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Quote of the Day
My first mutiny
The captain laughed loud at me.
My sword shut him up.
~Captain One-Leg Sterling

New Server Project

I’m getting ready to start a new project involving servers and media boxes and I am going to document the whole process as I go through it all both to share with the world how I’m doing all of this, as well as keeping a record of how I did it for the future in case I need to do any of it again.

The plan includes the following servers:

Physical Server

This server is going to be the only physical hardware I am using.  It consists (mostly) of a system that someone gave me, minus the case, which is why I have to build it up from the bottom.  It’s not really anything special, but it will serve my purposes for this adventure and hopefully allow me to expand slowly in the future, eventually moving the whole thing over to a hardcore server that I plan to build in the future.

The actual hardware is this:

Motherboard: Unknown, from a slightly older business workstation, no model information was provided.  The odd thing is that it is a BTX form-factor, which until now I hadn’t heard of.  Additional information on this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTX_(form_factor)

CPU:  AMD Athlon x2 Dual Core, speed unknown, presumably 2.2ghz or 2.3ghz

Chipset: ATI Radeon XPRESS 1150

Memory: DDR2 SDRAM, it came with 2GB (2x1GB Sticks), and I had a 4GB Kit here (2x2GB) that I added for a total of 6GB.  It has a max capacity of 8GB of RAM.

Hard Drive: 120GB Nothing special drive.

Since it came without a case, I had to go searching for one, and apparently nobody makes them since the BTX form factor appears to have crashed and burned beyond a few large companies using it for a short time.  I ended up finding one on E-Bay that was a decent looking case that should be here Wednesday (2 days).

I am planning to load either Ubuntu 12.04 Server to this, or VMWare vCenter Server.  There are pros and cons to both of these, but I am leaning toward Ubuntu simply because it’s “free”, and I would like to pull this whole project off without having to buy any software.  VMWare vCenter is actually meant for data centers, I happen to have a copy, but to use it long-term I would have to purchase it and it can be quite expensive.

If I choose to go with Ubuntu, I will likely use KVM to virtualize the rest of my “data center”, and if I go with VMWare, then it’s all built in and that’s about all I can do with the OS is create virtual boxes on it.

Through some combination of the physical server and various Virtual servers, I plan to implement the following:

1) A central Syslog server, likely using syslog-ng.  This is because I don’t want to have to comb around all of my servers to find the error logs, I want one central place to monitor the logs from.  In addition, my router supports logging to a syslog server, so I can kill 2 birds with one stone by implementing this feature, and keep error monitoring on my router combined with the rest of the systems.

2) A database server running both MySQL and Postgresql servers with a mix of applications on each so that I can become more familiar with their functionality.

3) A upnp media server, this will definitely be Twonky, as I already have a license for this purchased.

4) A torrent server, preferably standalone so that it can be easily killed if necessary.  I currently use transmission for this, and will probably continue to do so because it provides a very nice web interface for remote management, and there is a plugin for Chrome that allows me to monitor and add/remove torrents without having to log in each time.  This will also run a television tracking program I use called SickBeard, that keeps track of the television series we watch, and whether I have the episodes recorded to the server or not… and shows me a list of things I am missing/need to get.

5) A git server, I am a software developer and I normally sell my work, so I don’t want to store it on github or another free option that requires open source.  And since I have my own internal resources, I don’t want to pay for a monthly subscription to github to store something I can keep here on my own.

6) Networking host.  I want to run my own internal DNS server to serve up intranet names, and it will also act as a proxy server to pass HTTP requests from externally into my network and routed to the right server, so that if needed I can access any of my servers web interfaces from outside.  In addition, this host will run a package called FOG, which allows me to image systems in the house (laptops, servers, etc…) with a clean image, and anytime we want to clean up our systems, we just back up our data, flag the system for a rebuild… plug it into a network cable and reboot and within an hour it will be a completely clean “factory reset” with drivers and windows updates, which will be much faster than manually rebuilding each time we need it done.

7) Finally, I want to set up a VPN server so that my Android devices can remotely connect to the home network and not only secure any data transmitted over the wireless signals, but allow me access to the internal network without having to open ports to everything I want to access externally.

A few “toys” I want to mess with in this project include a package called Splunk, which I will use in conjunction with the syslog server to easily run reports and filter data from the logs to find and squash problems.  I also want to set up a bug tracking system to use in conjunction with the git server, and hopefully tie the two together somehow so that I can track bugs and tickets with each project I am working on.  I may add some additional things to this project over the span of the next few months of working on this, and I will be documenting the whole process as I go so that you can see how the whole things is done, as well as my results and how I am using them.

Hard to Starboard!

So I realize I have not posted in a while, and there’s a good reason for that.  I won’t go into details here because the people that I wish to know the details already know.  Long story short, I will be taking this blog in a different direction, and instead of a “personal” blog, it will be my “technical” blog.  I’m going to leave the old posts up for a while and I will probably unpublish them in a few months, but all new posts here will be geared toward programming, gaming, and all around nerdery.  For my personal blog, it’s been recreated elsewhere and my friends that I wish to read it know where to find it.  

One Life For Sale: Cheap

Today I’m just in one of those funks it seems.  I didn’t want to get up this morning and ended up at work almost 2 hours late, and then left an hour early because I just couldn’t take being there anymore.  Fortunately my boss is cool and doesn’t care if I have a day like that here and there.  It just seems like once in a while I have a day where I feel like the whole world is falling apart around me, and if I don’t hold it together nobody else is going to.  Obviously that’s not the case, but it just feels like it.

I have a lot of projects I really should work on, like my Dungeons and Dragons android application, along with a few other apps I’ve had ideas for recently, but every time I sit down to start working on them, my mind goes blank and I can’t even think where to start.  Even at work, whenever I try to start programming something, my mind just goes blank like it doesn’t want to think about code anymore, which kind of scares me because I used to really love programming, so much so that if I got in a groove writing something I could lose track of time pretty easily, but now I can’t even seem to get myself started anymore.

In other news, I got a raise at work this week just for the hell of it apparently, and I’m lined up to get another promotion in June, which is nice to know that they at least think I’m doing a good enough job that I deserve that sort of stuff.

Anyway, that’s it… just being emo apparently, and my shoulder is still in massive pain which isn’t helping any, and the pain killers aren’t killing the pain anymore.  Time to cut it off and get a chainsaw arm…

Tattoos (Part 5)

Whew, three blog posts in one day, this has to be a record, but I wanted to continue my tattoo series.  Last time I talked about the dragon on my back, which by itself doesn’t have a lot of meaning.  The big thing I have been trying to work out is how to talk about all the different pieces of my back, since they were technically done as a series of different tattoos that all fit together to for the “big picture”, and some of those were after others that I’ve had done, however I think that I am just going to go ahead and show you the stages of my back piece, and then talk about what the whole thing means since that will be the easiest to follow.  So here are the pictures of each “step” of the way on my back piece.  Some are crappy quality pictures, but it’s all I was able to find on my hard drive…

Step one.  You saw this last time, but I’ll throw it up here anyway to keep it all in perspective.

This was the outline for the bone pile.

Another shot of the bones outline.

The bone pile finished.  The right side was shaded previously but I didn’t have a shot after that session.  This was after the right side was shaded and was still pretty red and sore.

After healing, the completed bone pile.

The outline of the nest.  This hurt like a son of a bitch with the tree down the spine, and then all that little detailed crap running up my side into my ribs.  I can still feel that one.

A wider shot of the nest outlined with all the stuff on top.

After the first coloring session on the nest, we filled in the tree and added the smoke cloud along the bottom of the bone pile.

Little bit wider shot of the whole thing.

More color added to the nest, eggs are colored in now and some wizard hats still on the skeletons.  That little touch was my brothers idea and I liked it.

Wider shot after the second coloring session on the nest.

After the nest was completely colored.  There were some touchups later but that was the end of it for this session.  If I remember correctly, I took about 6-months off before getting the next part done.

I’m not sure why the coloring was so jacked up on these next pictures, but this is the top of the skull arch with the vampire skull keystone.  His name is Vampire Bob and he got too much sun, so I used his skull for my arch.

Wider angle of the whole arch.  This is still just the outline of the arch, no shading done on it yet.

 

The two sides of the arch in more detail.

The outline of the wizard and the path into hell (I’ll explain later).

The whole thing after the arch and bottom panel were outlined.

This is when Bob and the left half of the arch got shaded, I think this was taken an hour or two after we finished, so it was still pretty red and sore.

We finished shading the arch, and started shading the path to hell.  Painful day with the ribs and spine in there.

This time we outlined the sky at the top and started coloring it.  I think that took like 5-6 hours and I broke the chair from gripping it so hard so we had to stop.

More coloring on the sky.

Got some more coloring done on the wizard and shaded the right side of the path a little more.

The big picture at this point.

Fire! Starting to get more colorful now.  There’s a lot of black and white so the colored parts really stand out.

Wider picture of the fireball.  Can’t really see it here but part of the fire shows in the pile of skulls in the center as if it’s going through it.

Majority of the sky coloring done.

Sky is finished.  At this point the majority of the work was done, we just have some final touchup to do and fix some shading that faded.

Finally done, here is the completed piece.

So let me first start by saying the pictures are shown in the order I had the work done.  Some sessions were as short as 45 minutes, and others were as long as 9 hours at a time.  Mostly it depended on what the artist had open, and how much I could stand.  He wasn’t open on Sunday’s, but a few times he came in special for me and we would start around noon and end between 6 and 9 in the evening.  I don’t have an exact number, but I estimate that the whole thing took around 120-150 hours of sitting in the chair getting work done.  I’m a pretty big guy, and this piece is relatively huge, not to mention the sheer amount of detail that is in this piece.

I’ve had a lot of questions about this, the most common being “do you regret that?”, and no I don’t, and never will.  This tattoo is part of me and I wear it proudly.  When I’m 90 years old and it’s all saggy and looks like a big blob if nothing, I will know what it once was and I don’t care what anyone else thinks of it… plus I probably won’t be walking around with my shirt off much when I’m that age anyway, so who gives a damn.  I hear a lot of artists say that they don’t like doing such fine detailed work because after 10 years it all starts to meld together and looks like shit, but it’s been over 10 years since I’ve gotten the majority of this and it is still as crisp as the day I got it, and looks pretty amazing to this day.

Now… what does it all mean?  This piece represents life.  Pretty ironic considering the amount of death in it, but sometimes life is ironic.  The dragon is me, you, the human race, or any other species.  What is our primal instinct?  We protect those we love, and our young, the nest has eggs in it that are hatching, the dragon is doing its best to protect them.  The wizard has an egg under his arm if you look closely, and he represents all of the bad in the world trying to take away what we love and hole dear, while the dragon is defending that by trying to kill the wizard with the fireball.  The path the wizard is running down is the pathway to hell, because the evil people in the world that want to take what is ours for themselves are doing nothing but damning themselves in the process, instead of working for what they want, they try to take advantage of someone else and that brings them step by step closer to hell.  The bones and death under the dragon represent the past, our problems, our fears, everything in life that we have to overcome, and the dragon rising above all of that into the clear sky represents our ability to overcome and not succumb to those things.  In the end, we have to rise above the bullshit of the world into a new time of our lives (the new moon in the background).  And finally the archway of skulls above the dragon represent the problems and challenges yet to come in our lives that we need to add to the pile behind/below us and live our lives as we want to and not how someone else wants us to.

That in a nutshell is what this tattoo means.  There is a lot more to it, and it’s goes much deeper than words can ever say.  If I got into every single little detail of it, I could probably write a book about this one tattoo, but that should give you a general idea of what it means, and the best part of it is looking at all of the little details and finding your own meanings in it.

Next time I’ll go into some more of my smaller pieces, but for those reading and actually enjoying my blog, thank you for sharing this and I hope that knowing the real meaning behind it might make you look at me a little differently if you’re the type of person that doesn’t like tattoos, and if not then that is your decision but I am who I am and I won’t change that because of someone elses opinion of me.

Chainmail Chucky

So lately, my wife’s been spending a lot of time knitting and chrocheting, both making Christmas gifts for people and for fun because it’s something to do, and I started thinking about something I could do that might keep me occupied but be somewhat relaxing at the same time and I came up with making Chainmail.  I’ve looked around and there are a lot of people that sell chainmail, and it sells for quite a bit of money, so I figured I’d give it a shot and see if I can do it too.

So far, this is what I’ve made, it’s nothing special, but not bad for my first attempt…

Chainmail

Next I need to work on using some smaller rings so it’s a tighter pattern and not so spread out, and then maybe try some fancier weaves.  This is a 4-in-1 weave, so each ring links with four other rings.  There’s some that use more than that making it a much closer weave but also a little harder to master, so I’m just working on this weave to begin with and I’ll work up to the harder stuff over time.  There are a variety of metals you can use, but just starting out I went to Home Depot and bought a spool of galvanized steel wire thats normally used for an electric fence, and a wooden dowel to wrap it around and then just took a wire cutter and made rings out of the coil that resulted.  Through some trial and error and looking around online, I found that using a wooden dowel is not the greatest idea because the metal can dig into the wood resulting in unevenly sized rings, but to start off with I’m not overly concerned with the little details just yet.

My next step is to find a smaller metal dowel that I can use to make the rings, and once I get to that point I’ll probably spend a few hours just making rings, then making half of them open, and half pre-closed so it’s easier to just work on the weave and not have to worry so much about finding an open or closed ring in the massive pile in front of me.  The only thing I really don’t like about the tools I have is that the cut in the wire isn’t clean, so it pinches the wire a bit before it breaks, leaving it pretty sharp, and if I don’t get it closed just right it could stab whoevers wearing it, as well as the possibility that the rings can come apart, which has happened a few times, and it gets irritating trying to get the one ring back the way it goes after it falls out.  But as I said, it’s a work in progress, I’ve only been doing it for a week, so I don’t expect that I will be a master at it in a week.

Sunday Swashbuckling

Today was very busy but got a lot accomplised.  We cleaned up the garage which we could barely move in so that it’s mostly empty and the only “clutter” is around the edges, one half of the garage is my workbench and some shelving, and the other half is some stuff we need to sell in a garage sale at some point, plus some things of my wife’s mom’s that need to get moved out to storage which will clear up some more of the mess.  Digging through one of the boxes, I found my old stereo receiver, which was nice 10 years ago when I bought it, but now it’s pretty outdated, so I set it up in the garage and rigged up some coax for an antenna and hooked up some old speakers we had laying around so I now have some entertainment while I’m out in the garage puttering around.  Sorted through all of my tool boxes and actually organized everything into this little plastic drawer deal I picked up at Home Depot last week, and being anal like I am I sat there with my label maker and labeled all of the drawers when I put stuff in them… there’s a story behind that, but I’ll tell you that later.  Other than that, we cleaned a lot of stuff up today to get ready for Christmas dinner at our house, and getting ready to take a road trip to see some good friends up in Illinois during the week between Christmas and New Years.

Ok, so back to why I label everything in the drawers in the garage.  When I was a kid, my Dad had 6 of those big plastic deals full of drawers with all of his little parts and trinkets and shit in them, and he would always send me to go bring him something and get pissed off when I could never find what he wanted.  Dude… I was 8 years old, and there were like 300 tiny drawers to choose from, none of which you could see in from the front, so how the hell am I supposed to find that one particular bolt you’re looking for that you obviously know where it’s at?  Yeah I didn’t think so.  So I’m labeling crap so that when I have a son or daughter some day and send them to find me something, as long as they can read, they should be able to find what I’m looking for… in theory.  Probably won’t do a lot of good, but oh well, gave me something to do today.

On another note, I toyed with the idea of starting a new Facebook account so that I can say shit on it that I’m not constantly thinking “oh I can’t say that becuase of so-and-so” or “oh that might offend this person so better not say that”… fuck that.  I’m going to say what I want to say, and if all you have to say in return is negative bullshit, then you can go away.  So after starting a new account, I deleted it and culled my friends list from about 200 people down to 40ish people that won’t bitch and complain about everything I say.  If I want to take some time and sit here making chainmail that has no purpose, then that’s what I’ll do, and I’m not going to worry about what someone else thinks I SHOULD be doing instead.  Sometimes I need to relax and not think about work of any kind, and when I’m already working 50-70 hours a week, I don’t need to come home and HAVE to work on other crap.  I just want to do something fun and relaxing, even if it is useless.

Anyway, that’s my weekend rant.  If you’re reading this but not a friend of mine on facebook anymore, sorry about that, maybe you should be nicer to me.

Sleepless in Nerdville

Since it’s been a while, I guess I should give a general update to preface this 1am post.  About 2 weeks ago, I had a sudden onset of pain in my left shoulder, not really sure what caused it but it was not pleasant.  It kind of came and went as it pleased (and still does) and is a mixture of a sharp pain as if someone stabbed me in the shoulder, with a dull roaring throbbing radiating down to my wrist.  Long story short, I’ve been to see a doctor of some form 4 times and gotten everything from a cortisone injection to vicodin and pretty much everything in between and mostly nothing helped.  So this last doctor I went to see took xrays and said everything looked fine, which obviously it’s not … my bloody arm hurts for no reason??!?  So he scheduled me for an MRI at 8am on Saturday morning and gave me some Tramidol, which surprisingly helps and doesn’t make me fuzzy in the head like vicodin does.  Only major side effect of this stuff is that I will go from feeling fine to “hey I’m going to go take a nap now” in the span of 2 minutes.  So last night, I was having a lot of pain and took one around 4:30-5pm, and we ate dinner and everything was fine, then at 8:30 it was bed time.

Unfortunately it didn’t last, and I am now awake at 1am unable to go back to sleep and nothing better to do than to blog about useless shit.

In other news, I finally graduated and now have my Masters degree.  I’m torn on the subject though because my degree is from the University of Phoenix, and some employers pretty much put degrees from there at the bottom of the value list, while others actually see them as a good thing because it shows that you have the initiative and drive to go to class online and keep up with it when there isn’t really a set schedule for you to go to class.  No matter what you read online, some people say that UoP is a diploma mill where you just pay a ton of money to get your diploma, and other people say different.  For me, I won’t lie and say that I was challenged, but then almost every class I had to take was on a topic that I have been practicing at my job pretty much every day for the last 10+ years, and some of the instructors had about the same amount of real-world experience, so in most cases I was on equal footing with them and sometimes even taught them a thing or two.  I’m not one to brag, and I know that sounded like bragging, but when I made the decision to drop out of university the first time around and get my associates degree, it wasn’t because I thought that going to a 4-year school was too hard, it was more a matter of I already knew most of what I needed to get started in the field I wanted to go into, and I didn’t feel like I needed to spend 4 years of my life to get a piece of paper that confirmed that fact.  That decision started me on a 13 year journey that lead me to having my Associates degree, Bachelors degree, and now a Masters degree, of which I am relatively happy with, aside from the fact that I now have to pay for two of them.

On the subject of nerdery, today was my department holiday party, which is our yearly trip to Dave & Busters where the company pays for lunch and we get half a day off to play games or sneak out and just go home and take a nap.  I had forgotten that last year I had a few thousand tickets from D&B and never used them, so they were still on my card, and added to the ones I won this time around, I was able to buy a remote controlled helicopter, which I have always wanted and don’t really know why.  Like a little kid, I flew it around the living room for 10 minutes, chased the cats with it for a bit, and then crashed it into a box, and one of the gears slipped off on the rotor, so now I can’t get enough spin on it to actually achieve lift-off.  So much for my fun… guess I’ll have to take it apart and fix it this weekend.  Maybe I should put a jet pack in it or something to improve it while I’m at it?

On the topic of work, I have been keeping very busy, I got assigned to a project where I am the only member of my team on this project and I am playing the role of Lead developer, which means i get to write hundreds of pages of documentation before I can get to the fun stuff (programming).  The awesome thing is that technically I’m not supposed to be able to do all of this stuff because I’m just a lowly Developer II, however seeing that my boss trusts me enough to do this goes a long way, and surprisingly enough a few rumors have made their way back to me that quite a few people in the Atlanta office are pretty impressed by me, and I’ve had two project managers tell me they love to work with someone that has such rave reviews.  All of this was kind of a shock to me, since I actually thought I was barely hanging on to the workload by the skin of my teeth, but apparently everyone things I’m doing a wonderful job, go go big head for me.  To make it even better, a couple weeks ago (right after the shoulder pain started) I went to bed and fell asleep around 11pm, only to be paged and woken up at 11:45pm and asked to write an emergency script to help detect a problem that someone found because it was causing cash registers to lock up all over the company, which is nothing at midnight, but if they’re still locked up when the stores open that’s a problem.  So Captain Chucky to the rescue, I whipped up a script that scanned the 15,000+ registers in the company for this problem, and helped to save the day, for which there have been rumors that I may get employee of the month for, but don’t know about that one for sure yet.  If I do get awarded that, it’s pretty snifty, I get a bonus on my paycheck, plus lunch with my boss, and some free movie tickets or something, I forget what all is in the package now, but it would be nice to have my name on the wall for all I do for that company lately.  Not that I’m complaining, sometimes the hours are long and grueling, but at least I have a job that I for the most part enjoy.  And only one more year until I get my 3rd week of vacation.

Anyway, that’s all for this morning.  I meant for this to be short but now it’s 1200 words long (man I’m still in paper writing mode, I’m counting words in my blog posts now), and I’m going to attempt to go back to sleep.  If that doesn’t work, then I’ll watch some Gilligan’s Island or something.

Workbench

One of the projects I’ve been meaning to do since we moved into the house over a year ago has been to build a workbench in the garage.  Now normally I’m not the “building” type, I’m more of a nerd, but as I get older I find myself turning more and more into my father and becoming a “tinker” kind of person that likes to play with a little bit of everything.  So anyway, I was browsing around the net and found these plans that looked to be just about exactly what I was looking for, and for relatively cheap.  The article says $45 and thats about what it cost us, a little less actually and that was with Home Depot cutting the large sheet of wood for the top and the shelf.  Now I didn’t follow the plans exactly, I made a few modifications that I thought would be a little bit sturdier, and being the “I want results now” kind of person, I skipped the wood glue, which I am now kind of wishing I had used.

All in all, it’s a nice workbench, has a bottom shelf, and a tool shelf for stuff while I’m working.  It’s a tiny bit wobbly but after I put it up against the wall it was just fine, and it won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.  I guess the best part is that I chose NOT to build it into the garage (i.e. attach it to the wall), we had some friends that had one of those when they moved into their house and it took hours to disassemble when they wanted to replace it.

Three things I am going to do to “improve” it at some point are:
1) Add some peg board to the back so I can hang tools and such.
2) Add a cross brace in the back and on the sides so it stops wobbling
3) Put a small 1/2″ lip on the front of the shelf so stuff can’t fall off if I bump it.  Its relatively level, but if you bump something wrong it could fall off, and if that “something” happens to be a hot soldering iron, I’d hate for it to fall on my leg… plus it should only cost about $3 to get a piece of wood to put there, and I may even put an end cap on the shelf to stabilize it some more.

Anyway, that’s it, here’s a picture.

Tis’ The Season To Be Bitchy

It seems like everywhere I go in this state, if it’s around the holidays people are bitchy.  This is supposed to be a time of happiness and joy, and everyone is so self-centered that they can’t stop for 5 minutes to think about someone else, and how their actions might affect that person, instead they just go on about their lives not caring about anyone but themselves.  This rant isn’t directed toward anyone in particular, it’s just my yearly observation of people in general.  I love how everyone talks about “Southern Hospitality”, but I have yet to see any of it.  If you go to the grocery store, people are pushing and shoving their way around, getting pissed off because someone ahead of them isn’t moving fast enough, and it’s pretty ridiculous.  Why can’t we all just get along?  No matter who you are or where you are, next time you’re around other people, stop and think about what you’re about to do, and instead of taking out your anger on unsuspecting strangers around you, do something nice for them and maybe they’ll do the same.  Let someone in front of you in traffic, they’re likely just trying to take the upcoming exit and they won’t be in front of you for very long, if you see someone in line at the grocery store with 3 items and you have 100 items, let them go first, it won’t take much time and you’ll make their day.  If you happen to be the target of some idiot that can’t find it in themselves to be a human being, just be nice to them and tell them to have a nice day, and maybe they’ll get their head out of their ass long enough to realize you didn’t do anything to deserve their anger.

Zombies & Babies

This was too funny to pass up.

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