s so just not possible, but were going to setup something big and fun soon.
Anywhoo - busy week, got a copy of EE on the laptop, so I can work on it on the mac during the dead time, also have a few assorted things I am working on with FH/TN, and of course MLS has the Google Apps migration this week, I need to get the corp. card and get it paid for, as well as a few other purchases I need to make for building a small server to test a backup system, so lots to do! But for now I am going to zone a little to some TV, and then probably try to crash out early. Sleep will soon become my friend… I hope. Night folks! Thanks for the continued prayers!
So tonight is it. The big move (just started). Granted it’s not 100% done, but the last move is mainly of FH/TN websites, so that’ll go Tuesday at the latest - mainly want to keep it in one place till after a day or two of tickets is taken care of, but Thursday I’ll be requesting the other servers be shut down - which still leaves me with a bill, but something manageable, until I can relocate that final server - then I can be completely off the old provider.
It’s busy lately it seems, we met up at 9pm last night to see a old friend, however we never heard back that’d he was coming, but we figured - never hurts to try - so instead we had a fun dinner, and I had a nice chat with Jacob, it was a fun evening, I finished it up with some more relaxing - almost too relaxed for tonight, but I am hoping some moving around here at 6:30pm tonight will help wake me up a bit - but the move seems like it should be pretty straight forward, just have to move data, upgrade DNS, and only thing I can see as a “bad” thing is having to re-compile PHP4 on some servers, as I am sure there are some issues I’d rather simply not deal with right now, so I’d be going PHP4 on maybe 2 servers tops.
Got some more work today it seems, still waiting to hear back from EE on the final bits of it, I need to get RM up and online this weekend too - had hoped to get it last Monday, but I just have been so beat from these moves, thankfully this is the last weekend, then I may have a standard 9-5 so a semi-normal sleep schedule steady pay checks, rebuild my savings, get an apartment, build a time-machine, etc. etc. - so preparing for some big changes.
Just got in from a fun evening with the guys, it was pretty fun, had a good meal, some painful GH3, some ice cream from ColdStone - a good relaxing fun to lead into server migrations - so thus I am sitting here with the iPod crankin my car playlist, going to code some between packaging accounts - maybe sneak in a nap later… time will tell Prayers are appreciated! Oh and on my Grandma, they put a shunt in one valve and the meds had helped the other - so she’s going to get to go home on Sunday it looks like! Thanks for the prayers!
More later! Off I go to get this migration rolling!
An amazing day thus far (oh it’s not over yet!) - so far it’s just been a major blessing, got to hang out with my pseudo daughter lol - aka the Foster’s daughter Carlie who’s a sweetie and since we both have red-hair were part of the redhead family, so we hung out today, same with Ethan and Evan occasionally coo’d at me - tasty ice cream, snagged a Chocolate Shake with Malt and PeanutButter! Delish!
After that, I went to dinner, mainly to sit and visit, not so much to eat, but it was fun, got to chat with Matt, his Dad, and play with Evan and help Carlie eat her fries (okay okay, I ate one of the pizza pieces too) - but it was fun, and sad to see them go, but I think my plan will be to fix up their computer and take it up to them one day, get out of dodge for a while, and get a good visit in
Well I got a curious email from a customer with a screen shot which told me this:
Failure on Email servers - so I explored it a bit more, the cause? Firewall. LOL - so many new anti-spam and backscatter spam RBL and Firewall rules in place, it fails that test on DNS Stuff, sure enough, anything on the new server reports this, but the awesome thing is how much spam this is blocking, so much stuff gets hits from RBL’s and such - RBL = Real Time Black List - I am still looking at the ASSP solutions for cPanel, I like the fact that customers can work to train things, so going to setup a cPanel box after everything is off the old servers and migrated over, once things are happy - then I am going to setup a dev box, set d4t on it, and do some email testing with ASSP.
Anywhoo - the night is young! Have to draft up a email to TN customers/friends and a few servers I am moving this next weekend, each has a separate line, so it shouldn’t be so bad one night should do it, but if not, I’ll have a secondary plan in place, going to move Business then too - this way I can test the PHP5/MySQL5 of their custom coding and ensure it works - but tonight, mindless fun awaits, maybe Denny’s? LOL time will tell. More later.
he was missed, but it was a fun evening, got to even give a piggy back ride, so I mean that alone sum’d up the evening.
