My Wushu Blog

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I like Unix workstations, and I may have mentioned it more than once that I like a diverse computing ecosystem At my first real job, Legato Systems Inc., I was part of the SAN Device Qualification team. We all had a Windows and Unix desktop. I was lucky enough to get a sweet Sparc Ultra5: I know, look at that disaster... I'm sorry, I was young, messy and not the stellar employee I am today The observant reader will notice my Ultra5 is not actually on the monitor, and there is a familiar box under the desk.

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A while back, I noted my sloppy clean-up job when I ran my CAT6 cable under my house. I was able to address that, and, finally mount my surround speakers as well as my center audio speaker. It has been far too long since I packed away those read surround speakers. Sometimes you move around and shuffle your stuff from place to place long enough, you forget what you have in storage.

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I like hobbies, and my multimeter. Since I’m not a real engineer (I just pretend), finding accessible projects that let me use my soldering iron and multimeter are high on my list. The mechanical keyboard trend really grabbed my interest, and I didn’t want to just buy one and be done. Nooooo, I had to make it a real experience and justify my tools. Not really, I just wanted to do something more than just plug it in.

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Years ago when I bought my first home in Antioch I ran cat5 all over the house. It was fantastic. It gave me the flexibility to put computers in any room, or have my server inside or out in the garage. Wifi was pretty much only used for the Tivo and laptops. This was 2004 after all. Lets skip forward a few years, to 2011 when I moved and had to deal with a rental for the first time in a looong time.

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About 7 years ago, I wrote this post and at the very end I said: I’ll hold of on the firmware update, if I dont encounter an issue, I’ll leave it alone. Well I have finally found an issue! How exciting yes? I recently purchased a (used) PS4, for the “soul” purpose of playing Bloodborne. But Mike, isn’t that really weird to get a PS4 for one game? No, and maybe that could be a completely different article if I ever decide to update on a regular basis.

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