We've got Gears of War 2.

Going to see Senses Fail & Dance Gavin Dance on the 15th - WotLK comes out soon!!!

Umm...I got one of the new MacBooks! It's sexy...although still in the box. Probably won't set it up until next week when I have time.

Old MacBook for sale:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ssPageName=STRK:MESELX:IT&item=250321656992

I just finished cleaning up the kitty poo area, their food area, the dishes and I also cleaned out our "relaxing waterfall thingy". I think I am done for now, hopefully emilie can do the rest tonight or tomorrow. I will probably end up vacuuming. I had an easy consulting appointment this morning at Canus, just a erase a hard drive and then they had some permissions issues I quickly fixed with one command :P

morgan sent me the new Rise Against album and it's pretty damn good. I can't stop listening to the new Anberlin either.

So I've got to work on Macintosh-Admin a little bit, I hope my cards come soon. Just checked on the UPS website -- doesn't look they're coming until the 7th, oh well, shipping was free. I've just got to remember to send them out to my vet, Mark and a couple to my dentist.

I also need to work on TheMangosResource and get some more content posted up there.

I'm still in works on getting a full time job at the University. It's looking very good though. I am having mixed thoughts about it all, as much as I love consulting, but I also like the benefits and being able to take classes for free and all (can anyone says tons of Japanese classes and equine classes?!). I'll probably follow through with it.

Hrmm, not much else to say at the moment, I am looking to get back into World of Warcraft, not sure if I'll go official or not. We do have our own server (anyone can use it!)...so we'll see.

Have a nice day kids!!

As usual, I've been incredibly busy...and when i do have a moment the last thing on my mind is updating Scribbld, so I must apologize to my poor site! I've been working on getting a full time job although I am starting to have second thoughts about it, mostly because I love and enjoy consulting far to much to give it up entirely...so either the people who want to hire me full time need to pay me at least what I would be making consulting or it's just not going to happen...half of me wants it to happen, half doesn't. I mean taking classes for free, benefits are all amazing, but does that compare to the freedom I have when I consult? It's very hard.

Been trying to do as much horse stuff as I can whenever I've got a free moment. I really need to get better about that and not spend so much time on the computers, it's terrible.

morgan and I have been working on a new World of Warcraft server which is now up and running. You can visit this site for more information. I've not had time to re-create my character, hopefully emilie isn't to mad that we wiped the database -- I know she had a few characters setup and we did have our Blood elves.

There's some idiot on #lobby now...

Keith and I are still trying to get paid by YellowSteel, it's really a pain in the ass...I am thinking we're definitely going to re-work how we setup consulting jobs...a lesson learned.

I've got the new Underoath album, I can't stop listening to that, the new Anberlin and The Academy Is...albums. They're absolutely amazing.

raf I added you as a friend :) Morgan says you've got some pretty elite skills.

Not much else to write about at the moment.

Been incredibly busy with working at UVM and working on various other projects AND the consulting business. It's been ridiculous over the last 2-3 weeks or so, and I really don't see things slowing down. It's nice to be busy, but I am not used to it at this level!

In what free time I have I've been actually playing and not working (which is what I usually do). Haven't worked on Scribbld, no work on any websites really as of late. It does suck a little bit, but I just don't have the energy or attention span to do such work...I've been playing a lot of Spore though! I think the Galactic Edition was well worth my money. I am going to watch the making of and the National Geographic video too. The art book included is quite amazing, I really like it. I also noticed that Spore has teamed up with a few services (like a t-shirt place) so you can bring your creations of the screen and stuff. I really hope they add the ability to send in your creature and they made a plastic model/toy from it and mail it to you. I would GLADY play like $20 or something per figurine. WICKED COOL.

Umm, what else...not much else is new, I keep meaning to get my tack cleaned up, which I've not done yet...STILL. I plan on getting it done by at least Sunday so I can go riding that day. Been working at the barn too, 3 day a week, so yeah it's been super busy to say the least.

I think I am going to update Top 5 and post some new September news now.

Yesterday, I had a day full of consulting and other work. I had a client come over in the AM for a data transfer which went very well, quite easy. I also tended to some of their basic computer questions. Then I ordered a pizza and it was very good. After that I had another consulting appointment and that too was very simple. Small Dog screwed up the clients computer and I just went in and fixed it. I don't know if I would say screwed up, but they didn't change the things they had changed back to what they originally were leaving the client rather confused. Either way, I got them all fixed up and they seemed pleased.

So here's a bit of a rant. Back in the spring the town deemed that one of the bridges leading from our town into the next was not safe anymore and had to replaced. This bridge was pretty important to a lot of people as it meant we didn't have to drive on the interstate but rather on this "back road". I prefer it personally cause I love driving with my windows down, and it's not that great at 7mph when you're on the interstate, anyways, when I was consulting, it was the last road right before the bridge. After my appointment I was planning on going to the barn to get my chores done and whatnot. So instead of simply being able to drive over the bridge and then 10 minutes to the barn, I had to drive all the way back home, get on the interstate, then drive all the way back. It was worst thing ever, complete waste of time. The good news is that a temporary bridge will be completed within the next week or two.

After that whole ordeal, I finally made it to the barn, and got my chores done. When I got home, I hung out for a bit, and then my good friend Clifford (who's been in Afghanistan for the last 4 years and finally got back into the states about 2 months ago) came over with his girlfriend. We ended up going out to grab a bite and then we went to the skatepark in Barre where we proceeded to "skateboard" if that's what you want to call it. I haven't really skated in 4 years or so. We definitely had a good time though.

Today, I worked at UVM, nothing really special came out of it. I am thinking about changing to Mantis from OSTicket, mostly because I know Mantis can be a bit more flexible and has more option...although it might be possible to tweak OSTicket so that it does a better job, who knows....I'll try to figure it out tomorrow. Hopefully I can convince them to purchase both OS X Leopard Server and a PC to drop Linux on to for another server.

My buddy John also came over tonight and we went for a bike ride. He basically just left last summer right after we started hanging out. But apparently it was all for the better. He's living in Manchester, NH, doing IT/software engineer stuff. Had an awesome time with him, caught up, was a lot of fun. He'll be going into a new job in a week or something. He's got an office right above Canonical (the Ubuntu people!) which is awesome.

Well I've got to get some dinner cause I've not really eaten all day, I think we'll watch some Doug or some movie tonight, hope you kids are doing well!

Well starting with Friday, I got a bunch of work done in the AM. I actually had a fair amount, more then I thought I would have. I did a lot of preparation for the server work we did this weekend. Obviously I didn't get everything covered because we did hit a few snags while upgrading the servers. So after I got my work done I got all my gear packed up and headed to where the servers are kept. I worked on more prep work while there and then emilie came. She bought some stuff I forgot which was good.

Around 1pm the guy from GMA came out and checked over our lines and everything. We ended up splitting the voice and data wires and then we ran a cable directly from the data lines and pretty much right into the modem. Definitely noticed a BIG improvement and now I've noticed 0 disconnections since yesterday which is awesome. So now Scribbld should be up and running at 100%!

I don't think anything spectacular happened on Friday night. I attempted to get to bed early so that I could wake up early and start working at 8am like I mentioned.


.... interruption....

I just sent this photo to Keith, he should obviously get this instead of iPhone --


.... ok back to your regularly scheduled program ....

So I woke up a bit later then I had wanted to on Saturday, but by 8:20am we were working on the server. The first snag we hit was that one of the web servers wouldn't connect to the Internet. it's NIC module wasn't be loaded. Fortunately after some poking around and chatting on #Gentoo I got it working and made sure it loaded up on boot too.

The next snag we hit was the server to be Scribbld 1 ran some rather new hardware so it had trouble finding the hard drive. After bother #Debian I remembered the last time we installed Linux on it we had to use this special custom build which included drivers for all this new stuff. So after getting a bootable USB key we got the base system installed.

The last major snag we hit was we forgot to snag the Last.fm code from the development box so that feature was "disabled" until we could get to it today.

morgan and I worked until 10pm or so last night. We pretty much finished up all the big things and had about 8-10 smaller things left to do today. We did 2-3 of them today, the rest we'll complete over the course of the next 2 weeks. I don't expect it to take that long though.

emilie and I went to the barn this afternoon, played with the kitties, Bethany did really well in her A circuit show this past week. We almost brought another kitty home, we'll see. When I got home I added the Last.fm code and made sure it worked and it did. I'm just working on another Gentoo install for a private WoW server. I am hoping I can bring the databases over from the old percheron install, but you never know.

Alright, I think it's time to go relax and no more computer!

First I must apologize for not leaving comments as of late. I've been really busy consulting, working my horse, working at the barn, getting paper work done for my new job at the University and in-between spending some time with emilie. I've also been working hard at making sure we get a much more reliable connection between our ISP and our servers.

A guy from our ISP actually came out today and had a look at it all, I had him drill a direct line from our telephone box right into the server room. So now the modem has a direct connection to the phone box and it should be much better. Things seem to be fixed.

Tomorrow we'll be working on upgrading our entire systems setup. I've started a couple things right now, but the majority of it will get done tomorrow. We'll be starting at 8am and I hope to have everything back up and running by the late afternoon tomorrow if not sooner. It's definitely going to be pretty hectic but we'll get it all done.

I think I'll be getting to bed relatively early tonight, got to be up early tomorrow. I am hoping if it's nice in the evening, I'll be able to go out riding, but who knows. Have a nice weekend everyone, I'll attempt to get some commenting done!

This weekend went by waaaay to fast! On Saturday Emilie and I went riding. Definitely had an awesome time, really got a good ride in. Around 10pm or so the main database server locked up and everything went down. Totally suckass, so I had to drive like 20 minutes to where the servers are located and had to manually reboot it to find out the boot system RAID set had become degraded. No idea how it happened, but the rebuild only took 2 hours which wasn't too bad. The last time that happened to me, it happened on a 500GB set and took like 12 hours to rebuild lol. I do apologize about that! emilie actually came with me to keep me company, we finally got home around 12am haha

Sunday, not much happened, I've been playing as much Star Fox Adventures as I can, pretty fun game. I am ~20% done...worked at the barn and then went to my parents for dinner. Had an awesome dinner...I got a bunch of new movies and some new anime too (picked it up off the server while there).

Today I went back down to Boston with Keith. He had a second interview with Apple, he said it went very well, so that's awesome. We hit up Fire & Ice and the way back. Had some amazing food as usual. I highly recommend anyone who lives in Boston or visiting Boston to go there, you will love it! Really good price too, a lot better then I thought it was going to be.

I snagged an iPhone 3G, and it's quite nice. emilie got my old 8GB iPhone.

Tomorrow I've got consulting down south, so that'll be nice, of course I doubt it'll be nice weather, oh well. I think I might go riding tomorrow too. I got paid from the appointment at Yellow Steel in NH, yay!

I believe that's all the news I've got for right now! :) OH, Emilie and I saw Ex Machina, AWESOME!!!

I've been pretty busy with getting another job, consulting and attempting to upgrade Scribbld's code base. morgan and I have been working for the last 2 days on getting the code up to date. We're running it all on a development server which is really nice. I can get a lot of work done there without having to worry about screwing up the live site, always a plus! Basically the major new feature is the ability to have the Music field on the Update page auto-populate with your latest track on Last.fm (should have an account there). Definitely cool!

Besides updating the development code, we've also turned the chat server back on and now instead of having to type in your username that will automatically work (should you be logged in). Since the Chat link only shows up when you're logged in, it should work 98% of the time. The other 2% is people might have the link bookmarked and so when they hit it and they're NOT logged in, it'll give them a nickname like Anon4829 or something.

I've also emailed my ISP about the recent connection dropping between them and the servers, and other equipment. Hopefully they can help me figure out if it's their end or my end. Hopefully it's theirs haha.

On Wednesday I went riding. It was really nice even though we mostly walked around the ring, we did trot a bit, but I was just so beat after working that I just wanted to take it easy. It was a lot of fun though, sure relieves a lot of stress and gives you some time to clear your head. That's what I enjoy most about horses and riding, it's a good time to just focus on that and nothing else, plus you can talk to your horse about anything and nothing have to worry about it!

As for getting another job, that's pretty much 100% finalized which is great, one less thing to worry about. I'll be working at the University of Vermont as a mini (and by mini, I mean just me) IT department for the Center for Disability or something. It'll be fun. Pay is decent, obviously nothing close to consulting, but it'll do just fine.

Anyways, I hope that either this weekend or next (probably next) we can get the Scribbld live site updated to the new code. I think I am going to give Scribbld the quad-core box and one of the dual-core will be a full time development server. So that's the plan as of right now.

I played some Star Fox Adventures last night, it's getting to be a lot more fun now that I've found a guide on GameFAQs. I just hate messing around in a game, trying to figure out what to do, I just don't have time for that. I gotta get going on Final Fantasy III too.

So that's about it for now, I thought about going riding today and I might, I think I am going to relax my poor head hurts, I've not done this much coding in a long time, not fun, code sucks!! Maybe I'll watch Hancock.

This might be a relatively quick post. I'm pretty busy and I'm trying to spend some time with emilie since I didn't get to really last night.

On Saturday I went up to Milton with David and played some airsoft. It was relatively lame because the area was large and there was maybe 10 people. I guess it was okay, it was something to do at least. On Sunday Emilie and I just hung out, went to the barn and had fun, then went to my parents for dinner which was nice.

Today, I had another appointment in Burlington for something which I shall leave un-named for the moment. It actually went well though. After that I had consulting appointment and that too went really well. I got some really yummy banana bread out of it :)

Last night I pretty much spent like 4 hours getting Unrealircd and Anope working. Obviously morgan helped and we pretty much finished it up. There's a little bit left of configuration to do. We tried to get an Eggdrop bot to work, but we might have to have someone else do that for us, as we're pretty much clueless on how it works. For the moment, I am completely satisfied with how it works. I just wanted a basic chatroom where I have some bit of control. That way if people are being dumb I can just kick or ban them. Definitely join up though, I am thinking about putting a big chat button somewhere haha

Tonight, just relaxing, Emilie is making her amazingly delicious calzones, so I can't wait for that. We're watching Star Wars: Episode I right now, I would love to take a cold shower at some point too.

Anyways, I hope everyone has a lovely day and a lovely week, I do hope I have time to post again shortly :)