Five Down, Seven To Go

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Months, that is. The year, it flies by too quickly. We’re approaching the heat and humidity of the year, sadly. The upside of the unpleasant months is fresh veggies out of the garden. Soon, soon:

Garden - Late May 2014

Garden – Late May 2014

Things are going well … I cleaned house yesterday. No, really. With a car wash mitt and a few buckets of soapy water, I cleaned everything I could reach on the front of the house. Doing it that way was a pain in the ass, and frankly exhausting, but the method did a much more consistent job of cleaning than using a pressure washer to draw pictures in the dirt and oxidized paint. Originally I was just after the trim and gutters (off-white and white) to spruce things up. But it became quickly clear that everything needed attention. I’m very happy with the results. After I finished that up, I weeded out the garden beds.

Today, shopping, laundry, restructuring the garage entrance to the shed, and mowing. Of the four tasks, only the third is mildly interesting. The shed floor is about 14″ up from the level of the garage, and when we moved in, it was configured as one 14″ step. I move assorted wheeled equipment in and out of there, and it made sense to me early on to construct a short, steep ramp there. It was bolted to the ledger, and I used tapcon screws to attach the ramp to the concrete floor. Sturdy. In addition, at the shed back door, leading to the back yard, there is a concrete step.)

The problem with the ramp is that it is (errr, was) adjacent to Marcia’s driver-side door, which means the ramp has been rarely, but painfully in the way for her. A few years ago, I built a portable ramp, and started moving some gear in and out through the back as well. Eventually (this year), I figured that I could use that ramp when needed on the garage side as well. So today I deconstructed the 11 year old ramp, and re-used the materials to make a single step there, splitting the 14″ difference. That step will support the portable ramp as necessary, and Marcia now has more/better maneuvering room when entering and exiting her car.

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Our condolences to the family and friends of Pfc. Jacob H. Wykstra, 21, of Thornton, Colorado, who died on May 28, in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained as a result of an aircraft accident.

A Lovely Day for an Anniversary

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Yep. Sixteen wonderful years I’ve been married to Marcia. To celebrate, she worked on a t-shirt quilt for a customer, while I … went to work. But this evening, on the way home …

Got my gal some roses

Got my gal some roses

She seems to like them. She also got a sewing thing accessory as a pressie, while I’ve got a set of E. E. “Doc” Smith paperbacks headed my way. We’re so romantical. We’ll go out to supper to complete our celebration one of these days.

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Marcia got a FitBit thing a while back, and she likes it very much. It helps her keep track of a lot of the things she needs to. Since I’ve been trying to do better on that front, like this (this evening):

Burned a kilocalorie

Burned a kilocalorie

I could also do better at keeping track of such things, as well as managing my portion control through better records keeping. But I chose a different bit of gear: a Jawbone UP24. I executed the purchase through Amazon, which saved a few bucks, and I have had very few problems puzzling out how to make the App interface operate. I’ll report further on the product, the app, and how/if it’s helping me with any of my goals at some ill-defined later date.

Memorial Weekend

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First, a correction (fixed already) – I had the umlaut in the wrong place in Zoë Keating’s name last week. Sigh. I wouldn’t have these problems if I’d listened to more metal when I was growing up.

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The house in Kensington, California, where I spent my first four years, was sold last year. Zillow has pictures … and at least one of the stirs some memories.

The living room on Norwood

The living room on Norwood

Note the cabinets flanking the demarcation between living room and dining room. Note the glass front doors on the right cabinet. Note the LACK of glass front doors on the left cabinet. Yeah … that was me. Sometime between three and four, I was running hell bent for leather through the house. There was a sofa there, and a rug. I tried to corner around the sofa and lost all traction. Head first into the glass cabinet doors I went. I can report with some authority that scalp slices do in fact make one bleed like an actual stuck pig. The scars are with me to this day, as the glass is not with the house, also to this day. Thanks to my mom for bringing this memory back to the top of my brain (right near the scars, one suspects).

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I killed myself yesterday in the yard – all of the front beds are now weeded and mulched. In the evening we went over to supper with Linda and Mike. Yummy, yummy lamb, veggies, potatoes, and freshly baked chocolate chip cookies for dessert. Excellent company, and excellent victuals. Then we played Ticket to Ride, in which I eked out a two point win with the longest train. Not sitting on the Loser’s Couch last night, Mr. Wheaton!

Today was shopping for food, then shopping for paint. It’s time to clean, lightly sand, and paint the trim, front and back. Sadly, the local Sherwin Williams store, which is the local listed seller of Duron paint (an off-white for the porch and window trim), had a singularly unhelpful person who told me they couldn’t help me with the paint, even though I had the color codes. So screw that. I chiseled out a paint chip from one of the posts. Then I headed over to Will’s Home Decorating in Beltsville, where they still had a can of the original Benjamin Moore Classic Burgundy color which is the second trim color. They also matched and mixed me a gallon of the color I need to replace the Duron brand. Guess who’s getting my continuing business, eh?

The rest of the day? A write-off, frankly. I burned through most of my energy yesterday, and I’ll do another round of stuff tomorrow, so breaking in the middle seems like a good idea.

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Tomorrow is Memorial Day. Marcia and I have a number of people in our families who served in our nation’s armed services. It’s good to take the time to reflect on their service, and remember their stories, and their sacrifices.

Our condolences to the family and friends of Spec. Adrian M. Perkins, 19, of Pine Valley, California, who died on May 17, in Amman, Jordan, from a non-combat related injury.

Mostly Boring

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Productively, my weekend was full of remote work for $OFFICE, and yardwork. I did a fair bit of lawn work, and installed the pepper seedlings that Rich sent down from Michigan with Marcia. They were pretty droopy, the plants nearly drowned (I think) in the deluge of Friday, with no drainage in their holding tray. Good thing I transplanted today, eh?

Sadly, the news that Zoë Keating’s guy has cancer landed in my twitter feed this evening. Sending Jeff, Zoë, and the CelloKid all the good vibes I can lay hands on. I’m a huge fan of Zoë’s work, and y’all should be, too.

*      *      *

Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • Chief Warrant Officer Deric M. Rasmussen, 33, of Oceanside, California, died May 11, in Mazar E Sharif, Afghanistan, as the result of a non-combat incident.
  • Command Sgt. Maj. Martin R Barreras, 49, of Tucson, Arizona, died May 13, in San Antonio Military Medical Center, Joint Base San Antonio, Texas, from wounds suffered on May 6, in Harat Province, Afghanistan, when enemy forces attacked his unit with small arms fire.

Happy Mother’s Day

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Yes, yes, I called my mom. Thanks for checking, Internet. Also for Mother’s Day, Lexi had me wash Marcia’s car. Marcia was effusive in her thankage. All you other Mothers out there, you be happy, too, mmm-kay?

Me, I’m headed back to work tomorrow after a few days off. Nice and relaxing. (Work, I mean. Time off is exhausting!)

*      *      *

Our condolences to the family and friends of Pfc. Daniela Rojas, 19, of Los Angeles, California, who died May 3, in Homburg, Germany, due to a non-combat related illness.

Trip Report: LOPSA East 2014

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As promised, if a few days later than expected, here is my trip report for LOPSA East 2014.

For those who don’t know, LOPSA is the acronym for the League of Professional System Administrators. LOPSA is the entity that emerged from an attempt by SAGE to gain independence from USENIX back in 2005. You can get more of the back story on the LOPSA history page (https://lopsa.org/about_history).

Four years ago, PICC (the Professional IT Community Conference) was first held in New Jersey; it was organized by William Bilancio and Tom Limoncelli. I missed that one, but have attended ever since. Last year, the organization decided that if there was going to be a renaming to more closely associate the conference with the LOPSA “brand”, the time was ripe. Thus, LOPSA East.

Before the breakdown of my trip, let me present the value. I was $1100 all in: conference with two days of training, talks, and networking, plus food, lodging, and fuel. That’s a hell of a deal. I could have peeled off another 300 bucks by getting up at 4 AM on Friday, and driving home after the end of things late on Saturday, but life is short. Frankly, there is no better bang for the buck than a LOPSA regional conference.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the USENIX LISA conference as well. But there are so many simultaneous things going on at a conference of that size that I am ALWAYS missing one thing I want to do, to do something else instead. LOPSA East is small enough that I only felt that regret a little bit, since there are only three main tracks, not ten or a dozen. And if the price per hour of conference at LISA were the same as LOPSA East, LISA would be half the price. EVERY ticket at LOPSA East is a golden ticket, IMO.

The venue for the conference is the Hyatt Regency New Brunswick, in New Jersey. It’s about three hours and change for me to drive, in the middle of the day when the traffic is light. It’s a good hotel, pleasant and well-kept. The staff are polite and helpful. Stuff is expensive (as hotel stuff usually is), but the conference block rate for rooms is good, and I was comp’d the WiFi. (Dudes, seriously, Internet access is like air and water – build the charge into the room rate, mmmm-kay?)

*** Thursday ***

I drove up the day before the conference started, as has been my habit since I first started attending this conference. It lets me get settled in and be rested and ready for technical material – talks and trainings – first thing the next morning. I also found, my first year at LOPSA East (then PICC) that the conference volunteers and organizers also are on site the night before, and have a dutch treat supper, followed by assembly of the conference totes, etc. I’ve always been welcomed and been happy to help out in any way I can. This year, same thing, though we finally had more people than the small “private” dining room at the back of the restaurant in the hotel could hold.

The materials were all onsite by 1900, and we’d gotten everything assembled by 2000. Oh, yeah – I can definitely recommend the lobster macaroni and cheese. Just sayin’ … Folks often head out for a beer or three thereafter … but I usually skip that part,  not being a drinker.

*** Friday ***

One of my prime objectives in this conference was to get my head better wrapped around tools and utility of configuration management systems. I’d attended an Intro to Puppet training a couple of years ago, and while I “got it”, I wasn’t working with any CM at the time, and needed more personal experience with the concepts and products. For a variety of reasons, this has become my “year of configuration management”. I’d spent a considerable amount of personal time here at home working though issues with Puppet, and experimented a bit with Chef and CFEngine … and I was headed down the Puppet path when Erik Fitchner (former cow-orker at NFR/CP) suggested that I simply must check out Ansible or Salt prior to committing. So I started working with Ansible at home, too. This work informed my talks and trainings selections at the conference.

I started on Friday morning with a half-day Intro to Puppet tutorial presented by Thomas Uphill. Within the context of the work I’d already done, I understood everything that was placed in my brain, and picked up a few things I’d missed in autodidact mode. As with every training I attended this year, every demo and example presented actually worked. Thomas’s slides for the presentation are here: https://goo.gl/tZLMQX

Lunch (both days) is provided by the conference, at the hotel. I’ll give the Hyatt credit for having a first-rate menu, and kudos to the conference organizers for finding it in the budget to feed us so well, and having yet another space and time to meet and talk and network. With a small conference, there isn’t as much of a “hallway track” as there is at LISA-scale events, so these lunches are an important part of the overall LOPSA East experience.

Friday afternoon, I attended Mark Harrison’s tutorial on Vagrant: Not Just For Developers. I learned quite a bit about the speed and utility of spinning up and down test systems for any variety of purposes. I’m looking forward to implementing some of what I learned into my virtualization workflow at the office. Here are Mark’s slides.

The Friday evening Keynote was given by Vish Ishaya, on the topic of OpenStack in the Data Center. After last year’s keynote about our pending doom and the crisis of cloud that MJR gave us, Vish’s talk was optimistic, nearly all sweetness and light by comparison. I know more about OpenStack now, and how it plays into both external cloud vendor business models, and some of what to consider when looking for private (corporate internal) implementations.

After the keynote, a group of us went out to supper across the street at the Old Bay restaurant. I had a superb chicken and sausage jambalaya, the others in our group were equally happy with their selections. Highly recommended.

Conference BoFs (Birds of a Feather gatherings) and Lighting Talks were scheduled from nine to midnight. I attended the Mentorship Program BoF at nine. We discussed how the program was going, and what we needed to do as an organization to try to make it more effective. I’ve mentored one person through the LOPSA Mentorship program … and it just sort of, well, stopped. I’ve tried to send further emails, but no replies are forthcoming. Hmmm.

After that, I retired for the night. Twelve full conference hours is a long day for an old fart like me.

*** Saturday ***

Saturday morning, I attended the Infrastructure Talks Track, with these topics: Enlightining Technical Leadership, Using Ansible to Fill the Gaps Left Over from Puppet and mCollective, Git Hooks for Sys Admins, with Puppet Examples, and The Stack at Stack Exchange. They were, respectively: quirky, useful, interesting, and captivating. How Stack Exchange manages to be in the top fifty of web destinations, and serving that level of traffic with a single rack of windows boxes, well, it just blows my mind.

Saturday lunch was similarly arranged, and of equally high quality of food and company. I bailed out a few minutes early to take care of a few things, so I missed the public presentation of my Certificate of Professional Recognition:

LOPSA Certificate of Professional Recognition

Certificate of Professional Recognition

Saturday afternoon, I attended Thomas Uphill’s Advanced Puppet training course (slides: https://goo.gl/SeiVsa). This content included some things I’d experimented with on my own, and a lot of concepts and ways to structure a Puppet implementation that I will find very useful when I finally need to implement Puppet for real. I have no idea how long those slide decks will stay available – I pulled down a copy for myself, just to be safe. This was the most challenging half-day of my conference calendar, and I was not disappointed.

Saturday evening’s Keynote speaker was Elizabeth Krumbach Joseph, currently with HP, and working on the OpenStack project. Her topic was Universal Design for Tech: Improving Gender Diversity in our Industry. She made a great case for why we need to improve diversity (gender and otherwise) in our profession, and briefly discussed the pluses (the business world is a LOT more professional and non-harrassing than it used to be) and minuses (the online world, especially among the anonymous trolls of the open source world, is a very unpleasant place to be female, or really, different in any way). Her pitch is both true and important. It’ll be the talk most on my mind for the next two years, because of the last bit of news from this conference…

[Here’s Elizabeth’s blog post on the conference: http://princessleia.com/journal/?p=9372]

Also on Friday evening, after conversation with the organizers and next year’s Program Chair, I volunteered to be the co-chair for 2015, which means that I’ll be the Program Chair for LOPSA East 2016. Wow. Just wow. I’m honored that they think I’m up for the job, and I’ll do my best not to disappoint.

*** Sunday ***

A nice drive home, starting about 0800. I got 37.5 MPG in the 328i, too!

 

LOPSA East 2014

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The League of Professional Systems Administrators (LOPSA) puts on an east coast conference each Spring. We just finished up LOPSA East 2014 last night. An excellent two days of technical training, invited talks, and superb keynote speakers. I’d say that in terms of technical conferences, it’s the best value for money around. You’ll be hearing a lot more about that from me for the next couple of years. Why? It appears that I have volunteered to shadow the Program Chair next year, and be the Program Chair for LOPSA East 2016. Woo hoo! I’ll have a better write-up on this year’s event in a couple of days, when I’ve caught up on my sleep.

Today I drove home, unpacked, started the laundry, and went out to do the shopping. Back from that, I mowed the lawns front and back … then vegetated for the balance of the day. Tomorrow I’ll retrieve Lexi from boarding at the veterinarian, and we’ll wait for Marcia to come home from Michigan later this week. Plenty of stuff to keep busy with around here, as I’m taking this whole week off from work.

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Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • Pfc. Christian J. Chandler, 20, of Trenton, Texas, died April 28 in Baraki Barak District, Logar province, Afghanistan, when enemy forces attacked his unit with small arms fire.
  • Sgt. Shawn M. Farrell II, 24, of Accord, New York, died April 28, in Nejrab District, Kapisa province, Afghanistan, of wounds sustained when enemy forces attacked his unit with small arms fire.

Rain, not purple.

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In the last 30 hours, 3.25″ of rain. Another inch or so due tonight, so lovely. This part of the world is waterlogged. Lexi *hates* going out in the wet, but all of life is worth taking another nap…

Lexi ready to nap

Lexi ready to nap

Nothing to see here

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Then why post, might you ask? Well you might. But sometimes, “nothing” is good. For instance, I’ve nothing to report from DoD for the week past. That’s good – no reported casualties.

There’s been no frost, so none of the veggies I’ve planted are dead. That’s good. Also, I made the lawns flat this weekend, and got a bit of work done at the office on the virtualization infrastructure … neither of which is “nothing”. But lawns are boring, and by policy I can’t discuss details of work. So … pretty much nothing to see there.

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Someone wants lots of flashing lights near schools for child safety. Sigh. Virtually everyone I grew up with was safe, and we didn’t have much in the way of flashing lights, or school buses with 10 mile visibility exclusion zones. Much better to do two things: one – teach kids to pay attention again. Two – kill a kid on purpose or by accident: Death penalty, fast lane. Result: safety and road courtesy. Seriously. It wouldn’t take too many public executions, well publicised with cheering parents all round to bring most drivers to their senses. The rest would end up victims of Papa Darwin.

This is nothing new from me. I’ve been a crusty, get-off-my-lawn type since I was 4 years old. Enough nothing. Ciao!

0x35

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Another birthday done. Whew. I “celebrated” by taking the day off, aka working in the garden: planting and fettling.

2014 garden 3/4 planted

2014 garden 3/4 planted

It was a good day for working in the yard, about 15°C. Three quarters of the plants are in. Lots of tomatoes, some cucumber and zucchini, and habañero peppers. More peppers are needed, and potatoes need starting. The herbs are still pending in the small bed near the house. I got the watering system setup and running, and finished up by getting some bird discouragement netting over the snow peas and young cherry tomato plants. The birds have been slaughtering my snow peas, and they’d have done the same to the cherry tomatoes, too.