Today was another busy day. After getting breakfast, the three of us went over to the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum for some cultural enrichment for Reese. The museum was very well put together, with great exhibits and good explanations of the items on display. He had a really good time, and I wish we had more time, but we had to get him back to Peoria. So we hit the road, got him back to his mom, and then made our way down to St. Louis, taking some back roads to avoid the I-55 construction we saw on the way out. Thanks to that I got to take Heather to one of my favorite dive bars, Fast Eddie’s Bon-Air, in Alton, Illinois. It was a favorite haunt during Meet In The Middle rides, serving good cold beer and cheap greasy burgers. From there we made our way in to St. Louis and the hotel.
Author Archives: Pat
Graduation Trip – Day 2
We got up early today, fed Reese some breakfast, and then went over to the UIS campus for the On-Line Graduates brunch. It was great meeting some of the faculty and students that I’ve had classes with. Counting me, three of the four members of my capstone project team were there, which was nice.
After brunch and some picture taking we went over to the Prairie Capital Convention Center for the commencement ceremony. It was a little long, but good. I’m glad I didn’t miss it. The commencement speaker was Wenguang Huang, a UIS graduate, who spoke about some of his experiences growing up in China. After the speeches it was our turn to walk across the stage and receive our diploma holders. That was definitely the high point of the day. I know the grades aren’t in yet, but it does bring a little closure to the process. Once we were all done, we were dismissed and got to pick up a free copy of Huang’s book. I was lucky and got one of the signed copies.
From there we went back to campus to take some pictures in my regalia and then back out to grab a little dinner before turning in for the night. Reese and I downloaded pictures from the cameras and his DSi once we were back at the hotel. The little guy’s got a good eye, and I’m thinking of how to encourage it.
Me in graduate regalia, with Reese and Heather
Graduation Trip – Day 1
Heather and I got down to Love Field this morning to catch our flight to St. Louis. From there we rented a car and drove over to Pappy’s Smokehouse for some lunch. The barbecue was amazing. If you get a chance, it’s worth the trip through the order line. Here’s Heather munching on a pulled pork sandwich. She’s probably going to kill me for posting this picture, so have a wake for me at Pappy’s.
Heather enjoying a pulled pork sandwich at Pappy's Smokehouse
After lunch we drove up to Peoria to pick up Reese and then headed back to Springfield to get some dinner and settle in for the Commencement ceremony tomorrow. We went to D’Arcy’s Pint for dinner, where Reese and I split a horseshoe. It’s an open faced sandwich composed of bread, meat, and french fries covered in a cheese sauce. It was extremely tasty, and got Reese’s seal of approval as well.
Reese's first horseshoe
After that, back to the hotel for some sleep. Got a busy day tomorrow…
Fixing A Failed ESXi Boot Drive
My ESXi box’s boot disk died today. Massive filesystem errors while trying to install the latest security update. Thankfully I’ve had the VMware Management Assistant appliance running regular backups of the configuration, so it wasn’t too tough to restore. I grabbed a spare SATA drive that I had laying around (yeah, I know, it’s overkill), got it hooked up, installed and patched ESXi to the same revision, and restored the latest config backup. All the VMs are on the RAID volume so it was all up and running like nothing happened. So unless you’re using vSphere Auto Deploy you really should be backing up your ESXi configuration and have a physical machine that can restore that data.
Dallas Area Blogshoot Recap
Today was a stress management day, I’ve been way to frazzed with the workload around finishing up my degree and needed to get out and blow off some steam. What better way than a trip to the range? Well, how about a trip to the range with 15 or 20 good people! Yep, I made it to the Dallas Area Blogshoot and enjoyed myself immensely. We had a number of local bloggers including U.S. Citizen, who got us the location, down by the Trinity river, The Redneck Engineer who brought a homebrewed .50 amongst other toys and graciously let me shoot his Mosin-Nagant, and Bob from 3 Boxes, whose table I shared. I also got to shoot Nick The Blogless’s Saiga-12. It’s moved WAY up on my must have list.
We also had some guests who came from further afield, including Southern Belle and KX59 from down around Houston, Borepatch and Mrs. Borepatch drove in from Georgia, and Kevin from The Smallest Minority drove in from Arizona.
A good time was had by all, much ammunition was expended, many targets were ventilated, including Hope-N-Change the magical unicorn. Poor thing, with all the unicorn farts spread over that range it’ll probably get closed down as a superfund site or something.
The best part of the day was being around a bunch of kindred sprits. I didn’t worry once about walking away from a table of guns and ammo. Nor was I concerned that someone was going to violate one of the 4 Rules. Now to see which fades first, the smile on my face, the bruises on my shoulder, or the sunburn (that’s pretty much a riff of Bob’s statement, but I couldn’t have said it better so I’m copying it).
And here’s the guest of honor, Hope-N-Change, slightly worse for wear.
vSphere Lab Box Hardware Ordered
Since it’s becoming such a large portion of my life, I’m building out a vSphere lab box to experiment on without running the risk of breaking my customer’s production site. It’s been a heck of a project getting stuff that will work with VMware’s HCL. But I think I’ve got it nailed down. Here’s the bill of materials:
- Xeon E3-1235 quad core CPU
- Asus P8B-WS motherboard
- 32 gigs of RAM
- 8 gig CF card + SATA adapter for the VMware boot drive
- LSI MegaRaid 9260-4i RAID card with battery backup for the write cache
- 4 x 1.5 terabyte drives for a RAID-5 VMFS volume
- 500 watt 80+ bronze rated modular power supply
I had a good case and CD/DVD drive laying around, so I’m reusing them to keep costs down a little. Everything should be in early next week. Then I can start building it and making sure everything does work with vSphere. If not, who knows, I may end up with a pretty amazing hackintosh…
Flogging Molly – Green 17 Tour 2012
Heather and I went down to meet up with a bunch of friends to go see Flogging Molly this evening. We had dinner at the attached restaurant first, with good food and terrible service. Apparently our server completely flaked out and disappeared some time between taking our orders and when the food was ready. Good thing we didn’t plan on catching the first opening act. But we did get there in time to see the last couple songs of their act. The second opening act, The Devil Makes Three. They’re a sort of bluegrass band, with a twist. We really liked them and after their set I went over to the merchandise table and picked up a CD and got it signed. Tonight was the last night they were on the tour, but we’ll be watching for them to swing through the area again. They’re on the “don’t miss” list.
Finally it was time for Flogging Molly. They, as usual, put on a great show, playing a lot of their well known songs, but adding in some new ones as well. One of the closing songs was a cover of a Bob Dylan tune. That was probably the best Dylan song we’ve ever heard. The only down side of the show was the drunken fools in front of us. They eventually got too stupid for the security staff and got escorted out. I just don’t get that. You spend over $100 on tickets, plus booze, and get thrown out because you can’t control yourself? No thanks. But it really didn’t detract from the evening, just something we laughed at.
Dropkick Murphys At HOB Dallas
I met up with a friend down at HOB Dallas to see the Dropkick Murphys concert this evening. We had standing room tickets instead of seats, which gave us a much different perspective. The show was great, the setlist had a lot of my favorites on it, plus some new stuff I hadn’t heard before. It ended a bit earlier than I’d expected, but it was still a full set. If you’re a fan, definitely take the time to go see them, you won’t be disappointed.
Sportster Tank Decals Found
Reese and I have started the work to get my Sportster up and running again. We got the sheet metal and some of the other hard bits removed while he was down for Christmas. They’re going to get repainted, matching the original paint and decals, as time and money permits. That was the source of my worry because the tank decals were obsoleted years ago and the color, States Blue Pearl, was only used in 1996 and 1997. Turns out that while it was going to be difficult, it wasn’t going to be impossible.
I went up to American Eagle Harley-Davidson to pick up an adjustable thermostat for my heated jacket liner since I had some gift certificate money to spend. While I was there I went over to the parts counter and talked with the guys about the project. They looked up the decals, confirmed that they were obsoleted, and that they didn’t have any. But they were able to check dealer inventory around the country and found a shop in Florida that did have a set. They got the order placed and they’re heading my way. They also gave me recommendations for a good painter and paint codes so that I’ll be able to keep it wearing the stock color. Now I’ve just got to get the engine and everything else out of the frame so that I can get it stripped and powder coated. But at least the hard-to-find part is on its way.
SOPA Blackout
Not that there’s much traffic here, but I’m blacking the blog out tomorrow in support of the opposition to SOPA. I work in Information Technology and understand just how bad it would be for the Internet as we know it. We’re not China or Iran, though with what’s been going on in Congress lately, we could be going there. We should NOT be going there.
It’s asinine that Congress can’t get their act together to pass a budget but when Hollywood flings some money at them they have no problems working things out. Make sure you call your Senators on January 18th and let them know you oppose SOPA and PIPA.