The Stanley Cup Finals have been amazing. I’m a die hard Penguins fan, but anyone who is a fan of hockey has to respect how the Red Wings are controlling the puck and defending against Crosby and Malkin. The Pens are going to have to have their best game if they want to compete, because the Wings aren’t giving them much to work with.

In other sports news, CCU got knocked out of the regionals this weekend. Another run ath the College World Series cut short. It’s a shame, because Coastal Carolina has an exceptional program and seems to come so close every year.

Not alot to post about today, but I remembered that I had left out the fact that I had picked up NHL07 on that same trip to BestBuy. I was actually excited to try it out this year after being so disappointed last year. The hype on this year’s version was pretty good. From all of the sites I visited, this year’s version was to include a shooting function for the right analog stick, and had reworked the gameplay to do away with the speed burst button. All of these new features were supposed to take the NHL series more toward simulation play….
… Unfortunately, none of the sites I visited made the key distinction that all of the new features were to be implemented on the Xbox360 version only. What a waste! Being a PC-only gamer, I am once again disappointed as EA is the only option I have for PC Hockey aside from the text-based Eastside Hockey Manager(I will be checking this out soon. I played it about 3 years back and was pretty impressed.)

Anyway, I am really upset that I wasted my money on what seems to be a roster update instead of a game full of new features. I felt I should put this out to let any other PC hockey gamers know. I also emailed the guys over at sportsgamer and ended up getting some unexpected love for my efforts.

First, I read today that AMD has broken the 20% mark in market share. I’ve been a fan of AMD for quite a few years now, so it is a good thing to see them gaining a little ground and respectability in the general public and the business sector alike.

Also, I’ve been taking some free online courses from HP. Right now, I’m enrolled in the Linux 201 class and the PHP/Mysql class. We’ve gone through two lessons so far, and I’m fairly happy with what is being taught. The Linux 201 class is based on the Fedora Core distribution and even moreso using the gnome desktop environment. I use neither at home – I am a gentoo man with fluxbox as my window manager when I need one. However, The course outline says that they will begin concentrating on some command-line administration pretty soon. That’s the only reason I really signed up for the course – also to see where my skills are lacking as an administrator.

The PHP/MySQL class has been interesting and requires more time than I thought. I actually have to lay out the design of some faux property management website before we actually create it and then create a control panel for it. This class could end up being very helpful to me.

I’ve started an exercise program. Well – not really… I am just doing some calisthenics to keep my heart rate up and then some bench presses and resistance crunches on the Bowflex. No strict schedule or anything, but I’ve put in about an hour each night for the past 3 nights. You see, I noticed the other evening a new warning label on my cholesterol meds. The new prescription bottle says that I shouldn’t eat grapefruit or drink grapefruit juice at any time while on the meds. Intruiged, I did some web research and found out that there is some chemical found in grapefruit that reacts with the medicine. While researching, I also read many complaints from people regarding muscle loss. Some were claiming that it was pretty substantial. Well, for those of you that know me, know that I have kinda “let myself go” the past few years. The last thing I really need is to get bigger. I figure that the little bit that I’m doing now will help counteract what I could be losing due to the medication.

During my downtime, I like to browse the web and catch up on news(mostly technology) and sports, but about a month ago or so, I ran into a blog that has quickly turned into one of my new favorites. Again, those of you that know me, know that I worked in the service industry for about 10-12 years. I loved the restaurant business, and I took extreme pride in my job. The money was good as well… In fact, a couple of those years actually exceeded my sysadmin salary from last year. Anyway, waiterrant.net has been a good way for me to reminisce about both the good and bad things of my “previous life.” I thnk it’s a great read whether you’re familiar with restaurant life or not.

So the Steelers made it to the Super Bowl!!! I’m really excited!!! It’s a nice story that Jerome Bettis will get to play his final(reportedly) game in his hometown for the title. I’m sure emotions will be high, but I hope the Steelers don’t become overconfident. I’ve been keeping an eye on the Seahawks’ stats all year and they’ve been pretty impressive. This game is going to be much closer than most people think.

I also read that Mario’s calling it quits again. This time it looks as if it’s for good. I’m so sad about this. I had planned on going to Raleigh this year to see the Hurricanes-Pens matchup just to say that I got to see Mario play… and then they found out about his irregular heartbeat, and all my hopes were lost. Earlier in the month, Mario put the Pens up for sale, but wants to keep the team in Pittsburgh. I truly hope he can accomplish this task. I know the Pens haven’t been great the past few years, and I know that they are underachieving this year, but the Pens should never leave Pittsburgh. It just wouldn’t be the same.

A thought just came to me… How many cities have won at least 3 of the big 4 sports championships?
Here’s what I have: New York, Boston, LA, Chicago, Pittsburgh… Any others?

HOME
Will got sick last week. 2 ear infections and tonsilitis. Needless to say, we had our hands full. Amy is still running herself ragged trying to get caught up with her new class. Now she’s coming down with a cold. Brian took a trip this weekend with his lolo and lola to Tennesee to visit his Aunt Jen, Uncle Terry, and his cousins, Eric and Ryan. Victoria has been the ultimate daughter taking up the slack whenever Amy and/or I can’t be around. She’s been a real trooper. I have barely been home the past week or two due to work. Usually when I get home, everyone is asleep…

WORK
We made the big move this past weekend by migrating all of our customer’s email boxes from a 3-node tru64 cluster to a 3-node linux cluster. The migration process lasted about 14 hours if you include the monitoring of email flow after the transition took place and also babysitting the new cluster while the influx of emails come barreling in after building up in a queue for such a long period of time. Everything looked fine all day Sunday… And then Monday came.
One of my fears about this project came true. You see, a decsion was made somewhere beyond my team’s control to hook this blazingly fast linux cluster to an extremely slow disk subsystem. So, while the servers can process tons of email, the disks cannot keep up with the write load and you end up with an extremely tight i/o bottleneck. The only way to alleviate the problem was to throw more disks at it and spread the load out Unfortunately, these disks are not made to take the amount of constant pounding that they are getting, so unless we can find a solution fairly quickly, one or more of these things are likely to fail.
Then today, the mailserver we use for outgoing smtp went on the fritz. Our anti-virus scanner kept bombing out which would basically stop the server from accepting email. Thus, tons of angry customers calling about not being able to send out. So I spent all day building a linux server on better hardware so it could handle the load (The old server was Solaris9 on some very underpowered hardware). So the story still continues….

FUN
My friend, David, dropped by this past Friday night to visit. I hadn’t seen him in quite a few months so it was nice to catch up. He brought his PC with him, so we hooked it up and he, Grady, and I played Ghost Recon until around 5AM. I had forgotten how much I loved that game!!!

If you haven’t seen Batman Begins, I recommend it. It was done quite well, and, in my opinion, is much better than any of the previous Batman movies.

I picked up Tiger Woods 06 last week… Excellent golf game! I like it better than last year’s version. EA did change the way attributes are done. Now you must earn them by way of experience points instead of purchasing them with dollars. It seems to me that the TrueSwing technology has been tweaked a little as well. Swinging the club just feels more natural in this year’s version. There are a few more new features, but I’ll save that for a later post. This one is getting pretty lengthy.

I also picked up NHL06. Nice to have hockey back! A decent game. Definitely better than ‘05, but the computer AI still needs more work. It is tons more competitive playing against a human than against the AI.

Football- My Steelers played well against the new and improved Bengals. Nice to see Big Ben starting at QB. Except for the Indy game on Nov 28th, they may not lose another game.

Hockey- My Pens are still winless at 0-4-0-5. Hopefully they can on get back on track soon before my old hometown loses interest. Sidney Crosby has all the makings of becoming a superstar, but unless we can learn to play a little D, it’s going to be a looooong season.