My Wushu Blog

I like Nginx a lot. Not because I’m some sort of hipster sysadmin either. I like it because it is small, fast, and as a FreeBSD port, it compiles and updates quickly. What I also like is the separation of services and processes. For example, if I want to run a PHP script, I don’t load “mod_php” like you would with Apache. Instead, you have a PHP processor, like php-fpm, running (on localhost, or, another server that only processes PHP scripts).

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todo Owen and Caralyne playing at the beach I always felt very proud that this site was “free” to everyone. I think its great when you can go to a site that isn’t laden with advertisements or pop-ups that try to sell you more things you don’t need. Sort of like how the internet used to be. I regret to say, I’m going to compromise my ideology and give Google Adsense a try.

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Glenn and I have kept up with our Tuesday nights band practice. Every Tuesday with rare exceptions, which is usually some form of vehicular issue on my end. Both Michele and I have had a slew of minor vehicle issues, mostly dead batteries. Our motivation has not been the more difficult part, nor has our muse left us ( The two of us have been able to work out some really fun segments ).

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My previous experience with a large virtual “enterprise” environment was with VMWare’s ESXi and vSphere. Performance wise, I was always fairly happy with ESXi knowing that it was a virtual machine of course. There were a few issues I recall: silent data corruption (fsck’ing Linux and FreeBSD volumes would reveal inconsistent filesystem information, but there were never any errors reported to the VM) Live migrations were not always stable. In fact, most of the time it would result in an unexpected shutdown I doubt it was solely VMWares fault, as it could have been a series of mis-configurations and poor implementation descisions.

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Over the past year or so, Caralyne has become increasingly interested in scientastical things like computers, Minecraft, Robots, Mythbusters, and specifically, Mythbusters! I’ve been using our TV for my own nefarious deeds, unbeknownst to Caralyne, as an educational tool in science and skepticism. Between Good Eats, Mythbusters and a few PBS clips of Neil Degrasse Tyson being awesome, something was bound to stick. Also, as a daughter and child of mine, she is constantly seeking my affection and approval… which I am not above exploiting these features she no doubt got from me, so I give her a LOT of positive feedback and attention when we are watching these shows.

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On aspect that I was never happy with the Bacula environment I built while at LLNL was the fact that I could no look up certain values for each client. Values like: Passwords Storage Devices Certificates (if you are using Encryption) Well, over the past few week’s I’ve been able to work around this problem by storing additional information in a CouchDB DB. It is not the ideal solution, but it is a start and I’m okay with that.

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todo From one Lab to another After 9.5 years with one employer (LLNL), I joined Bay Photo Lab in Santa Cruz. This has brought on many changes, not just a career change but a significant change in my way of life. First off, I’m renting a room until my family gets down here. I have this weird double life now, where during the week I live alone in a small room with no heating, and then I go back home on the weekend.

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I’m absolutely crushed. I’ve lost a great friend and member of our family, Coal. He escaped our backyard and was hit by car between the A and G street freeway on-ramps. He turned two on 11/16. Coal was the dog I dreamed of having; he was the combination of all the Aussies I’ve had growing up. He was the best. That dog never seemed to have a down moment. He was always happy, and always looking for trouble.

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todo Well, after about 9 and a half years with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 11/09 was my last day. Now, I wasn’t the only admin besides Jenny (thats the aquilino1@llnl.gov email you see there), but she was my closest friend and peer while I was there. There was a little poetic license there, but it was accurate. It is hard to quantify the emotions about leaving LLNL. I do not know if I have the appropriate words to describe the feeling.

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For a few reasons, I decided to go through the City of Antioch’s Type I crime reports (available here: http://www.ci.antioch.ca.us/citygov/police/crime-maps/crime-maps.htm). The City only publishes this as a PDF image, comparing the year selected, and the previous year. It also only goes back to 2005. To help view this as a possible trend, and not just a snapshot in time, I typed up all of them in Google Docs - City of Antioch Crime Stats

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