personal

Over the past couple Weekends Deena and I have been working to get our garage in shape. It wasn't the most pleasant experience by any means, but I think the results speak for themselves. The project was quite successful. We coated the unpainted chip board and bricks, replaced some very old carpet with a bunch of cheap self adhesive carpet tiles, and got some very nice and large storage shelves.

Shot from when we first moved in Getting ready to paint First few strokes of paint Side shot before Ground pre-carpeting Ground carpeting in progress First gallon of primer First gallon of primer Half the carpeting done Carpeting all done Carpeting all done - Tired Deena Carpeting all done Carpeting all done Carpeting all done Carpeting all done Room put back together with painting, carpet, and storage shelved all done Room put back together with painting, carpet, and storage shelved all done Room put back together with painting, carpet, and storage shelved all done All Done !!!

Since last weekend, Deena and I have been completing and working on the oft talked about, long ago planned, project of the The Chalkboard Fridge (dun dun dun).  We have had a kegerator for a long time and have always wanted to do something more with it than just drink delicious beer served out of the tap.  Mostly things like doodle on it, install a second tap, and keep track of the temperatures and pressures for making sure each pull brings another perfect pour.  In order to solve two of those problems, chalkboard paint.  About $20.00 in primer paint and rollers, and a little elbow grease is all it took.  We primarily followed the guide we found at The Kitchn, and here are the results:

The Beginning - Front The Beginning - Side Sanding Primer Coat - Front Primer Coat - Side First coat of chalkboard paint Chalkboard paint - the second coatening "Curing" the paint Erasing the new chalkboardComplete

A quick update about my Dell Latitude saga.  I called customer service today at 7:00 a.m. and had a pleasurable and productive, albeit lengthy, exchange with their representatives.  I have managed an exchange for the ill-fated Latitude XT, and the process is everything that it should be.  They are sending a replacement laptop, and when I receive it, I'll just have to send the broken one back.  Hopefully they will ship it overnight, but that is doubtful, and I still haven't received any confirmation e-mails or phone calls that the exchange is going to actually happen.  I am cautiously optimistic.

Quick Update (2/10/2010):

I have heard back from Dell, and everything appears to going well so far.  I will say that I was dismayed that the standard laptop exchange takes 10-12 days to process.  They have assured me however that my exchange is a high priority and will be shipped overnight when it is ready.

Another Quick Update (2/18/2010):

 So, I received the replacement laptop as of yesterday, and everything works.  Well, pretty much everything.  The battery it came with was near dead, and while I did receive two CD-ROM attachments, one doesn't fit the CD-ROM, and the other, which does fit the CD-ROM uses e-SATA instead of USB, which the laptop doesn't have available.  So 8 days, and overnight shipping means it wasn't too bad of a wait for exchange, and just as I was about to call Dell about the not quite right bits I received a call from them.  They were OK with me swapping batteries, and tech support should take care of getting the right CD-ROM bit to me.  All in all, it took about three weeks to get everything straightened out, which was a tremendously long time, but on the plus side everytime I interacted with Dell's customer support staff, it was delightful (minus the call about the original shipment of the first laptop).

Dell has been the primary provider of commodity hardware in my current and last job.  At the NITC they were our primary provider of commodity servers, but the more exotic kit such as SAN, switching, and routing gear were left to field leaders in those areas.  I was extremely happy with their servers, we had great support, good pricing, and rock solid reliability.  At the KU School of Engineering Dell is the primary provider of all our IT systems including desktops, laptops, some switches, and all of our storage gear.  Again, I have been satisfied for the most part, though the prices and features for some of their re-branded storage kit has been painful.  The point of all that is that when it came to purchasing a replacement tablet for my girlfriend choosing a Dell Latitude XT series tablet seemed like a no brainer.  Wow, was that a mistake.  The entire experience has just been a nightmare.

I ran across this today while updating one of my clients Web pages, and I simply had to share.  Incredible.

Oh, and another representative line:

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I've updated the version of the backend CMS for the site.  I'm planning on redoing the layout after I'm done moving and all the other hectic stuff going on, but for now I'll use the default Drupal theme.

Fri, 27 Feb 2009

It has been a long time since I have posted, and just thought I would link in some of the things I do for work at the University of Kansas School of Engineering. I have been working there about a year now, and the amount of change and work that I have done there is pretty insane. We have moved ahead nearly a decade technologically in the way we manage computers, rollout services, and secure the school's IT infrastructure. The first thing I'll note is the blog, which is available at http://www.engr.ku.edu/computing

Well, welcome folks.

This has got to be like the 2,318,266th Web page I have put together for my hubris. These "personal" pages/blogs never end up working and I always get sick of them and give up. Well this time it's for real--yeah right. I'm hoping that if I focus on security/network/computer postings and don't fly to far afield with random stories that I may actually stick with it and post pretty regularly.

Just thought I would make my actual first post and get this thing out onto the inter nets and try to spread some truthiness, peace, and love.

Hasta