I love Christmas, and I wish December hasn’t gone by so quickly. I have felt sick the last few days with some sinus pressure and it’s put a real damper on my overall Christmas cheer. We are driving to Portland on Thursday morning to spend Christmas with my family and while I am not looking forward to the drive, I am excited to get down to see my family.

Between Christmas and New Years Mars Hill staff get the week off and so I traditionally go to work and take of the major outages that I just can’t do during the year. This year I am planning on moving our Finance server from one virtual environment to another to finish out my redundancy project for our virtual environment. I am hoping as well to get some cleanup done in the Co-lo with some wire management.

Karen’s Aunt and Uncle and there two boys are getting baptized at their church in Portland New Years eve and so we will be going back down to Portland to be with them. So over all a big two weeks coming up, but it should be a great way to end 2009.

This has been a tough week at work.

We currently have a SAN down, an important NAS down, and today our Financial Server decided to kick the bucket. All of this is stuff I don’t have time to work on but forced to.

There is just not enough time in the day to get everything done.

UPDATE: Actually… finance server is fine, it just helps if you work on the right instance of the server… kicking myself now.

I am very much looking forward to vacation this week. Tuesday marks our two year wedding anniversary with my beautiful wife. It’s gone by so quick but it has been an amazing two years and a really hard last six months. We have had apartments problems, health issues, job loss, and death and sickness in the family and with friends. But with all of that, we are so thankful for God’s grace and for continuing to teach and strength us and bringing us joy in during this season of time. Thank you Jesus!

It’s very loud and cold today…

I am out at our datacenter for the church upgrading our Call Managers from 4.2 to 6.1. It has been a long day of waiting and so far I am not even done with the first one. I have been planning for this day since December of last year so I am excited to see this finally get completed.

Everyone is out of the office this week so it is a convenient time for to take down the phone system and do what I need to do. So far though, the phone system hasn’t been down yet as it fails over to the other server when one is down. We will see what happens when this is complete and it’s time to move onto the next one.

More as it happens…

8:15pm Well, the first server is done and the phones are up, which is good. I was a little woried the phone were not going to like the new firmware but that seems ok. Now on to the second server. It is past the point of installing and try to talk with the first node and it is taking it’s sweet time. You’d think with a gigabit backbone that it would have no problem transfering data. Oh well…

These last few weeks have been crazy.

We have been getting rid of and simplifying everything. We brought a Christmas tree home last week, and already we have a pretty small apartment and so it was a serious shuffle of furniture to get it to fit. We decided it was time to get rid of some chairs… Then replace a bookshelf… then take down the futon in the guestroom/office and turn it back into an office.

By the time it was all said and done, the entire weekend was gone. But everything has been simplified. We even were able move some customer websites to an external hosting facility and turn off a firewall/switch/and three servers. The office is now very quiet, but also very cccooollldd. The network really kept everything toasty warm. I guess on the bright side, we should save a bunch on electricity!

This new theme is awesome.

I think I could probably play with it all night long, but I think it is finally wearing me out and it’s time to go to bed.

The realization that I have to be up in 6 hours for work tomorrow is now setting in…

This current theme I have is nice, but the color for headlines is pink. That’s got to go….

The server I had this site previously on decided to kick the bucket.

The power supply for my Powermac Dual G4 Quicksilver is on it’s last leg, and I am not sure if I really want to replace it. I found a replacement but it would set me back about $300. Not really excited about that.

I am going to try and get the previous posts off the drives but it may not be worth the effort. So I am starting fresh! Nothing like a new beginning… in the dead of winter.