Happy Birthday Melissa!
Today we decided to go to Chicago in May to officially celebrate. So today we had an exciting time doing laundry! Afterwards we went to Olive Garden for dinner because it is her favorite and then came home to relax. We are already planning the things we want to do while we are in Chicago; as usual the top of the list is Navy Pier. Beyond that we are planning on museums, the Cloud Gate and walking Michigan Ave. I am sure it is going to be an excellent trip.
Today Melissa and I went out to my manager’s (Keith Bankston) house for a traditional Cajun Party. Keith is from Louisiana and had something like 60 pounds of fresh crayfish flown up so he could throw a spicy crayfish boil for his team from work. 
Additionally he somehow managed to get a couple of our vendors to sponsor part of the cost! So in addition to the crayfish we had some really good traditional jambalaya, corn-on-the-cob (which was also spicy because it was made in the crayfish water), some potatoes, charred alligator (which was also flown up) and of course many libations. It was our first time having crayfish, and while they were way too spicy for Melissa, I thought they were excellent. They were extremely spicy though, and unfortunately I made the mistake of inhaling some of that spicy, pro tip – don’t do that. It was a really good time, with good food and good people. Hopefully we will do this again in the future, and I learned the correct way to suck the heads out of a crayfish, which, FYI, are extremely spicy.
Because I finally got the motorcycle back from Nicholson’s from Winter storage. While they had it they replaced my battery because apparently it was not up to par, though they said nothing appears to be wrong with my charging system. As for the fuel gauge they say it’s normal for it to be slightly off, so instead of me spending a bunch of money to have that replaced I am just going to leave it and be mindful. The levers were successfully replaced, however the mirrors were not. Well, technically they were but the new ones were not large enough or high enough and ended up being completely useless. Unfortunately they were not able to refund me the cost of the new mirrors because they could not find the box they originally came in. As such they supplied me with some store credit which I applied toward some winter/cold weather riding gloves that came in very handy on the chilly ride home! I am hoping to have time to do some more riding this year, however, I have a bad feeling that won’t happen due to my new job and the commute that I don’t feel comfortable on the motorcycle on. Regardless, it’s nice to have it back.
One of the goals that I set for myself when I took the position with Secure-24 was to transition to the storage team within 6 months. This has been my goal because I enjoy doing storage work a lot more than I do backup and recovery. I even mentioned in my interview (for a backup engineering position) that I did not want to do backup work and that if I were to get hired this would be my goal. Over the last few months I have been halfway to my goal due to being the point person for both storage and backups for our enterprise delivery team. In fact this team has had a major project underway for one of our customers that has us implementing two new EMC VMAX arrays that I have been deeply involved with and will begin provisioning storage next week for. However, today, my full transition has been made (sort of) due to a colleague leaving the company for another opportunity. Jon was the NetApp engineer and now that he is gone the storage team will be leaning heavily on me to fill the NetApp knowledge gap, which suits me just fine! Considering another customer is lined up to bring in some new NetApp filers as well, this puts me a great position to build another set of controllers from the ground up. So officially I have transitioned to the storage team, but until they can back fill my position I will be pulling split duty between the two teams. Needless to say I am pretty happy about these circumstances, and I even beat my goal by a month!
Today we went to Melissa’s twin nieces Jorga & Riley’s 3rd birthday party, and as an added bonus Kylie came with us. This is the first time Kylie has ever chosen to go to one of Melissa’s family events. Normally when we ask her if she wants to go she says no, so I normally stay home with her and do something else while Melissa goes. I am really happy that Kylie finally decided to come, because she had a really good time running around with the girls and playing with everyone. Hopefully over the summer she will be willing to go out there again.
Tonight I took Melissa to see the Broadway Musical The Lion King at the Detroit Opera House, which is the same venue where we saw Wicked. Unfortunately getting to the show did not go as easy this time as it did for Wicked. Part of this had to do with planning on our part, failure to make dinner reservations forced us to go to a second choice for starters. Then there was some unexpected traffic issues that caused us to take an alternate path that I was not even remotely familiar with. Thankfully the GPS on my phone is really good and was able to get us there, though we did cut the timing very uncomfortably close. When I say close I mean that when we walked up to the entrance of the Opera House they were already calling out announcing the show was going to start and doors would be closing in 5 minutes, and we still had to wait in line to get in and find our seats! We made it though and had some time to spare, mainly because they never seem to start on time, and the show was amazing! While this is actually the second time I have seen this musical, I was surprised at the amount of the show that I had forgotten about, so it was almost like seeing it for the first time again. Or perhaps they changed some things since the last time? Either way the musical was really good for me the second time through, and for Melissa seeing it the first time; well she found it to be pretty amazing too. She really loved the costumes and how they were able to portray the animals, particularly the large ones like the elephant, giraffe, and rhino. A couple of pictures are up in the gallery. Now we just need to wait and see if anything else is coming the area we want to go see.
Brought the motorcycle to Nicholson’s today for them to provide the off season storage. While they have it, in addition to preparing it for winter storage and then preparing for riding season in the spring, I 
am also going to have a few other items looked into. I still feel like the fuel gauge is not reporting properly, so I am going to have them check into if that needs replacing or not. They will also be checking the battery and charging system as the battery seems to be dying out quickly again. I will also be having some items replaced and upgraded as well. The riser bolts are going to be replaced with stainless steel ones and the rust will be cleaned out, I am also having caps added to the tops of them to keep water out. Once again my brake and clutch levers will be replaced, however this time I am going back to the aluminum ones, seeing as the oils in my skin appear to be eating through the chrome ones. Lastly I am having new mirrors put on, hopefully they will sit a little higher and come out a little further to improve my visibility. The bike should be ready for pick up around mid-April, I just hope the weather is also ready around that time. Additionally Kylie had fun looking around the shop and playing with Melissa on all the different vehicles! This Polaris Ranger was her favorite by far, as it was the perfect size for her.
Today was my first full day at Secure-24, and it seems like it is going to be a good place to work. My hope to hit the ground running wasn’t as fruitful as I had planned though. The environment in which the company operates is pretty locked down, which I understand the need for. However, this makes for a lot of jumping through hoops in order to connect to the desired systems where work needs to happen. This means there are also many accounts that need to be configured to allow the appropriate access, and all of mine have not been set up yet. Hopefully over the next few days things will get straightened out. From what I can tell so far working here is going to be an entirely new experience from what I am used to. I already see a lot of exciting challenges and opportunities to learn new skills and improve on existing ones!
Tomorrow is Dann and April’s wedding, so tonight we got together with them and a few of their other friends and went to Circus Bar in Ann Arbor for some karaoke and drinks. Considering that Melissa and I pretty much never go out to bars or clubs, this was a really fun time for us. Watching Dann perform is always a blast, and the general atmosphere was a lot of fun. In addition to the bar, in the basement there is also another club called the Cavern Club that we also checked out. I guess in the same building there are also two other clubs, but they weren’t opened tonight. there’s a lot to do in that one area, and not surprisingly we had never been there before. Perhaps one day Melissa and I will venture out that way once again.
My first day at Secure-24 was a typical slow orientation day. Spending the better part of 8 hours in a training room and going through procedures is about as fun as it sounds. There were only two other people in my orientation group; Brian is joining the project management team, and Patti is joining the storage team. I’ll be working more closely with Patti as the backup and storage team work together and report up through the same manager, and our desk areas are right next to each other. I will say that it was nice to see that the facilities team had everything together. We got our badges, our desks, and our laptops and bags all on the first day. At the end of the day we went and spent about 1.5 hours with our teams, meeting everyone and setting up our desks. I opted to configure my desk to be a standing desk, and am looking forward to it. I have the rest of the week off, but now that corporate training and orientation is over I’ll be able to hit the ground running!