Author: Jeff Phillips

Geeking Out

If you’re not interested in technology or other geeky stuff, you can probably skip this entry as I’m going to be describing some of the technical endeavors I’ve been undertaking over the last couple of weeks.

SP1
You may or may not have noticed that the site is a bit faster. This is mainly due to the fact that I have installed Service Pack 1 for Windows Server 2008 R2 on both the host and the various guest OSs that I have running. The new Dynamic Memory feature allows me to just set initial memory settings and allow the system [guest] load to either request more memory or free up unused bits so that other guests can use them. I’ve given the email server and this web server [and the firewall server] priority so that their requests for resources are serviced first.

The performance is much better – you may not notice much, but on my end when I use my virtual desktop [which is where I do all my personal computing like Quicken and personal email] is much faster since it has the RAM it needs and the other guests aren’t being hogs.

It also makes accessing all my other guest machines easier and faster. The ones not used much can idle and give back RAM. It’s supposed to be “greener” too, allowing you to save money by throttling back CPU and resource usage on the server to only what is needed.

New Virtual Box: FAIL
I tried to utilize one of my old laptops, a Toshiba Techra M5, as a new virtual host for a couple of guest machines [like a new virtual SAN host I got at TechReady]. I installed the raw, bare-bones Windows Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 – which is NOT Windows Server, for those of you not in the know. The install went fine until I got to installing SP1 [see above] on the machine. The Blue Screen of Death made a command performance.

It seems that I remember why I stopped using the laptop: it’s prone to overheating and crashing, which is exactly what it did – several times. So, scratch having another host box for my virtual machines for now. I suppose I’ll have to wait until I get a new one and take one of the other old ones and repurpose it.

Smart Cards and Certificates
I’m also playing with certificates and smart cards. I’m about halfway there – I’ve gotten one to work via logging into a laptop, but not yet with OWA [which is the goal].

I’ll soon have to upgrade the CA to 2008 R2, but not just yet.

That’s all for now. 🙂

I’m Not Dead

I know I haven’t said much lately on the blog, but the truth is that I’ve been quite busy traveling around the world for the last couple of months. In fact, right now I’m sitting in Seattle for a “community day” for the Microsoft public sector group. It’s not bad, but I’d rather not be here on a Sunday. They have attached this day to the general TechReady week… I suppose to save money and get us all together in one place.

As for my other trips, we went to Belize at the end of November, and I almost immediately went to England and Germany, only to hop on a plane to Fayetteville, NC the very next week. After a short break, Laura and I headed to Laramie, WY for Christmas. Laura then went to Texas for a few days to visit with her family and her grandmother. We then went straight to Hawaii for another business trip, followed by another trip to Texas for Laura’s grandmother’s funeral.

At least I had two weeks at home before coming out here to Seattle.

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More Belize & Happy Thanksgiving!

After three full dive days at the Turneffe Flats resort, we hopped on the boat back to the mainland for a journey to the interior of this beautiful country. On our way in, we saw four very large cruise ships station keeping off the coast of Belize City. Since there’s no deep-water harbor there, they have to anchor offshore and use water-taxis to get the people off. Four at once, though, was quite a sight. There were boats streaming back and forth to each one causing quite a lot of wakes. I’m certainly glad we didn’t chose that mode of transportation.

Here’s a picture of the sunrise on our last day on the atoll. (well, it’s got a little extra “dynamic range” but it’s true to the emotion… 🙂 ) This was taken from the deck of our ocean-front cabana.

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So, after several days of exertion, today is a day of rest and thanksgiving: we’re both thankful that we have the privilege to be able to go on a trip like this – it’s certainly something worth saving up for.

Here is a picture of where I’m sitting right now while I type this entry:

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From ocean to jungle. The weather is great up here, and we’re glad since there’s no air conditioning. It does take a little getting used to since when we left, it was close to freezing.

I’m working on getting the pictures ready for posting, but since the bandwidth is so limited, I will not put the on the site until we get home.

That’s it for now: here’s wishing you all a very happy and thankful Thanksgiving day!

The Belize Experience

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this post since I’m exhausted, but I wanted to let you all know that Laura and I are having a great time. We’ve been in Belize a couple of days now and really love the place so far. We stayed at a bed and breakfast in town the first night and made friends with the owners.

Then, we went out to the Turneffe Atoll where we are now. We’ve been on three dives already and we’re TIRED. So, here are a few samples to tide you over.

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More to come!

Vacation Planning

Once again it’s that time of year where we are dying for a vacation [well, isn’t that always, though?] and the destination of Belize has been chosen. It looks like we’ll be doing a fall dive trip to the Turneffe Atoll – which will be quite cool. It’s basically an island with a hotel on it – and a small one at that. That’s it. Just relaxation and diving.

For the second part of the trip, though, we’ll head inland into the jungle where we might do any number of things like canoeing, hiking, horseback riding, but certainly photography.

We have finally made our reservations.

It wasn’t easy, though. At first, we wanted to go to Cayman. However, the entire island is celebrating some kind of anniversary and all flights were sold out. Then, the search began in earnest with me looking from the Seychelles to Galapagos to the Marshall Islands – each of which was deemed too far. Belize finally won, but even choosing the hotels/resorts was tough. Each resort has different features and activities and prices things differently leaving us with a very difficult task of comparing apples to oranges.

It’s planned and booked now, though, and I’m ready to leave… but… I gotta wait a couple of months now.

Media Center Project: Complete!

After many months [years maybe] of working to build a Windows Media Center PC, I now have the final piece of the puzzle. I have installed a quad-tuner card from Ceton which just came in this morning after literally months of waiting. Instead of being release in May, it was released last week and only just now arrived at the house.

Since I am working from home today, I took a coffee break to install the card – and that’s about all the time it took. Power down, insert card, power up, install driver & update BIOS, restart, update Media Center tuner configuration. Start recording four shows at once! Woo Hoo!

Project: Media Center – DONE!

Next up: Project: Kitchen Backsplash… waiting on ordered tile.

New Dishwasher

One more item in our kitchen remodel has been finished and that’s the dishwasher. Since we had to replace it, we went with stainless as we are eventually going to replace the appliances with stainless ones for the rest.

We’ve had it installed now for a while, but since I’ve been lazy about blogging for a while, I thought I’d share a picture of the new dishwasher finally.

Next up will either be tile or some electrical work.

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