Author: Jeff Phillips

Power Outage

Many of you may have noticed the site down for several days. That is directly due to the power outage. Not that we’ve been without power, mind you. Power came back within 12 hours of loss. (Yay! Air Conditioning!) What happened was that I was in the middle of moving critical files from one disk to another when the power failed. The failure damaged several of my servers including the web server and the email server. I have no email for now, but hope to have it up soon – even if I have to do without the old stuff.

But, as you can now see: the web site is up and running.

Thank you for your patience!

Travel Rememberences

Today, Laura and I sit in our room overlooking the San Diego Marina and try to relax a little. This is a very different travel experience than I’ve had recently.

Up until the a couple of weeks ago, I’d been assigned to several projects at once and the resulting travel was chaotic, frequent, tiring, and unsatisfying. It brought up memories of working for IBM – back when I was on the road every week.

This travel “binge”, however, seemed worse to me. I think it was worse because I was never in the same place twice and was therefore always feeling uprooted and unable to form a workable routine. My workout routine practically died, and I gained some of my weight back. I was always tired and unable to focus on anything but work.

This trip, though, isn’t about the customer: it’s about me. That make a big difference. I’m here for training, which while work related, means that I’m here to learn and take in instead of “give out” and I need some of that now.

I’ve finished one rather unsatisfying project, and worked myself out of another, so I’m down to a single, primary project and that takes a lot of stress off of my shoulders.

After a week at home to rest up a bit, going on this trip with Laura feels almost like a vacation – even though I’ll be spending my days learning things.

Oh: and I get to add a new airport to my list as well… 🙂

Lots of Travel

Normally, I’d travel to a new place and blog about it and such and have a good bit to say. Maybe you’ve noticed, but I’ve been a bit quiet here lately. That’s because I’ve been doing TOO much travel. Yes, that’s right. Too much.

I’ve been going from place to place so much, that I’ve been so tired and emotionally drained that I haven’t had the will to sit down and type.

In fact, I don’t really have it now, but I felt that I needed to put something down.

In the last month, I’ve been to Fayetteville, NC, spent the weekend in DC for Photoshop World, spent a day in Laramie, WY, a day in Breckenridge, CO, and a week in Denver, CO. Then, I just returned from Burlington, VT last night. Next week, I’ll be in Fayetteville again, followed by a weekend jaunt to go plant trees in Pennsylvania. Then I should have a break… for a week or so. Then, Laura and I will be headed to San Diego, CA. I’ll be there for a conference for most of the time, but we’ll be extending a couple of days to celebrate our 9th anniversary. This will, of course, add another airport to my airport list. Again. Just like Burlington did.

I’ll try to post more later when I have some time about the places I’ve been over the last few weeks.

Maybe I’ll even feel up to it. 🙂

New Online Backup Solution

It may not be new, but it’s new to me since I last researched these things. When I first sought a backup solution for our home, I settled on Elephant Drive for two reasons: price (it was $4.95/month for unlimited storage) and software compatibility. This last one meant that I could run the software on our server where all of our data is stored, instead of on one of our laptops or desktops which never has anything stored local. The software had to run on Windows Server.

All was well once I had Elephant Drive running. Then, after two years of great service, the hammer fell.

They wanted to raise prices and eliminate the unlimited package. This meant I would have to pay almost $200/month for my near 1TB of data that I was backing up. That was quite a price jump, so I ditched them and have been without back up… until now.

I found a new company called CrashPlan which has great plans, even family backup plans, and a client that works on Windows Server. I’m now back to backing up!

I’ll soon be backed up again in the “cloud”. Soon meaning about a month due to the vast amounts of data that will be going up.

Progress

I’ve been trying to exercise more lately and I think I may have made some progress. How do I know? Other than loosing a few pounds, which I have, one of the other ways I know I’ve been exercising a lot is that my running shoes are now toast. Fried. Completely worn out.

The last run I did, which was 4.35 miles, really put my poor feet close to some large blisters. The shoes I was using worked very well for me up until lately once I started running again. Now that I’m running more, the age and mileage on the shoes began to chafe a bit.

So, I bought a new pair today. I’ve got to break them in, so I think I’ll be doing a few short runs during the week next week before I hit the 4 mile mark next Saturday.

Go, shoes, go!

Yet More On Media Center

Here I am again, now, talking about my Windows Media Center and the challenges I’ve been having.

The last post said I was happy about the Blu-Ray player, but that’s not quite true. Watching a few Blu-Ray disks has revealed a problem with playback: stuttering. Occasionally, the disk would pause or hesitate, or just generally not play smoothly.

Now, ArcSoft has release an update to Total Media Theater that is supposed to solve a whole host of issues. Of course, I think my problem was broader than just that and related to hardware and drive issues with the drive itself. Funny thing: the manufacturer of the drive just released a firmware update relating to “smoothness of play”.

Hmmm… Maybe I wasn’t the only one having issues?

I haven’t watched a disk yet with both updates, but I’ll have to do that soon.

New Look And Feel

Some of you may have noticed that things are looking different here. Well, they are. But not just “looking” different, are we. We are actually “feeling” different. Under all this visible change are other major changes – changes that will not only make my life easier, but will make the site a bit more stable, reliable, and faster.

What I’ve done is actually migrate [finally] all my sites/blogs/galleries to a single server. I’ve eliminated the old photo gallery server that was an “interim” box and moved that function to the main server. I’ve removed all instances of MySQL and am instead utilizing a single Microsoft SQL Server 2008 instance, which will soon be upgraded to SQL Server 2008 R2 for those that care.

This was harder to do than to write about and much pain and link adjustment/correction was required after migration to make sure everything was working.

In the past, running WordPress required MySQL since the Microsoft database was considered “enterprise” and not “open source”. However, in recent months, some enterprising individuals wrote a WordPress plugin that allows a connection directly to MS SQL instead of MySQL.

Now, all my blog are belong to MSSQL. [Grammatical incorrectness intentional for those not “in the know”, and if you don’t know where that reference comes from, I’m not explaining it to you.]