Life on Snow Hill

It’s been a beautiful (but hot) last several days, and that has allowed Becky to get outside and work in her flower beds. I’ve done a little bit in the evenings after I’ve gotten home from work, but this week has worn me out. We’re short one at work, and it’s been one of the most busy weeks we’ve had in a long time.

Hopefully today when I get home from work I’ll get outside and cut down another tree to use for firewood. I’ve been needing to do that all Spring, and Spring has gotten away from me. I really want to try to have enough this coming Winter to last us all Winter long so we don’t have to run our electric heat any more than we have to.

There’s always work to be done in the garden. I’m actually kind of proud of it this year. Becky and I have been able to get out and keep it pretty clean from weeds and everything this year, so it looks much nicer than it did last year. We’re already getting some squash and zucchini out of it, and Becky has eaten a few cucumbers that have come in. Soon we’re going to be covered up by a lot of this stuff and we’ll be scrambling to get it canned and/or frozen.

Yard work never ends either. It seems like the yard was just mowed yesterday, and it needs it again. Hopefully I’ll get some time to take care of that this weekend sometime as well.

Yep, we’re staying busy. I mostly enjoy it though. I don’t enjoy being worn out from it, but I do enjoy the good sleep I get as a result.

Everybody around the world knows who he was. He was a very popular entertainer and people around the world loved him. He had a lot of accomplishments, and all of the news media are talking about how great of a person he was and how much they will miss him. It would be comical if it wasn’t so serious, but everywhere I look, everyone is saying ‘rest in peace’.

Nowhere in Jackson’s life can I find that he ever came to know Christ. I won’t go so far as to say he lived completely for himself because he gave to charities and such, but even some of that was pretty controversial. What I will say is that he did nothing for the cause of Christ. According to my Bible, and according to his testimony, he is far from Heaven.

Hell is real. It is hot. Everything Jackson did here was temporal. Nothing lasted. Nothing he did will help him. Nothing. People will say that his influence lives on, and his spirit lives on in his music, etc. I don’t deny that. But it still will not help him. It will not help you, either.

Everyone, if all you live for is to satisfy the flesh, whether it be with music or anything else, it is all temporal. It has no lasting eternal benefit. I’m not against having fun, but if you’ve never been saved, you’ll end up with the same fate as this ‘great’ person.

If you are saved, our first priority ought to be to please God. I can’t think of much of anything about this person that pleased God. Especially his music.

I expect harsh comments, and will only censor vulgar or otherwise filthy language. Otherwise you may speak your mind. I reserve the right, however, to cut it off at any time. It’s my blog, my rules.

As much as I dislike him, he is the president of this great country. Because it is still a free country, and freedoms that I have are still protected, I’m going to voice my opinion.

Barack Hussein Obama doesn’t have the guts to stand up and be what he should be, and as elected, is supposed to be. Instead, he blames all of his problems on former president Bush. Now, I’m not going to get into the debate about whether or not Obama actually inherited problems from Bush. I wasn’t pleased with everything about Bush. I’ll leave it all at that.

However, nearly 5 months into the presidency, Obama is still blaming everything on Bush. Let’s recap a little bit, first looking at unemployment rates as an example.

During the first part of Bush’s presidency, unemployment was rising, and topped out at 6.5% in early 2003. Since then, it has gone down, bottoming out at 4.1% in October, 2006. Since January, 2007, the rate has been on a climb. Hmm…Isn’t that about the time when Democrats took over Congress? When Obama took office in January, 2009, unemployment was at 8.5%. For the month of May, it is at 9.1%.

Obama said earlier this year when he was pitching his stimulus package that if it wasn’t passed immediately that crisis would turn to catastrophe, the recession would last longer, millions more jobs would be lost and businesses would close.

That’s happened. But wait, wasn’t that stimulus package passed? It didn’t boost the economy, it made things worse. And he’s still blaming Bush. Man up, Obama.

Next up, Chrysler. Obama’s administration forced bankruptcy on them. Chrysler had made a deal with the UAW to freeze wages, promise no strikes and a few other things to save money and survive as a corporation. But no, they wouldn’t hear of it. Bankruptcy was demanded. A deal with Fiat was demanded. Chrysler wanted no part of it, but they were forced by our government.

Next up is healthcare. Obama is saying the same thing again – if we don’t act now, it’s gonna get real bad! Just like the stimulus package has rescued our economy from the pits of despair (Oh, wait. That was the fuzzy warm dreams the Obama supports had last November), and how our government has ruined social security, they’re going to save all of us from the insanely high healthcare costs. (Can you sense my sarcastic tone? It’s there in case you couldn’t tell.)

Imagine this – a government that controls healthcare. Say goodbye to most of the freedoms you enjoy today. Whatever the government decides is ‘risky behavior’, we will be banned from or our healthcare costs will be raised significantly. They’ll be telling us what kind of car we can drive, how far we can drive, what we can eat, and who knows what else. Do you jog frequently? Oops, might sprain an ankle – your rates go up. Do you eat out at restaurants? Oh, they use the wrong kind of oil – your rates go up. The businesses that will be mandated to provide this healthcare will be forced to fire people to save money and remain in business, contributing even more to the growing unemployment rate. By the way, the Obama administration saved or created 150,000 jobs over the last 100 days. I guess that would be cool, except there have been over 2 million jobs actually lost during that time.

Our government has already taken over a company (GM) and sold part of it to China. I’m anxious to see what all Obama and his administration can get their hands on before their time is up.

I haven’t even gotten into moral things like abortion and religious tolerance. Even without that, what I’ve talked about in this post sickens me to think Americans actually wanted this trash. I suppose you all still blame Bush too? Of course, he did make Katrina hit New Orleans. I forgot.

I’ve refrained from this in the past, but it’s gotten to be too much to let it go any longer. As it says in the title section of this site, every once in a while I’ll go on a rant. So here goes.

I went to the little convenience store around the corner this morning to get a snack. I actually go to this store all the time, and I’ve run into the same thing many of those times that I’ve gone. However, this one has convinced me not to go back. I’m going to name it in this post in case the owner(s) decide to do a Google search someday to see what people think about their place. J & C Market at 90 E Tennessee Ave in Oak Ridge, TN is the little store I’ll be talking about here.

When I walked in this morning, there were probably 3 or 4 people there, not including the loudmouth behind the counter. She was talking, trying desperately to talk above the noise, to a lady sitting at a table in the store. That’s not such a terrible thing in itself I suppose. I went about my business to pick up the snacks I wanted.

When I got to the counter, this loudmouth continued to yell to this other lady in the store telling her about some deadbeat guy buying video games instead of paying a mortgage. This is now happening while I’m standing there trying to pay for the snacks I wanted to purchase. Not only did she continue yelling, but she was stepping aside as to look completely around me to continue this extremely important conversation. Her interactions with me constituted of only “debit or credit?” when I handed her my bank card. And she had to ask that twice because she was so intent to stay focused on this other conversation.

No, this is not the way to keep a customer. I’ll go to the Rocky Top a mile down the road before I visit this store again. At least they pretend to care about the customer and pay some mind when they’re being given money.

But I enjoy being a geek.  This week I’ve been in a VMware training class – Deploy, Secure and Analyze.  It’s been a good class.  For a lot of it, I already knew the concepts about how things worked, but the class went into a lot of detail of exactly how things worked, and why they work the way they do.

One thing I learned a lot about was the networking portion of it.  One of the instructors showed the class a live VMware implementation (It may have been one that he has at home) and gave me an idea.  He had his ‘production’ network, his ‘internet’, or public, network, and a ‘DMZ’ network.  All of these were attached to physical NICs on his ESX host, but during the lecture we were told that a physical connection isn’t necessarily required.  So that gave me an idea.

I have a web server, database server, and file server.  My web server, of course, serves web sites and other miscellaneous web stuff.  For my more robust websites, it connects to my database server for data storage.  My file server is where I keep all my photos and application install files and things.  I’ve always known that any public-facing server (i.e., my web server which is accessible from the Internet) should be in a DMZ with its access to other parts of the network restricted.  It’s just simple security practice.  But I didn’t have a way to do it on my ESXi host.  Or so I thought.

I configured my virtual networking so that I had an Internet connection on one virtual switch (we’ll call them vSwitches) attached to my first NIC, my internal servers on another vSwitch using the other NIC (I only have the two NICs), and another vSwitch that is completely internal to the ESXi host.  It isn’t attached to any NIC or external switch or anything.  My Internet vSwitch is connected to my DSL router.  That’s the only thing on that vSwitch.  My internal vSwitch has all my servers on it.  Except for one.  My web server is on my DMZ vSwitch.

I’ve always liked the SmoothWall product (the free one – I don’t like paying for things I don’t have to).  Now I like it even more, because it does exactly what I want it to in this setup.  For my new firewall, I connected 3 virtual NICs to it, and put one NIC on each vSwitch.  I have a GREEN interface (my internal network), an ORANGE interface (My DMZ) and a RED interface (attached to the Internet).  Because the firewall is a virtual machine, that is all I need to be able to access my totally virtualized DMZ network.  Pretty clever.

To the left is a diagram of what my virtual network looks like. (Click it to see the full size screenshot)  For any of you that have had the pleasure of configuring or managing a virtual network, it should make total sense to you.  To anyone that is curious, drop me a line and I’ll explain in more detail if I can.

So Jacobs paid upwards of $3,000 for me to take this class so I could learn this simple (but clever) network strategy.

Yep, I’m a geek.  I’m fine with it though – I don’t have to ask for help with electronic stuff.

Some of the teenagers put on a skit at church last Sunday evening. We (the men) cooked for the ladies of the church for Mother’s Day, so instead of church services we had a church dinner/fellowship, and this skit was one of the things that kicked it off.

I hope you enjoy it! Click here for a larger version.

Can you believe it’s already May, 2009?  It seems like just last week it was New Year’s, and we were thinking about what all we wanted to get accomplished this year. My WAIT program failed miserably because I wouldn’t stick with it. I haven’t stayed all that organized, either. I haven’t gotten any new firewood in a good while, either. It won’t have time to dry out by next Winter if I don’t get on the ball.

The faster time flies, the more things need to get done, and the less time you have to do it. Do you see a pattern here?

I suppose that the biggest reason I haven’t been able to get a lot accomplished lately is because it seems like it has rained non-stop. My garden is loving it, but I can’t give it any attention because if I try to walk through it, I’m up to my knees in mud.

My yard desperately needs to be mowed. I can’t, however, because, you guessed it – it’s raining! And the more rain it gets, the more (and faster) it grows.

Overall, I’m thankful for the rain. The last couple years were a little dry and the garden needed to be watered by hand. So far, there’s no need at all for that!

I’m looking forward to things drying out, though, so I can get back outside and take care of some work that really needs to be done.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been overwhelmed. Not in an “I’m so stressed out I can’t take it any more!” kind of way at all. Maybe it’s more of an “I’m so busy lately that I sleep much better at night!” situation. It’s true, actually – I’ve been getting such good, sound sleep lately. I just wish I could get more of it.

Things have been picking up at work, first of all. We have 9 servers that need to be rebuilt and reconfigured. These servers are what our virtual infrastructure runs on. “What’s that?” you may ask. I’m so glad you asked! In a nutshell, a virtual infrastructure is a set of servers and network configurations that run on other servers. This is a good thing, because on these 9 servers, we have over 100 virtual servers running. So rather than having over 100 physical, real servers sitting in our datacenter, we only have 9. But we still get the benefit of the power these 100 servers offer us.

At home, well, the weather is changing. Spring is here and grass is growing. Along with weeds. Flowers too. This means mowing, weed-eating (Gotta get that weed eater fixed!) and gardening. I’m honestly excited to start the garden again this year. It just needs to dry out long enough to be plowed and tilled really well so that I can get some seeds in the ground. Spring means it’s also time to start working on getting firewood for next Winter. I’ve blogged about that in the recent past, so I won’t say much other than that I’ve gotten a pretty good start, but there’s a lot more to do.

Lastly, but certainly not least, we’ve been busy at church. Becky and I are, as most of you already know, teaching the teenage Sunday School class. I’m also in charge of the youth choir. We’re also working towards getting a teen visitation program going, as well as other youth ministries. I’m not sure I knew exactly what I was in for when I became the Youth Director, but the Lord had it in His plan, and Becky and I have been reaping blessings from it already. We’re thankful the Lord is using us, and praying that He will continue to do so, doing our best to stay in His will. These youth are a great bunch to work with. Our prayer is that they’ll have such a desire for God that we’ll be the ones trying to keep up with them!

A while back, I saw this thing on YouTube where they wanted to put together a music video from all over the world. They called it the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, or YTSO. I considered trying to play a piece for it, but didn’t put all that much thought into it, and eventually forgot about it.

I ran across it again today, and they’ve just posted a mashup video of all of the entries that makes up the entire song. Pretty impressive! I sort of wish I’d tried out for it now…Take a look!

Hey, everybody! A little while back, I bought myself a Macintosh. I’ve been wanting one for a long, long time, and I was finally able to get one. One of the things included on every Mac is iLife.

I’ve been playing around with iPhoto for the last few days, and it is actually fun to use rather than tedious like other photo management apps I’ve used. You can geotag photos and display a map with all of the places you’ve taken your photos. You can also use iPhoto’s built-in facial recognition and tag people’s faces in photos, sort of like Facebook’s photo tagging, but better. It recognizes the same faces in other photos and tags them appropriately.

The feature I want to talk about here, though, is iPhoto’s Flickr integration. As I understand it, it’s been an included feature in iPhoto for a while. But since this is the first Mac I’ve ever owned, it’s new to me.

I’ve played around with Flickr before, but never really gotten into it for different reasons at different times. I used to host my own gallery using Coppermine Photo Gallery, but didn’t keep up with it very well. It has great features, but it was another place I had to keep up with photos.

With iPhoto’s flickr integration, you can publish an album or set right from iPhoto. All in one place. Nice.

And others have said I needed more photos on my blog. Well, I’ve killed two birds with, well, 1 1/2 stones anyway. I added a Flickr widget to my sidebar over there on the right. So as I take more photos and import them into iPhoto for organization, I’ll publish them to Flickr as well for your viewing pleasure – they’ll show right up in my sidebar. Spring’s arrival has inspired me to get the camera out a little more than I have in the past, so I’ve added a few photos in the past few days.

Clicking on one of the thumbnails in my sidebar will open it up on my Flickr page. There you’ll be able to browse all of my uploaded photos.