A blog from MN about whatever
Population: ~626,000
Became a State: 1959
“Sewards Folly” – purchase of Alaska from Russia: March 30, 1867
Alaskan Flag
Area:
The coolest thing about Alaska (other than its wonderful ~60 degree noontime temperature during the summer?)
Kristin and I spent the last week there 
Denali Park in the background.
Much more coverage to follow.
–Nat
Roommate Camping 2010 was a blast! As always, food was a big part of the action with along with some late night drinks around the campfire. In addition it gave the rest of us an opportunity rally around Travis while he navigates some perilous waters while admiring how well Erin handles being very, very pregnant. Eldora was thoroughly investigated and the Hardin County fair underwhelmed.
Setting up our tents on the RV spots at Pine Lake State Park took some work with a hammer to drive the stakes, but they were nice and level and proved to stay dry on Sunday. Having electricity was nice as we were able to enjoy some tunes, etc. The trees seemed to be dying therefore didn’t provide as much shade as we would have liked, but overall the evening shade was excellent and the proximity to water was very nice. It wasn’t very buggy at all. I’d easily go there again, assuming the same company 
Andy and Erin kicked off the feasting with some excellent grilled chicken breasts along with a foil cooked potato-veggie medley that was very tasty and threatened to overwhelm the tin foil in which it was cooked. Slicing up all of those vegetables must have been time consuming work but they sure tasted good! Friday supper was rounded out with some cantaloupe and watermelon.
The fire that didn't want to start...
Obtaining firewood is one of the activities we men really look take pride in (you know, providing for the womenfolk) and it was adventure this year as well. After throughly ”scouring” the town, it became apparent that our best bet was again to be the first place advertising wood that we had seen right next to the campground. The fellow there proved to be entertaining with his lack of mathematical prowess – as he was selling wood “by the piece” we elected for the $10 for 15 deal. After he had loaded “five or seven” pieces into the trunk, Chris wisely took action and finished counting and loading the car. We then drank into the night and enjoyed some smores and enormous marshmallows. Andy and Chris collectively ruled the bean bag toss.
The next morning featured showers in the somewhat creepy bathrooms – you had to pull the cord down in order for the shower to function. It was OK that the water was lukewarm as the day developed to be clear, hot and humid. We walked as a group from the campground to the beach area on the park path and then came back to the camp via the road… by the time we got back we were all craving some shade. Chris and Jessica treated us to some expertly prepared brats, polish sausage, fruit, baked beans and grilled potatoes and veggies. After lunch we headed on into town to explore and enjoy the Hardin County fair and find some ice cream.
After experiencing some user error with the GPS that would have taken across the state in pursuit of delicious ice cream, we decided to head to the fair. It was the standard county fair, with a 4-H building sporting prodigious amounts of blue and purple ribbons and some small animal barns. After watching a couple of ~1500 pound steers duke it out for a trophy we wandered a bit more. We checked out some more animals, Chris picked out a John Deere, Jessica got some cotton candy and we headed out.
We went to a little local place called the Ice Cream Station where lack of adequate staffing had us eating our reasonably priced treats in two shifts. En-route to the Ice Cream Station, the caravan had discovered the Eldora Aquatic Center which required a trip to “Pami a” for Travis for a swim suit while everyone else headed back with some rapidly melting ice reinforcements. The water slides, diving boards and other little kids at the pool provided for hours of enjoyment and I think was one of the highlights of the trip. A couple hours of discounted swimming later, it was back for steaks, potatoes and wine by Team Juchems. The night had cooled a bit and it was nearly dark by the time supper had ended. Wood wisely purchased earlier at Fareway lit the night as old memories were shared, deep matters discussed and coolers went from low to empty. I should have insisted on trying one of those Bud Light Wheats
Sunday morning came to fast as we awoke to the sound of engines revving as many of the RV’s packed it up and headed out following a short rain that ensured we would all have to pack our tents wet. Kristin and took that opportunity to have some more “dialog” at home as we took the tent out for drying 
Burgers with bacon and pasta salad rounded out lunch as we all packed our vehicles back up and said our goodbyes. The weekend went by way to fast but I loved every minute of it. Well, most of it, except for the few moments when I had convinced myself that I had ruined the steaks… 
Travis, it was so great that despite all that was going on in your life we were able to spirit you away and get you smiling, joking and relaxing. Know that we all love you and can be counted on anytime.
Erin and Andy, may your entire parenting experience go so well as the first eight months have gone! It was so great that you could be with us and show us that pregnant ladies are people too – water slides and all
I can’t wait for next year. It won’t be too far north, I promise.
–Nat
Today Ars Technica posted a couple great articles about broadband in the United States, one covering how communities are stepping up and providing their own high speed access while the other covered the new Broadband Plan set before congress. What interests me most is the support for broadband for all of the U.S., including rural areas. The FCC recently proposed a plan that would set the goal of all households receiving a minimum of 4mbps internet at a reasonable price by 2020 – a little above the typical DSL speed of 3mbps and about 80 times faster than 56k dial up. To put this into perspective, that would equate to download speeds of about 500KB per second or the ability to stream Netflix in high quality while still doing some low impact web surfing. When you consider the number of internet connected homes that have more than one concurrent internet user, it is easy to imagine that this is constraining. On the other hand, the number of homes and users connected to the internet via dial up and satellite that technologies such as flash and streaming video have rendered quite obsolete it is obvious that this is a great step in the right direction. The plan also has a goal of 100mbps in 100 million homes by 2020 as well in urban areas.
What is troubling, however is how far behind the rest of the developed world we are in internet access. Given that the information age is here and the very competitiveness of our schools and workforce relies the internet and related services it is difficult to understand how we are not more ambitious. That is where the Municipality driven broadband speeds shine as a great example. In the article linked above, it is noted how the area around the Wisconsin Dells has urban internet hosted by the city that features two tiers; 10mbps for $50 per month and 5mbps for $40. Using federal grant money and private investment, they are going to push this service to all of their users via fiber optics, including those far out in the rural areas that currently only have access to dial up or satellite. The community feels that this will allow them to sustain a thriving rural atmosphere that doesn’t make moving into town for internet required to work remotely or take classes online necessary.
Some might think this is a waste of federal tax funds, but for all the projects we endeavor on with our federal funds this one not only delivers value to constituents but enables our country to continue its rural heritage and remain relevant in an ever increasingly connected world. I am really thankful that Butler-Bremer offered DSL to the farm when I was there as I feel it was critical to my development as an IT professional, hopefully more rural towns will follow suit.
I mean, what is life without You Tube? Empty!
–Nat
Yep, those are all guns... and the suit is her hair, which she uses to summon giant, boss eating demons. No joke.
Every once in a while you find something that is just unexpectedly interesting and fun. A long while back , Penny Arcade mentioned a game they were super stoked about, Bayonetta. I mentally bookmarked it and went about with my life, per the usual. Fast forward a few months, and I had the opportunity to not only get some solid gaming time in, which is somewhat abnormal, but also some quality xbox 360 gaming time.
So off to Metacritic I went, very sure there would be many games I would want. Well, it seems that the 360 has many shooters which rate highly like Halo 3 but I only play those games with a mouse and keyboard. Its also fair to say that Grand Theft Auto games are exactly my cup of tea. Other games like Bioshock and Fall Out3 I have already played on PC. Which leaves… action adventure games? Tops was this Bayonetta game, so off I went to a local Gamestop and traded in some games I was never going to play again (Sonic? Ugh!) and picked it up used for $35.
What a great purchase! I put a solid ten hours or so in over the weekend, and they were all awesome. I enjoyed fighting games like Soul Calibur and this is like a fusion of that and Mario Galaxy – levels that don’t always make sense and crazy combo physical combat with plenty of blood and sexual references thrown in. Even better is that the game is still plugging along even after that much play time with several more chapters to be completed. Its one of those games where you tell yourself “one more chapter” and an hour and a half later you are telling yourself the same thing.
Watch this YouTube trailer – that pop music is the *actual* game music. The boss battles are their own levels as the bosses take up nearly the whole screen. There is a ton of stuff to collect and challenge levels sprinkled throughout. This review really sums it up for me – a big plus is that it showcases the 360 hardware by running great and not slowing down. I enabled vsync to get rid of the screen tearing on my ghetto LCD monitor setup.
Some things about the game annoy me. The insta-death push button events that punish you (and your level score) with death and the choice to continue are not are irritating. Being able to replay previous chapters to earn better scores or farm more crafting components both help to overcome this annoyance.
All that said, are there more games like this lurking out there? Anything you’ve played in the last couple years or so that just shouldn’t be missed?
–Nat
Having more and more digital “stuff” that’s somewhat important to retain, I’ve started looking at some solutions. Already, we put all of our “important” files on our Windows Home Server because it has disk redundancy and is available from anywhere internet is accessible. Our pictures, tax information, etc. is all stored electronically and it is important that it be protected. The question then becomes how data is protected from there.
What are we protecting against is probably the first and most important item to detail. What could happen?
After that, we have to decide how much data loss would be acceptable. If we could potentially lose thirty days worth of data, is that reasonable? One day? One hour? One year?
Tiered backups is also something that has to be considered. Some data, like important documents, likely needs to be more secured and backed up more often than the photo collection. The photo collection likely needs to be backed up more often and securely than the TV show collection, etc.
Some strategies will come in follow up posts…
–Nat
Craigslist is an interesting place. I compare it to the John Deere swapsheet, for those of you who might be familiar with that. Its a place to find treasure for the price of junk, junk for the price of treasure and everything in between. It can be critical that you move quickly or take advantage of ambiguous wording while at the same time seemingly reasonable deals show up week after week. Kristin and I have sold more than we have purchased on Craigslist on the whole of it which I count as a good thing.
For Sale
Yesterday I put up an ad for some paintball gear with a price I thought would encourage a quick purchase, as it seems you either price it right or sit on it. Turns out that my price, $20, was way too low. I had a taker about seven minutes after the posting went live, which should have clued me in. I agreed to that and I had a deluge of other people wanting to buy it, ranging from the typical “hay u want ur gun” one liners to very eloquent and polite offers up to $50 for it. I agreed to sell it to some guy from clear across the cities for $20 and he was going to pick it up at 9:00 PM. It’s 9:15 now and I am hoping he doesn’t show so I can move on down the line to the guy that is going to give me an xbox 360 controller and $20 cash.
I’ve got some wheels for sale too, but they haven’t been quite as popular…
–Nat
This isn’t going to interest most folks who are reading my blog. I need to get this written out though, because some guy was looking for Lab Manager feedback and couldn’t find constructive criticism. Here is mine, and I am sure Google will index it.
As of 4.01, VMware vCenter Lab Manager has its uses, but it has huge gaps:
1) Total lack of storage resource monitoring tools/information that would be useful. You can’t export storage usage, linked clone tree structures, etc. If you aren’t familiar with CoW disks, linked clone chains, etc. you soon will be and you’ll be wondering about this in a big way when you need to constantly buy huge chunks of SAN disk with little hard data.
2)No exisitng backup solutions. Want to back up your library entries? Enjoy manually exporting them and hitting them one by one. SAN replication IS NOT a backup mechanism, folks. Backup is to tape or similar.
3)Very little in the way of customization. We have users that constantly fill up LUNS and IP pools when they have open space in other LUNS and pools because they just use the defaults. We’d like to set the default to blank in many cases, but that isn’t available.
4)Redploying VM’s nets them a new IP. This is a huge issue at times if you have IP sensitive configurations, especially when dealing with fencing.
5)Active Directory is a mess with fenced VMs, etc. Not really Lab Managers fault, but that’s the state of things.
6)Scalability. Using host spanning networks you are limited to 512 distributed switch port groups that each fenced configuration uses. In large deployments, you are likely to collide with this, necessatating another vCenter/Lab Manager instance and fragmentation of resources.
7)Maitenance issues. Maitenance Mode even with host transport networks enabled is borked because of the little VM that Lab Manager locks to each host. This is fairly ridiculous and convulutes what should be a very straight forward process.
8)Get ready to work some enourmous LUN sizes vs what you are likely used to. We have 2TB FC Luns and the only one we extended to 4TB is having locking issues, etc. NFS is the way you need to go.
9)Enjoy adding another Server 2003 instance to your infrastructure, because 2008 isn’t supported as an host OS for the Lab Manager services. Oh yeah, all your important data is located in a little SQL express database on that server too. This is Enterprise software, right?
THE biggest issue I have with Lab Manager is the fact that Lab Manager accesses the ESX servers directly. Do us all a favor and use vCenter as an abstraction layer so we can actually see what the crap is going on and rely on a proven set of administration tools. Ideally Lab Manager would be a plugin and wouldn’t be harboring its own database, etc.
Bottom line is that you need to be sure you have the right needs for Lab Manager to be useful.
Original Thread:
http://communities.vmware.com/
–Nat
The Chevelle lives! Here are some pictures of it looking a lot more like a car than it has in recent memory…
There will be more updates in the not too distant future. Exciting
–Nat
So awesome.
Shirt.woot.com has some fantastic artwork. The problem is, who can wear these t-shirts all the time? They fit me like crap, too, with there “athletic” sizing. How many people buying t-shirts online really conform to an “athletic” sizing model? :) To that end, we need posters of these awesome cultural statements. Join me in bombarding them with emails so we can display this sort of things pinned to our cube walls or framed in our family rooms. You know you want to.
I already sent my email. Send yours to: Woot Member Services <service@woot.com> Some person actually wrote me a response saying they were too little as business to handle that but it was something they might consider. If they get enough emails, maybe they will consider it right now…
–Nat
According to Edmunds the Northstar V8 found in many Cadillac models will be done in July, finished. I remember fondly the two STS sedans my parents owned. They both had the optional, powered up 4.6 Liter engines and while they seemed to drink some oil they were a joy to put your foot into. As gracefully as any engine I have had the privilege to run hard it would pull to redline at some 6,000 RPM and then slip into the next gear, pulling you forward to speeds that were well in excess of the speed limit. Those were a nice pair of cars.
What I think is most intersting is that they are almost the same engines being discontinued today. That picture, on the left? That was available in 1995 and they still sell it in $50.000 luxury cars today. Evidently there was a replacement, but the whole GM going under and being baled out shelved it.
Perhaps the funny thing is that GM has so many good engines today they don’t even need it. With the advanced V6 engines available like the 300HP+, 30MPG+ one in the new Camaro and the good ol’ super-evolved (~400HP, upper 20′s MPG) small block V8 from the Corvette GM has the gamut of power trains locked up without the Northstar. GM can certainly make some excellent engines, in this case, too many.
It is intersting that for just a couple grand more when I bought the ‘stang I could have had a SVT with its Northstar clone, a DOHC 4.6L hand assembled V8 with nearly the same power ratings and power band of the GM equivalent. Give the GT some extra love in July Dad, its SOHC 4.6L is as close to a Northstar as we are going to be for a while
–Nat
If you want to see my LinkedIn profile, click on this button:
