So I’m hoping to warm up and revive the blog again in a little bit. It was never my intention to abandon the blog, though it may seem that way. Especially since the microblogging stuff is pretty convenient these days, I have spent most of the year doing regular – though smaller – updates on Twitter/MySpace/Facebook (oh yeah, I’m on Facebook now). The main thing was I felt like I needed to sort myself out since being let go from Cisco earlier in the year. Things are starting to ramp up again as I am now involved in a new venture, and I can start making more solid plans for the near future.

So the first order of business for this thing is – what else – to think about the music that came out this year and talk a little bit about my favorite albums. And if I find the time, maybe I’ll put together something about my favorite albums from the last 10 years.

And then, perhaps, in honor of the new year/decade, I’ll do a little relaunch of the site…

The team was a truly special team. We never lost our start-up spirit even after we were acquired and grew in size. We did things very differently from the rest of Cisco, which drew both good and bad attention to us. We had some ridiculously creative and intelligent people on the team. We were a team of about 25 people doing the work of about 35. Managers were also developers. Developers were also customer support. Customer support was also IT. We worked on a platform-independent process messaging system and then we open-sourced it, which was unheard of in Cisco. We proved we could do things with our platform with one guy in a couple weeks what took other teams in the company months to just plan. We were mavericks and trailblazers, and we had fun while doing things our way. On top of all of that, we were close like friends, and not just coworkers. The sudden dissolution of the group was even harder to take because of that.

Between my time with the startup and Cisco, I had put in nearly five years into the team. The things I have learned in those five years as both an engineer and as a person have been innumerable. I’ll continue to have many fond memories of those times in spite of the way it all ended.

I had an extended employment with Cisco for a month (which ended earlier this week) to help with the transition. I’m currently in a period of a couple months where my primary goal is to find another job, although Cisco will keep me on the payroll. This is all part of a rather generous severance package, which is easily the one thing in this whole ordeal they are handling well. In all honesty, though, Cisco was one of the best companies of its ilk to work for, and it seems that it also one of the best companies from which to get laid off. Unfortunately, it still could not escape the typical trappings and politics of a being a large technology company and stuff like this still happens.

I also have a fair amount of free time on my hands now…which, granted, already seems to be taken up by other things. However, I do plan to take some time very soon to get around Texas to spend time with the usual suspects and some people I haven’t really made time to see. Aside from the larger cities, I’ll probably try to hit up some other places I normally don’t stop in like Ft. Worth and College Station. Some e-mails will be sent out soon.

I originally had not envisioned that I would actually stay around long enough to be here when the New Year comes, but now it seems more likely that it will happen. I think I have been feeling particularly worn down this year and, as usual, coming back and seeing everyone…even if it hasn’t been everyone…was exactly what I needed. The “usual crowd” may not be quite the same, but it all still feels very much the way I remember it to be. Maybe even better.

This past month in particular have been really busy.  I’ve been traveling a lot and probably having the most active summer I’ve had in a while.  I’ve been taking baby steps to polish some of the stuff I have going on the web.  I put up a news/blog for the Splatt site to at least maintain some sense of relevance and keep people updated on it.  On that note, I’ve put a couple of notable photo sets: the recent camping/rafting trip and Adam & Kasey’s wedding.

And then, like 10 minutes after getting to work, I was actually feeling a little jittery. Since I’m not a coffee drinker, I wasn’t used to having so much caffeine coursing through my veins that early in the day. It was only one cup (or maybe two, a grande size?). I guess most people’s bodies are used to it, but it was a very odd feeling for me. It was like I should’ve been nervous about something. It wouldn’t go away until I had something for lunch, and even then I probably couldn’t bring myself to get a soda until about 3pm.

I mentioned that I thought I heard somewhere that a soda had as much caffeine as coffee, so I was a little confused, to which one of my coworkers replied that that was a load of crock. He also said that Starbucks coffee has about twice the caffeine as most coffee, so it was like I guzzled about four or five cups of Folgers.

Honestly, kids, I don’t see how you do it, but I guess it goes the other way around, too.

I will also be out and about a lot in the month of April.  I’m due for a visit to Houston, Nacogdoches, and Dallas (possibly twice) starting next weekend.  Unfortunately, I will probably be in and out of Dallas both times, so I won’t have enough time outside of doing what I’m going to do there and perhaps seeing my brother and sister-in-law, so I can’t promise to see any of you Dallas folk (maybe on some other random weekend).

As usual, work and life is busy, and I hope all is well with you guys.

I spent my whole evening today setting up the Linux-based open source firewall/router IPCop with an old machine my brother gave me and some NICs I had lying around. I actually first spent about an hour rearranging my computer room. I decided it made more sense having the firewall box and my server boxes on the same side of the room as my computer, which was not true in my previous configuration.

I struggled for a while to get the firewall set up the way I wanted it, and even now it’s not 100% perfect. One of my NICs seem to be faulty, so I currently don’t have an “orange” zone for the webserver. Instead, I’m poking a hole for port 80 into my “green” zone where the server currently resides. I hope to rectify that little issue soon. I also spent about an hour and a half figuring out why I couldn’t get my wireless to work, only to discover one small but crucial step needed to let my wireless router talk with the outside world. It’s always the small stuff.

Another thing currently bothering me is that I can’t seem to get it to pick up OpenDNS as the DNS servers, even when I specify them. It still assigns the DNS servers it retrieves from my ISP’s DHCP. I’m thinking it may be a bug. It’s not a big deal, but I liked using OpenDNS as it made web browsing just a little snappier.

But all in all it looks good. I have a firewall now that acts as an awesome router with different subnets for my wired and wireless machines and just enough pinholes between them to do the things I want. Hopefully, we will no longer see a port 80 forwarding issue, so the website should be much more available now. It now also serves as my personal time-sync (ntp) server which itself syncs with the NTP Pool Project once daily.

Technobabble aside, all you really need to know is now the site should be up regularly and hopefully you should see more posts from me soon.

The combined Christmas and New Year’s break went very well this year. Christmas with the family was particularly good as we actually had a lot to do and everyone and everything got along without a hitch. Everybody had an idea of what should be in the Christmas dinner, so we compromised and put everything in the Christmas dinner. It was way too much to eat but easily the best holiday/family dinner we’ve had in some time. By some sort of default, I ended up manning the gas barbecue grill too cook about half of the dinner, and the Christmas miracle was everything came out (eh, well, chicken was a little pink near the bone…)

It’ll be difficult for me to go back to the grindstone at work tomorrow. We’re supposed to be hitting the ground running, and my co-workers are getting a day’s head start on me as I type this. I’ll be heading back to Austin sometime today.

My year can be summarized by a lot of the usual things: went through some interesting things, faced some interesting challenges, a lot of sucked, but a lot of good times were there as well, and all in all I learned a lot and came out, I hope, a better and wiser person. I’m hoping for more of the same in the new year.

Coming up soon: favorite albums of 2007.

So after big Joe go married a few weekends ago, it seems that I finally feel free of outside obligations to go anywhere or do anything and finally getting some of my own personal stuff out of the way. I’ve been slowly cleaning the apartment up removing clutter, but the most exciting thing to happen to me as of recently is the purchase of a new mattress.

It’s an indicator of how wholly unexciting my life really is, but this new mattress is a big deal to me because it means I’m finally getting some decent sleep in…ever, really. I don’t think I’ve ever had a good mattress to sleep on in a regular basis, and I do mean that in the sense that just about every mattress I’ve had until now was of sub-par quality. Growing up I slept an old and worn out mattress. In college I slept on crappy value mattresses that were either part of the rental or were free throw-aways from other college dorms. When I moved out on my own, my parents gave me a full size that they themselves had 10 plus years to wear out. So now I have a brand new queen size quality mattress with a pillow top, and I’ve only had it since Tuesday, but I’m pretty sure I’ve already been sleeping better and waking up feeling better. I’m hoping that this will also put an end to the hours of lying awake at night and even the occasional sleepless night that I’ve been having for several years now.

Without going into too much detail, things at work have been pretty good as well. Our team at Cisco is growing rapidly and we have changed up our development process, and overall I think it’s greatly benefitting us. We’re due to move into some new office space at the end of the month, and I think we’re at the cusp of some exciting things. We were also told that our product has finally pulled in a pretty good amount of revenue for the company this quarter, which is sort of a first for us, so it’s helped renewed my optimism for what we’re doing. What has also been nice is that a few of our new hires are just-out-of-college guys with a solid sense of geek pride, so I’ve been enjoying finally having some people on the team that I can truly think of as my peers.

As usual, and like everybody else, I’m still trying to get the rest of my stuff in order though.

Hopefully, you’ll hear some more things from me soon.

…

In Chicago.

Tom, this means I’m finally coming to visit you in St. Louis.

I’ve been thinking about hitting up Houston and Dallas sometime in February. I’ve been promising to come to Houston especially now that so many of you guys are there now, and I want to see a couple of my favorite girls while they’re still glowing with pregnancy. I’ll let you people know if/when I decide on dates, and hopefully you can make some time for me.

I feel like I should leave you with something to entertain you…hmmmm…

Okay, this is REALLY geeky in nature, but maybe you guys would like the spend 15 minutes learning the basics of a programming language. Here is a great online interactive tutorial on the basics of Ruby. Ruby is an interpreted language that is supposed to be intuitive to learn and makes it possible to put together programs rather quickly, and thus has become very popular as recently. The best part is, if you’re curious about it, you can download everything you need to write, test, and run Ruby programs for free at the official Ruby site.

Why am I talking about this? I know these guys. When we were still our own company and no more than nine employees, Metreos squatted in their offices. We actually took up more of their office space than they did – there was only an administrative assitant and two or three executives. The whole time I was there, though, I had no idea what they did. I just think it’s interesting that all of this was going on in the background of where I was working for a while.

The lady behind the counter smiled at me and said, “Well hello again!”

Now, Lord knows I don’t usually make an effort to remember who has checked out my groceries, so as far as I was concerned, this was my first encounter with this lady. Apparently, this was not the case. What impressed me was the fact that she remembered me, even if she had checked my groceries before, because I figure with all the people you see day in and day out as a checker, everyone would just be a big blur.

She started scanning what few items I had and remarked that I always seem to come late in the evening. It was about 10:30. I smirked and told her it’s the only time I really have to do things, which is mostly true. I was rather amused that she made that observation, too. It made me wonder if I’m just getting too predictable.

But it is a grocery store, so that’s not so bad. But one time…

I walked into a Best Buy and walked passed one of the employees, someone who obviously managed one of the sections. He took a look at me and said “Hey! Welcome back!”

Yeah, at that point I was pretty sure I had been going there too often.

I understand this is actually how they met.

So all in all, I’ve recovered from the situation pretty well. I’ve only lost about a day of photos from the ACL festival!

In the last three months, several major components of my computer have suddenly failed on me (I suppose it’s not often that they gracefully and slowly fail on you, though).

Just before the move, my computer would power up for about 4 seconds before it would shut itself down again. I thought maybe the power supply was bad, but a power supply tester confirmed that it was okay. I figured it had to be my motherboard. Replacing the motherboard pretty much rebuilding the system, so I ended up doing a full-on upgrade: motherboard, processor, and video card. All that cost me about $300.

Then, about a month ago, I found my computer wouldn’t even turn on. Interestingly, this happened while trying to diagnose a problem with my internet connection. Strangely, it was somehow linked to the fact that I had my coaxial internet running through my surge protector. I decided I wanted to try and see what happens if I reset my protector, so I shut off my computer. Then when I tried to turn it on again, it wouldn’t. After checking cables and all, I decided to test the power supply again. My worst fear was right – my power supply gave out. It was a nice name brand one, too, and I had it for less than a year. Incidentally, it was only the 5V+ that was no longer giving for some reason. So I went to the store and bought a replacement for about $80.

I came up to the loft this evening to do some stuff on it, and I saw something I did not care to see. The computer looked like it had rebooted sometime today or maybe even last night, but Windows did not boot up. Instead, on the bottom of the screen was message saying that it could not boot the OS. Of course, that is never good.

I tried rebooting and, sure enough, it was the same message. I opened up my computer to see what was going in there. I heard a tell-tale “click-click-click” that could only have been the final death throes of my hard drive. It seems my luck with components haven’t been that great.

I also noticed while I was in there that everything seemed pretty hot. I wasn’t sure if it was normal or extreme, but it seemed like it was more than I was used to. The thing is the loft in my new apartment has this window that is in a peculiar position where it is impossible to mount any blinds or curtains on without, maybe, a sturdy ladder and someone to hold the other end down, and even then, you risk falling down to the living room below. All the heat in the apartment already rises up to the loft, but then the window lets in the pure sunlight all day long, so it gets really hot up there. I have a feeling it could very well be having a considerable effect on my hardware.

So, I’ve got this thing called a “temporary shade” which means it is less elegant than a blind, but it’s stupid easy to mount and it’ll get the job of blocking the sunlight done. Getting to the window to put it up is still a task that I’ll probably have to leave to the complex’s maintenance crew, but I hope that this will help things out. Maybe it’s also just bad luck, but I hope that my components aren’t dying out because of any one faulty component I keep overlooking.

Anyways, hard drives are stupid cheap these days, and luckily Best Buy happened to have a good sale on some Seagate drives this week. You can pick up a 120GB for $50 or $200GB for $80. I originally was going to get the 120GB, but I decided to spoil myself (again). Fortunately, I’ve been doing regular backups, and most of my important day-to-day stuff is on the laptop, so there are no real setbacks. My only fear is that since my backups are only weekly, I may very well have lost the pictures I took from the last day of the Austin City Limits Festival this past weekend, although there may be some hope in restoring them from my currently-empty flash card.

So those are my current adventures in tech.

Coming up: how to get any Linux+GNU/BSd distribution running in a virtual machine on your Windows desktop.

And consider coming to big Death To Work Fiesta on Logansport on Sunday night, and make sure to bring a dish. Apparently it’s the 10th anniversary, so it promises to be a big one.

Sort of.

Along with moving, things kicked up a notch at work.

Barely had any time for myself until now.

Most everything is still in boxes.

Slowly and surely, it’ll come together.

My main system also recently kicked the bucket. I thought it was the power supply, but I suspect it’s the motherboard. I suppose it’s fine, everything in that system is newer than the motherboard and processor, even the case. The core of that system served faithfully for four years, and it was still more than suitably fast for my needs, so getting something newer will be faster than I could probably ever really need. Fortunately, all my crtical data and day to day activities have been moved to my laptop