I am glad tomorrow is May...

Last night it started snowing. I don't know why, I assume it was some sort of cruel joke, really. The above picture was from today about noon, most of it had melted. I think it's all gone now, I have been avoiding looking at it. I hope the below forecast holds true, because next weekend looks like it might be really nice. I think it will be time to plant tomatoes on Tuesday or Wednesday. I'm thinking today was "Winter's Last Stand"

Guy's night out

Tonight Adam and I went out for a "guy's night out". We started by getting a drink at the Chevron, and Adam got his very first Hostess Pudding Pie.

{Parenthetical commentary - When I was a kid, one of my paper routes had a Wonder Thrift Store at the end of the street. I used to get a Hostess Pudding pie or Hostess fruit pie almost every day. Occasionally I would mix it up a bit and get one of those giant marshmallow snowball things. Other times I would get a bag of chips to eat while I delivered papers. It's no wonder I never made a dime on that paper route.}



Anyway, I asked Adam what he wanted to do after the Chevron stop, he said "Go home and play in the back yard." I suggested the NickelCade instead. I don't know if they have these all over the country, but here we have this place where you pay $2.25 to get in, and they have arcades, claw machines, skee ball, and ticket machines that are anywhere from one nickel to four nickels to play. $2.25 for admission and 10 cents a game of skee ball can make for a pretty good deal.

I introduced Adam to Crusin' World, Super Mario, Mrs. Pac Man, Galaga, and a couple of other games. We played skee ball about 10 times, he liked handing me the balls. We also played the claw machine a bit and got him a stuffed animal out of it.


Adam seemed to enjoy putting the nickels in the machines. Hopefully this doesn't mean that I will find a whole pile of change in a CD player sometime soon. Towards the end, we hit a 100 ticket jackpot on a little game, and ended up with 205 tickets. Adam got two handfuls of little prizes to go with the stuffed animal that I got out of the claw machine.

Superpower - Flight

Adam is all boy. This has happened in a house full of girls. He has several pairs of Superman pajamas. One has a cape.

Every couple of days, he comes and finds me, and asks me to find his cape for him, so he can fly. This is interesting to me, I ask him where he wants to fly to. Every time he has a different place: to church, to Anson's house, to the store...

I remember back when we lived in the house on Villa in Buffalo, it had windows in the living room that were smaller, and a little higher on the wall. (I suppose because there was another house close by, and they wanted light but not staring...) Anyway, when I was little, I have no idea how little, I would reach up and grab the window sill by stretching as far as I could, and I would put my toes on the floorboard. I would look up, and see the dust in the sunlight. Then I would look down to verify I was off the ground. Then I would let go of the window sill at the same time that I jumped off the baseboard, in an effort to fly.

There was one time that I was really sure that I actually took flight. Just for a second. Adam must get it from me.

Some recent thoughts I have had - Including an endorsement of one company, and mockery of another...

Some recent thoughts:

• I think it's finally Spring. I hope it's finally Spring.
  
• Early this month, we found that the latch on our bedroom door had frozen. Fortunately, the door was open when this happened. I had an extra latch because I bought an extra knob two years ago when we remodeled. I took the doorknob apart, and replaced the latch. Then I thought it was kind of silly to have a two year old latch that was frozen. I bought the thing from Kwikset, which is a Black and Decker company. I got on their website, and sent them a message asking how to unfreeze the latch for the lock. The next day, they emailed me to say that a new latch was in the mail. It came a few days later, no other questions asked. Not bad. I will certainly look to buy a Kwikset lock the next time I buy one, even if it means I might someday get locked inside my bedroom because the lock has frozen...
• Several times this month, I have gotten in the shower, turned on the water, and my body has registered surprise at getting wet. Then my head says "Of course it's wet. It's water." I don't know what that means. Maybe my body has gotten dumber than the rest of me. I explained it to Tara, she thinks maybe I wasn't fully awake yet on the days that it happened. Either way it's weird.
• I've been a "manager" for over a year now. This can really take a good chunk of my time sometimes. My team is now 9 full timers, and 4 student employees, with another full timer coming soon. More than half of us have trips coming up in the next few weeks. I'm not sure we thought that through properly... Our bosses boss like to call me a manager. I like to call myself an engineer. When he calls me a manager, I think "Smile when you call me that." Turns out I've got the phrase backwards in my head. I haven't said it out loud to him yet.
  
• I've been working on a large wood project this week. I burned out a belt sander early this week. (sparks and flame) Drew hooked me up with a chainsaw and a grinder, which is helping a lot. Today I got through a chunk I've been working on for several days, but the thing cracked in a bad place. Grrr..... Maybe Gorilla Glue?
• I've set a goal to walk 200 miles this year. I've only walked 21. My office is only a mile and a half from here, but I can't seem to try to walk that far. (And it's not that far, really.) I think I just need to suck it up and do it, but lots of mornings are just hard. Lately I've been peeling myself off the bed. Lots of pain right now, but I suppose the pain is there whether I walk or not, so maybe I should just try it Maybe I'm just lazy.
• The people behind us have chickens now. On Sunday, the kids all had their noses pressed against the back window. "Dad! There's a chicken in the yard!" I've got a bunch of city kids. The chicken must have dug under the fence and squeezed in. While I don't mind having a chicken eat the bugs in our yard, chickens are messy. I caught it and tossed it back over the fence. The kids were impressed.
• Every time I see the following commercial, I think about buying a Mustang. But then I think about all the other things the same amount of money could do around here. I need to start walking to work.
  
  
  
  
• I had the batteries in a UPS in our campus bookstore go bad recently. We bought it about three years ago, and didn't have it on a maintainance contract. Turns out it was still under warranty, which I give HP credit for. They overnighted me new batteries (50 pounds). We scheduled to replace the thing tonight. The bookstore had a power flicker this afternoon, which took the servers down. Timing it everything. I went over there at 9pm, it took them about 40 minutes to get BYU Hawaii off the system. We shut the servers down, and took the UPS apart, and couldn't get the batteries out. It turned out that the batteries wouldn't come out because one of them had nearly burst, and was swollen. I finally got the thing out, and we found that HP had sent the wrong battery pack. (Now here's the mockery) HP - If you are going to spent the money and effort to overnight large items to people, maybe you should consider making sure you are sending the correct part...

• I'm definitely in the mood for a sugar free donut. Is "sugar free donut" an oxymoron? My sister has been posting these deserts online that sound really good, but I can't touch them...
• Still here? I'm going to Atlanta next month for Microsoft Tech Ed. Anyone going? I'm going to an Atlanta Braves game while I'm there, and have an extra ticket...
  

I haven't had one of those dreams in a while...

Last night I had a dream that I was taking a final for a literature class. I'm not sure what brought that on, expect it's finals up on campus starting today. It has nothing to do with me, really. I've been out of school for good for nine years now. I also didn't really take any literature classes in college...

Anyway, this final was an essay test. The only question on the test was "which of the books we read this semester was your favorite, and why?" I started in talking about how I didn't actually go to class during the semester, or read any of the assigned books, but I did get some reading in, and started writing about some of the things I recently read. This was more true to my illustrious college career...

In the middle of the test, whoever was next to me started freaking out, and had to be removed from the room. I figure this was Tara tossing and turning next to me.

At least I took it in stride. When I was enrolled in school, I used to have dreams that I had been enrolled in classes for several weeks, and forgot about them. In the dream, I would be checking my schedule online, and find this class I was signed up for, but didn't know about. As far as I know, I never really forgot that I was enrolled in a class, but I'm not sure. Rob, Russ, Jonathan? Did this ever really happen to me?

Also, I was once in an American Heritage class, but only went something like a half dozen times. The final was an essay test, and one of the questions was "What was Benjamin Franklin's influence on the Constitutional Convention?", or something like that. At the time, having not been to class much, I didn't know what his role was. I think I said something about how he was a big man with a loud voice, and liked to throw his weight around. I kept going from there. Hopefully the TA grading the final was at least partially amused. (I ended up with a 'D' in the class, which counted, and never retook the class...)

All in all, I am glad I am no longer a student. Or at least enrolled in school. I'm a bad example, kids. Follow in the footsteps of your mother...

Book review

VMWare vSphere 4.1
HA and DRS
technical deepdive

by Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman

A coworker recommended last week that we get this book and read through it. He had heard someone else talking about it on a business trip he took.

As the name implies, this is a technical book related to the concepts of HA and DRS inside VMWare. I might have titled it "HA and DRS - technical 'very thorough overview'", because when I hear the word 'deepdive', I think about internals, this book was more about concepts, 'best practices', and practical setup and use of HA and DRS.

The book is kind of smallish, 200 pages with lots of illustrations. One of the things they did throughout the book, that was kind of funny to me, was they kept talking about different setting available to you to change, then they strongly recommended leaving the default. At least they did it in a way that you could understand why to leave the default setting.

Having said that, even with all the things going on this week at work, here it is on Thursday, I got the book on Monday, and I've read it. I found it to be a very good overview of HA and DRS, written so that even the novice with VMWare can pick up the book, read it, and feel like they know what is going on with HA and DRS. We have been running VMWare for five years now in our environment, and are nearly completely virtualized, I would say we have quite a bit of experience in these areas, and there are a few things we need to talk about from this book.

I plan to have everyone on my team read it, and would recommend it to anyone running VMWare in their business environment, whether they are just starting out, or have been running for a while now...

Fun with little kids

The three older kids are off somewhere having a good time. (It's Spring break. They are not in Florida...) We took the little kids to Denny's for dinner, and then miniature golf.

Adam had a good time cutting his food with his knife. He ate one piece of bacon, and tried cutting everything else. He did a pretty good job with the sausage. Adam also nearly pitched a fit when Tara drank some of his chocolate milk.

After dinner, we took them to miniature golf, since we have the passes. Those three little kids sure can be persistent about getting the ball in the cup. Ruth wanted to play in the dark golf. (They have an indoor course with neon lights.) She was wearing a white shirt, it was a little hard to look at her.

Afterwards, we went over to watch them drive the slick track cars. Adam was pretty impressed. I took a shot at the batting cages, but I was hitting medium speed softballs, after about a dozen successful hits, I was done. I guess my wrist is not quite fully healed yet. Next time I will have to stick with baseballs, I suppose.

The little kids seemed to have a good time. When we first bought those passes this year, I wondered if the little kids would enjoy / be able to play mini golf, but they seem to do just fine.

One other thing. I have decided that wearing a public batting cage helmet is just like wearing bowling shoes. You really want a layer of clothing between you and it. Next time I will remember to bring a ball cap... (And my own bat.)

Thanks, Mom

My Mom made this baby quilt last year when we lost the baby. I think the little tags all the way around are from all the different quilts she had made to that point for grandkids, but I could be making that up... Yesterday I finally got around to putting together a frame for it so we could hang it on the wall.


The sides of the frame are not attached, I couldn't convince myself that a single screw through each end would hold the thing steady, and we wanted the option of taking it apart so the quilt could be cleaned, so I ended up nailing it to the wall with eight nails to hold the shape together. We will have to see if it works or not.

Nachos

I've never met a plate of nachos I didn't like. Until last night, I hadn't had one that I couldn't conquer, either. That all changed last night. We went to Maria Bonita in Orem for dinner, I ordered nachos. The lady asked me several times if I wanted a full plate or a half plate, I insisted on a full plate. She nearly didn't let Tara order after that, she had thought that we would share it.

When the plate came out, it was piled high on a two foot across platter. There was a layer of chips, followed by a heaping layer of refried beans, follwed by chip, then cheese, then chips, then beans, shredded beef, lots more cheese, onions, tomatos, and cilantro. This was a massively large plate of nachos.

When I got my plate, the people behind me were asking their waitress what exactly it was I ordered. The plate is big enough to feed a number of normal people, or two of me, under normal hunger conditions.

It was a very good plate of nachos, I also enjoyed it for lunch. It is seriously enough for a half plate to be a meal in and of itself, if you find yourself looking for dinner in North Orem sometime. Just don't plan on ordering something else with it.

"New" Front Door

Almost two years ago, I bought a new front door for our house. Yesterday I decided to stay home from work and install it. (I figured it's about time to get around to it, and the fact that I started 3 weeks ago by pulling half the siding off helped...)



The old door wasn't in great shape. It was pretty weather worn, and the weather strip at the bottom would not stay on it anymore. To the left of the door, you can see that the old shingles and old door frame is still on the house.

It turned out that when they put our existing door on the house, they decided to not replace the frame, and just stubbed the door into the existing frame. It looks like the door was a bit shorter than the existing frame, because they put a strip of wood on the bottom of the door to close the gap, and the weather strip was hiding the little strip of wood.

Whoever built this house with either cross eyed or didn't own a level. There is not a lot that is level, including the rough framing after I got the old door frame out. I had to do some shimming and build the thing out a bit so that the siding would go back on properly. (I didn't really want to take it all down and remove the old shingles, just because I was putting in a now door.


There was one episode of "John gets very angry at the stupid door", I got the thing all ready to go, and the top and bottom sills level, put the door in, and it wouldn't shut. Turns out the sides of the door frame were no where near level. I took the door back out, dropped the bottom sill a little, and Chad came over to help me finish putting the door in. (We also have a picture here from yesterday that proves that Emma did not change her clothes today...)


This afternoon I finished putting the siding back on the house. All that's left is finishing the sill at the bottom on the outside, and cleaning up the rough opening on the inside, and working on the little gap the new door left in the floor on the inside. As usual, one finished projects caused two others...