Has it been a month?

Posted on 8/14/2007 by Kyle

I guess it has been quite a while. Where to begin? I suppose work is always a good starting point. It’s been crazy in DCS (Distributed Computing Services) lately. Our new storage array (EMC again) arrived and we’ve been working on getting that set up. Thankfully, EMC pushed off their original date to come set it up (it was supposed to be yesterday) to this coming Monday giving me a little more time to finish the wiring. Our new fiber switches are in and installed along with new fiber trays to attach to our ladder rack. Tomorrow we should finish running the obscene number of cables required to get all 5 of our new cabinets on the network. Then we just have to configure the connections.

We’ve also been working on a number of other projects:

We moved one of the air conditioners to the middle of the data center and will be moving the other one once Telcom finishes moving their telephone racks. This should improve our cooling efficiency.

The second UPS and the flywheel will be installed soon – thankfully I have no responsibilities with either of these projects.

We’re beginning to run into space limitations in our racks and on our switches. Vendors are coming to help us decide what to do with our patch panels. Recabling those if we have to will keep me busy for the better part of a year. Hopefully they can suggest a way to simplify our cable management (we have 2Us of cable management for every 1U patch panel) that will leave our existing patch panels the way they are.

We’re looking at ways to seal our cool rows from our hot rows to increase the efficiency of the AC. We’ve been attempting to get big sheets of plexiglass mounted in the spaces between our populated racks, but that has been pushed off for a while now due to all of our more important projects.

There’s quite a few other projects that are still being evaluated, so I probably shouldn’t say much about those except that they’ll all be keeping me busy for the foreseeable future.

I’ve been traveling quite a bit as well. Recently I picked up a Garmin eTrex Legend HCx with the intent of using it to insert GPS coordinates into the EXIF data of my photos along with auto navigation and perhaps geocaching. I’ll post a review of the unit later, but simply having it has been invaluable during my trips.

I’ve been doing a bit more on the photography front than I did earlier this summer. My motivation is returning and I’m beginning to go places just to take pictures again. I think the lull was definitely good for me. I’ll end this post by leaving a few photos and some links.

I went to Porcupine Mountain State Park with my friend Gowtham in July and discovered some amazing scenery. You can find the photos in a flickr collection, but I want to show everyone this one (I think it’s one of the best pictures I’ve ever taken:

I also attended an autocross and took an astonishing amount of pictures. What made it onto flickr is only a smattering of what made it home with me.

My most recent photo expedition was simply a trip around downtown Houghton. I decided I wanted to learn a bit more about black and white photography, so I stuck my 50mm f/1.8 lens on the Nikon and headed out. It’s simply amazing what black and white does for the atmosphere of a photo. Sticking with just the one focal length made me focus quite a bit more on where I was in relation to my subject and my framing. It was definitely a good learning experience.

Back home!

Posted on 11/25/2006 by Kyle

Well, I’ve made it back home and it is time for the obligatory picture post.

Once I got down to East Lansing, Jess (Tim’s girlfriend) and Melissa took me on a tour of Michigan State University’s campus, it was a really good time (the campus was nice too…)

Once I made it to my parents’ house, I got to spend a good bit of the week deer hunting (no, I didn’t get any this year; in fact, I didn’t see any bucks).

It was a great vacation, and I can’t wait to head back downstate in a month. School has begun to get very tedious.

Some more pictures

Posted on 8/5/2006 by Kyle

Well, I guess it’s about time I made another post. I’m afraid it just takes a little while to build up a whole lot worth talking about that isn’t simply part of the daily grind. A couple weeks ago, I took a trip with Betsy to her parents’ house; it was a pretty good time and we spent a bit of time waterfall hunting. Her mom also had a little garden out back that I was able to take a few interesting shots in.

We headed up to Tahquamenon Falls Saturday (July 22nd) in the morning and I was instantly regretting not having any ND (Neutral Density) filters to cut down on the light. We ended up going back at sunset/dusk so I could shoot some more pictures.

A trip to Sault Ste Marie filled up the middle portion of Saturday (sorry, no interesting Locks pictures) but we did stop by Point Iroquois Lighthouse on the way. We saw a freighter while we were on the beach, Betsy put up with me taking yet more pictures of her, and of course, we climbed the lighthouse.

Sunday, we headed out to Miner’s Castle on the way back, and then stopped at Alger Falls, Wagner Falls and Munising Falls, all within a few miles of Munising, MI.

Last weekend, as we were coming into town from Berzerker, I caught a couple shots I wanted to take out of the corner of my eye as we were passing over the lift bridge. I headed back down about 15 minutes later to snap them, but the sun had moved too much and they were gone. Luckily, (for me at least) I was too stubborn to leave without taking at least a few pictures, so I found a few more things to take pictures of.

The next day, Gowtham took me out to check out the new lens he picked up for a friend, a 200-400mm f/4G ED-IF AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor lens. The thing was huge, and I don’t think I could ever afford one on my own (as it is a little over $5000).

This past week, I picked up a new lens, a Nikkor prime lens, 50mm 1.8f. I’ve shot a few pictures with it, none of which are not on flickr yet. Its 1.8 fstop definitely came in handy when I went down into a local mine two days ago (Thursday, August 3rd) and snapped a few pictures. I’ll get those up on flickr early next week and then post them here.

Penguicon 4.0

Posted on 4/23/2006 by Kyle

After 10 hours in the car, we (5 other MTU LUGers and myself) made it to Livonia and checked into the hotel and got our badges. The night started off pretty well after I found the Ars room (Penguicon is an annual gathering for a number of the Arstechnica #linux people).

It was good to see all the people I’d been talking to online for a couple of years for the first time (with a couple of exceptions, a number were at Penguicon 2.0, which I attended). Kattni, tm, road, uberkludge, docah, Adam, Jorge, Kyle Rankin, evarlast, Flav, Glenn, mmx, Bill, JohnF, and a few others made it out and many of them presented (I filled in for a missing presenter on the Sun Ray and thin client panel); overall, we filled probably 90% of the programming in our room.

Talks ranged from mono, DVD authoring with Linux, Ubuntu, Knoppix, thin clients, PHP application security, security fundamentals, SSL to backupPC. The quality of the presentations was excellent, and though I didn’t get around to see many of the other presentations I heard that they weren’t nearly as good as the ones the Ars crew put on (a notable exception in my mind is the Keynote presentation put on by a guy from Google).

It was most certainly a good time, and I really look forward to coming back next year. I’ve known these guys for a while now, and any get together promises high quality conversation (geeky and non) and a chance to make it to restaurants I never would have before.