Oh Passat, how I will miss thee… (or, “my tale of a new car”)

April 26, 2010
Our Passat before trade-in

Our beloved 2007 Passat just came up on lease end, which means that it was time to decide if we wanted to keep it, or if it was time to go car shopping.

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Some small wins..

March 9, 2010
Thumbnail image for Some small wins..

So I’ve been trying to have some wins in life.. and in the last weeks, I’ve managed to make a few, albeit small ones. I figured I’d post these publicly so all my friends, enemies, and random haters on the ‘net can mock me mercilessly if necessary. ;)

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Sun’s Unified Storage 7210 – designed to disappoint?

February 23, 2010
Sun Logo

At my day job, we purchased 3 Sun (er, Oracle) 7210′s (part of their ‘Unified Storage’ platform; the machines are X4540′s with their specialized Unified Storage OS) on the recommendation of one of our vendors. The models we purchased contained 48 250gb disks and 32gb memory — no SSD’s. Our intent was to use these [...]

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Sarah Anthony of The Letter Black (aka Rock Photography is Fun Part 8)

December 25, 2009
Sarah Anthony of the band The Letter Black singing

Sarah Anthony of the band The Letter Black singing; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during Skillet’s ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

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Sarah Anthony of The Letter Black performing during Skillet’s Awake and Alive tour

December 15, 2009
Sarah Anthony of the band The Letter Black opening for Skillet during their Awake and Alive tour

Sarah Anthony of the band The Letter Black; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during Skillet’s ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

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DRBD accepted to mainline kernel for 2.6.33!

December 8, 2009
DRBD Logo

As announced on Florian Haas’s blog, DRBD has been accepted into the mainline Linux kernel, and will be released with 2.6.33. Congratulations to the DRBD team on this major milestone! This will make the lives of all DRBD users much, much easier. For those of you who are not aware, DRBD is a synchronous block-level [...]

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Mediacom, stop messing with my packets!

December 4, 2009
Mediacom - We Edit Your Packets

Mediacom keeps getting worse and worse. As I’ve mentioned before. Mediacom is my ISP at home. Unfortunately, it’s the only service of reasonable speed at a decent price available for my address.

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Web interface with Java console for XenServer (and Xen Cloud Platform)

December 4, 2009
Citrix Logo

One of the things that is nice with the release of Xen Cloud Platform (which I mentioned previously) is Project XVP. As the site mentions, it has four major components – xvp (a VNC proxy to allow you to connect to the console of a VM hosted on XenServer or Xen Cloud Platform), xvpviewer (TightVNC’s [...]

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Google launches new public DNS resolver service, OpenDNS competitor

December 3, 2009
Google Logo

Google recently launched a new Public DNS resolution service. I’m very excited to see this.. the most commonly-used public resolver up until now has been OpenDNS, which works fairly well, but has some features that I do not likely — namely, it will (by default) redirect any requests for non-existing domains to a host on [...]

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What a cute puppy!

November 30, 2009
Thumbnail image for What a cute puppy!

This is Lucky Ehrlich – a black and tan Cavalier King Charles spaniel who stayed with us for a few days while their son was being born.

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Why I made a “stupid” financial move – intentionally

November 23, 2009

On my previous post, I mentioned that we were debating making the switch from a PPO to an HSA. Thanks to all who commented! We’ve decided to go the HSA route, and what’s more, we’ve decided to use the option to roll over funds from an IRA to the HSA (we are contributing the maximum [...]

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John Cooper of Skillet playing his bass, singing, and lit up by pyrotechnics

November 22, 2009
John Cooper of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the 'Awake and Alive' concert tour playing in front of some pyro.

John Cooper of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour. Non-silhouette shot of John Cooper of the band Skillet playing his bass in front of the pyro. Skillet’s use of pyro is great – not overly distracting, and very well timed to [...]

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Ben Kasica of the band Skillet with pyrotechnics in the background

November 21, 2009
Silhouette of Ben Kasica of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the 'Awake and Alive' concert tour.

Silhouette of Ben Kasica of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour. Once again, Skillet loves pyro. Here’s a shot of their lead guitarist, Ben Kasica, with fire in the background.

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Close-up of Korey Cooper of the band Skillet singing with fog in the background

November 20, 2009
Korey Cooper of the band Skillet at her microphone

Korey Cooper of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour. Korey is Skillet’s keyboardist, backup guitarist, and backing vocalist. In other words, she stays busy on the stage! She’s very hard to get pictures of, as she never stays still for more [...]

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Jen Ledger of the band Skillet singing and playing the drums

November 19, 2009
Jen Ledger of the band Skillet performing at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009

Jen Ledger of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

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Ben Kasica of Skillet during a guitar solo in front of fog

November 18, 2009
Ben Kasica of Skillet playing a solo at the Minneapolis Convention Center during their Awake and Alive tour

Ben Kasica of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

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Site updates; switched themes to Headway, then Thesis

November 18, 2009

As I’m sure my regular readers have noticed (and as I mentioned here), my site has undergone a redesign. Instead of having my articles sections managed via a custom (and ancient) php mini-framework that I wrote many years ago, I’ve imported everything into WordPress. This means that people can now leave comments on all pages, [...]

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John Cooper of the band Skillet with his fist up in the air and silhouetted by pyrotechnics

November 17, 2009
John Cooper of the band Skillet thumbnail

Silhouette of John Cooper of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour. NOTE: Wallpaper-sized copies of this available here. Make this your background!

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Are there any open-source worm filesystems?

November 8, 2009

I recently came across Nexenta’s WORM plugin for their commercial storage system, which is based on the OpenSolaris kernel and ZFS. For those of you that aren’t familiar with the term, WORM means ‘write-once read-many’ — in other words, after it’s written it cannot be modified, but can be read any number of times. I’d [...]

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under construction..

November 6, 2009

You may notice a few changes around here; I’m changing my entire site to be managed by WordPress. If you find any links that are broken, hate the new design, or just want to tell me I’m crazy, please leave a comment on this post. Thanks!

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Help! Health insurance – Blue Cross PPO, or Blue Cross HSA?

November 6, 2009

Open enrollment for health plans starts at my day job soon. Now that I have a child, I’m looking at the HSA (Health Savings Account) combined with a HDHP (high-deductible health plan) with a high deductible versus the PPO (traditional) health plan option again, and with a few changes that have been made in the [...]

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