So far this summer I feel like I haven’t really had the opportunity to ride the Motorcycle as much as I would like to, either due to unfavorable weather or general life conflicts. Today though we got to take a nice ride out to Melissa’s parents’ house. Round trip it’s about 115 miles, which I know is not really a lot but it is better than nothing. This trip is always a nice one to take on the motorcycle because we ride along a lot of back country roads, so there is typically light traffic and some really nice scenery. My ultimate hope though is to one year be able to go on one of the extended motorcycle trips that my friend Chuck goes on. This year i might have tried to join him if not for work not allowing me the option to join, he will be riding around Lake Michigan with a few other guys, camping along the way. He estimated this trip to be about 1200 miles. That would be one hell of an experience!
Category Archives: Ed
Busy Fun Day
Today was a rather busy day for Kylie, Melissa and I, much busier than we thought it was going to be when we woke up, but in a good way. We started out just by simply relaxing and having a calm day. But then around lunch time we decided to head to the pool and swim for a bit, Kylie really seemed to have a good time playing in the water. Additionally she is getting much better at swimming; kicking and using her arms and she is also getting much more comfortable with putting her head underwater. After swimming for a bit we decided to lay out in the sun and dry off and relax, and relaxing it was. After we went home and changed we had some dinner and decided to head down into Depot Town to look in on the areas first ever Ton-Up Motorcycle festival. They had all sorts of motorcycles on display, live music, food vendors, local accessory dealers and even a wrestling show. Seeing all the older vintage bikes (which was a focus for Ton-Up) was really cool, but Kylie really seemed to enjoy watching the wrestling match, which was rather surprising to Daddy; and of course she liked listening to the live band (Rattlebox was playing while we were there). Hopefully next year we will head to the festival a little earlier in the day because by the time we arrived a lot of the vendors had packed up and left. As an added bonus and surprise ending to the day Daddy decided that after looking at what was left of the festival that we would take a walk over to Cafe Luwak in downtown Depot Town and have some ice cream, this decision, of course, was an overwhelmingly good idea. Today was a really great day and I look forward to many more like it.
Success, decrypted
The past few days have been pretty busy for me with the work disaster recovery test going on. It was nice to be back in Philadelphia, as I really enjoy this city; I am always amazed at the beauty of City Hall and the Masonic Temple. However, this time, work did not afford me the opportunity to do any site seeing. The test went well though, in reality it went better than anticipated. The new LTO4 tape drive encryption I implemented went very smoothly. I was able to configure the TS3500 library to communicate with our TKLM server without any issues, which was a very pleasant surprise. Once that was done and the AIX boxes were built we brought up the TSM server, and i have to admit, once the server started reading the first encrypted tape to restore TSM’s database I was elated. Had we not been able to read the encrypted data on that tape we would have been in a world of trouble, especially since I had already moved the entire environments data to encrypted tapes. Once the TSM server was completely up and running all of the necessary restores ran really smooth, and as a bonus the new LTO4 tapes wrote the data back out faster than anticipated. In the end it was a successful test and a pretty decent validation of all my hard work to implement the new encryption method.
Off to Philadelphia
Due to some unfortunate scheduling I had to cut my Father’s Day with Kylie short (dropped her back off at Mommy’s house around Noon) as I have to leave for a DR test in Philadelphia which starts tomorrow morning at 8am. My flight leaves at 1:45 which means I have to be to the airport by 1 the latest. I tried to get a later flight out so I would have more time to spend with Kylie, but the price went up by an additional $600 for the later flight, so sadly I am not able to postpone the flight any later. The only thing that makes it anywhere remotely ok is that Kylie has been with me since Thursday night, so I have had a good amount of time with her the last few days. So off I ago once again to Philadelphia, at least it is a city that I really enjoy being in.
One (maybe two) Down, More to go
Today I completed one of my new year resolutions, and I think that may be first for me. At the beginning of the year I listed out a few things I wanted to accomplish this year and some steps that I was (hopefully) going to take to achieve those things. Today I am proud to say that I have fully completed one of the goals that was actually measurable and had a solid ending point. This morning I finished reading the Bible; not only have I caught up (I was about a month behind at the beginning of the year) I have finished a day early. By no means did I understand and comprehend everything I read, nor do I now consider myself a biblical scholar, but I did learn a good deal of theology. Along the way I had some very good conversations with some friends (namely Rick Hale and Steve Thompson) that have and still do study the Bible, both Old and New Testaments and gained some interesting perspectives. Now that I think about it, this may actually count as two resolutions, the second being learning something new. Sweet, a two-for! In any event, it really was a good read, a very long and typically dry (to me) read, but good; there’s lots of information and wisdom in the Bible. Now that I am done with this maybe I’ll start on The Book of Mormon, or perhaps The Quran (Yes, I own copies of both).
Vulcan is out of the barn
Went over to Chuck’s after work today to pick up the motorcycle seeing as it is finally a semi-nice day, of course it is supposed to rain all weekend though. We checked the air pressure in the tires before I left his house, and it was a good thing to as they were about 20 psi low. Luckily Chuck has an air compressor and was kind enough to fill them for me. He was also kind enough to attempt to tighten up my right side mirror as it was very loose. It was odd though, for some reason when I left his place I felt very nervous about pulling out of his driveway and on to the dirt road he lives on, not sure why but once I got out on to the paved road i felt much better. I made it about 1/4 mile from his house when my mirror came loose again, loose to he point that it was of no use to me, so before I do any further riding I will need to get that take care of. Apparently my speedometer is still off as well because when I got home Melissa asked me if I was ok because I was “driving so slow”, I asked what she was talking about and she said that I was pretty much always going about 10 mph slower than the speed limit. I told her that was odd because my speedometer showed that I was doing the actual limit. I have had this looked into once before so I may need to have it looked at again. Other than those few small things I am all set to ride. I do, however, need to get a new pair of boots because mine are worn flat. I’ll need to add those to the shopping list and see how I can manage finances. Now I just need to wait patiently for some nice weather.
Finally, a 360!
On November 15, 2001 Microsoft released the Xbox video game console in North America and though I wanted one at the time I did not have the money to purchase it. So I waited patiently until I did have the money, but no matter how I tried to save something always came up and I never got one. Then on November 25, 2005 they released the Xbox 360, which has better video, audio and storage capabilities than its predecessor. Once again I tried to save money to get this new console, and once again something always came up and I never purchased one. All that changed today! After so many years of waiting and trying and hoping, I finally purchased an Xbox 360 today.
I happened to be reading though my jobs internal classified ads yesterday and stumbled upon someone selling an Xbox 360 with a 120GB hard drive, one wireless controller, and Rock Band 2 with the drums, guitar and microphone; all for $125! I literally had no choice but to buy this bundle! Now let me put that into perspective for those of you that are wondering why I didn’t have a choice; the Rock Band 2 bundle on its own is selling for $127 at this time, and the Xbox 360 Elite bundle (which this is the equivalent of) is going for $299! I practically stole this console! On top of that when I met the guy to make the purchase he also threw in 4 other games, a second wireless controller, a headset, and a memory module in addition to the console and Rock Band 2 for no additional cost!
I can not even begin to explain how excited I am to get this setup and to start playing Xbox 360. I know a lot of people who also have a 360 and a few from work are already planning on bringing in some older games for me to play. This is going to be a blast!
Happy Anniversary to Me (and my job)
I just realized that today marks my 5 year anniversary with Thomson Reuters. When I first started working for the company (February 7, 2005) we were Thomson Medstat, then in 2007 Thomson purchased Reuters (Reuters Article) we became Thomson Reuters Medstat. Eventually after the acquisition was complete we eventually transitioned to what we are now; The Healthcare business of Thomson Reuters. Over the last 5 years my career has gone down a completely unexpected path. When I graduated from college in 2004 my hope was to become a Unix System Administrator, and while I do perform some work on Unix systems I am by no means a Unix administrator. I started out as a humble Operator in (what was then) the North American Data Center (NADC) for Thomson Healthcare and Scientific. I was working third shift (11pm to 7am) and performing mainly system monitoring processes along with data submission (getting customer submitted data off of various media and into our data processing and tracking software) and general data center monitoring. After a little under 2 years I learned that the NADC was moving to Eagan MN to leverage the Thomson West Law campus and there data center. Knowing that I would soon be out of a job, when they asked for someone to go to Eagan to add in the build out of the Healthcare Data Center infrastructure I knew I had to go. So making the sacrifice to be away from 1 year old daughter for 3 months, I packed up and moved to Minnesota; little did I know those three months would turn into almost nine. After all those long months of racking servers, running cables, configuring ILO connections, and trouble shooting hardware issues I came back home, to what I thought was no job. However the day I got home I received a phone call from Bob G. asking me to join his team and to become a Storage Engineer. I’d be responsible for ensuring corporate backups (using IBM TSM) and eventually NetApp and SAN disk. Over the last three years in this role I have managed to become one of the most knowledgeable and turned to TSM admin in the company and gained the title of Sr. Storage Engineer. Had you asked me 5 years ago where my career would take me, I can guarantee this is not the path I would have laid out; but I have embraced the opportunities that were presented to me and here I am. I wonder what the next five years will bring?
Detroit Basketball
Thanks to a promotion that Meijer does called “Meijer Ticket Zone” tonight I got to go see my first professional basketball game! Melissa and I got free tickets to go to the Palace of Auburn Hills to watch the Detroit Pistons play against the Miami Heat. This was my first time ever in the Palace, and I was impressed with the venue though I am not certain if I would want to see a concert there. While the experience was enjoyable, I still stick with my previous thoughts that I would rather watch the game from the comfort of my living room. The worst part about the experience was the drive to and from the venue; lots of traffic coupled with the fact that I really didn’t know where I was going didn’t make for the best driving experience. I’m sure the next time the trip will be easier, assuming there is a next time. The parking was ok, though the $25 parking fee was not to pleasing. The event was enjoyable and Melissa and I did have a good time, unfortunately though the Pistons lost 65-92. We took a few pictures of the pre-game set up and the outside of the Palace using our phones, they can be viewed here; additionally I took a short video (again with my phone) of the Pistons coming out onto the court, and that can be seen below.
Wii Fit Begins…Again
In an effort to maintain my New Year’s resolutions, today I took my first step in what I hope is a successful attempt to lose weight, I re-started my use of the Wii Fit. It turns out that the last time I used the Fit was 355 days ago. I know this because the system keeps track of that and is only to happy to make me aware of it when I started it up. I decided to clear my historical data and start fresh so I don’t have all the old data from almost over a year ago skewing out the numbers. It is my hope to be able to use the Fit everyday, though I am pretty sure that isn’t going to be possible, so instead I am setting my goal to be as frequently as possible. In any event it should be fun to earn enough credits to unlock all the activities again.