2021-12-06 | #Geekyness #Repair
This has been a challenging school year. My son not only had to go from Elementary school, to fully remote during the COVID lockdown, then all of a sudden to middle school in full swing. To say he “greatly dislikes” middle school is an understatement. He struggles with the material, but, during the fully remote learning environment he really had some at home advantages. Most notably, he was able to use his Desktop PC for school.
2021-03-11 | #Geekyness #Logging #UNIX
Dashboard DISCLAIMER: I work for New Relic (at the time of this post). I am not being paid or asked to write this, my blog is my own personal thoughts and experiences. I set up a personal account to use New Relic for FREE, with one goal in mind: migrate from Papertrail to NR Logs. Why? I work there and I wanted to dog food a specific aspect of New Relic’s Logging product: TCP syslog
2020-09-12 | #Home Projects
Some things I keep lying to myself about; things I promise to myself I will never do again. Mostly things like moving furniture or large home projects. However, I must be a glutton for punishment (or I like saving thousands of dollars) because here I am again installing pergo flooring. Since this is my third home, and it was built new, you would think I/we would have learned our lesson by now.
2020-06-02 | #weight lifting
Since March, our school district has converted over to a remote learning platform. This is by far the most interesting experience we have go through with our two kids and their school work. Some of the benefits are they get to manage their work like you would in the real world. They can both work on their projects at any time of the day, any day of the week. Sometimes we’ll help Owen knock out the majority of his school work during the weekend.
2020-04-12 | #Chrony #Geekyness #GPS #NTP #RaspberryPi
simple munin metrics I use two raspberry pi’s as my home’s silent and invisible infrastructure. No one in the house can tell you what they do. One could say they serve no real purpose, as my little Ubiquiti router can actually do the majority of what I run on these two micro space heaters. Their real purpose is to scratch an itch at a very low price point Currently, infra-1 and infra-2 are:
2020-03-11
First, here is a link to a blog post that was created based on a talk Kat Dober and I did at our companies product offsite: How to Manage Remote Engineering Teams So, if you want a TL;DR there it is. I have worked at New Relic for 3 1/2 years now. When I first interviewed and joined, the work culture was strongly based on co-locating engineers. Even the office setup was geared towards this environment as it highly encouraged spontaneous collaboration and flexible meeting spaces.
2020-02-18 | #Geekyness #IRIX #Nostalgia #Retro #SGI #Silicon Graphics
Last year, I found an Indigo2 on ebay, had some fun cleaning it up and putting it in operation. I was a little sad that the used Octane market has brought them up in price, and, the current set of community built IRIX packages are not well maintained on the MIPS3 architecture. After some patient eBay trawling, I came across a “Samsung Octane” for $220 USD. It was listed without a hard drive and powered on, but nothing else.
2020-01-30 | #DHCP #FreeBSD #Geekyness #Work
Introduction I started a little home infrastructure project a year. It was mostly because I really wanted to check out ISC’s new DHCP server, kea. Primarily because it is API driven, and the configuration files are in JSON. At work, I am on a team that is in charge of a few thousand servers all colocated in 4 datacenters across Chicago. For the longest time we have managed to keep those servers auto-registering and pxe booting with 2 VM’s running CentOS and ISC’s DHCPD server.
2020-01-08 | #Family
A lot happens in 10 years. I have: Lived in 7 different cities Antioch Santa Cruz Felton Ben Lomond Boulder Creek Washougal Camas Worked at 4 different companies LLNL Bay Photo Lab Stanford New Relic Visited the emergency room 3 times Said goodbye to 3 wonderful pets, all of them broke my heart Taught two kids to ride a bike Taught one kid to DRIVE Read 97 eBooks Read countless comic books Got 2 tattoos Gained ~50 glorious pounds Joined the “1000 lbs club” This is a lengthy post with a lot of pictures.
2020-01-06 | #Archery #Family
A while back when I was visiting my Dad for a little family gathering, he had us shoot some arrows in his backyard: My Dad teaching me all over again It rekindled the fun I had as a kid with archery, when his dad taught me how. Since then, I have always kept it in the back of my mind to see if I could somehow arrange my back yard to accommodate the hobby.
