Penn State

Updates

Posted by Matthew on December 9, 2008
Posted in: Boise State, NFL, Penn State, The Eagles, The Flyers. Leave a Comment

What can I say, I’ve been busy. Emily is growing and changing so fast that we can hardly keep track. I’m trying to take as many pictures as possible and store them all in my gallery.

I’ve been scanning and scanning and scanning for my Comic Book Database System. It is taking a while, but the geek side of me loves having all of that information cataloged.

The Christmas tree is up, and boy do the cats love it. They think it is a large green scratching post with lots of cat toys hanging upon it. It is quite a party.

The Eagles are still pretty crappy. Although they seem to be headed in the right direction, and beating the Giants sure helped my blood pressure. The Flyers are headed in the same direction, but their constant ability to take games into overtime is certainly NOT helping my blood pressure. Penn State is headed to the Rose Bowl versus USC. That should be a good game. Boise State is headed to the “San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl.” That’s quite a mouthful and a game that very few care about. I’ll be watching. Enough about sports…

Work. Heh, let’s not talk about work. I’ve been slowly working on moving server stuff around at work. Most of the core stuff is all hosted on VMware’s ESX virtual server system. It’s helped a lot and made a lot of things easier on my end. However, here comes the bad part. Previous people that were employed by the district decided to go outside and bring in consultants and have them “look at things.” Well, their suggestion was to have fewer servers, not more. In the process, they migrated every individual server into one server that was supposed to take care of. Thank god the people that made said decisions are no longer employed by the district, and it has taken me years to start splitting the servers up again. It really doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that when you carry all of your eggs in a large basket and that basket breaks, you have a mess of yolk all over the floor. However, spread the eggs out in many smaller baskets, and when (not if, let’s be realistic) one of those basket breaks, you only lose an egg or two. Duh. But, such is life when you work in Education. Again, those people are no longer at the district, and thankfully the replacement people agree that my way is “better.” I’ve already moved our major database system (fund, child, and transportation accounting) off of the main server onto its own samba server. The thing has really never run so well. I am now in the process of doing the same with printing. So far, that is going well too. I’ve moved all of the web services (http, MySql, DNS) onto their own servers and they have been running well for over a year with little or no problems.

Now if I could just ditch the 450 MacBooks we have, I might actually like going to work again…

Well gosh

Posted by Matthew on October 7, 2008
Posted in: AFL, General Nonsense, MLB, NFL, NHL, Penn State, Rants, The Bills, The Eagles, The Flyers, The Phillies, The Soul. Leave a Comment

I feel as if I have lost the urge to blog. I dunno, maybe I just don’t have anything important to say these days. Although, let’s be honest, when did I ever. Check the archives, there really isn’t anything groundbreaking there. I really should get back to posting more. I’m not sure what to say.

I pretty much hate watching the Eagles anymore. Watching yet another year of crap and horrible offense piled on top of shockingly mediocre defense is really getting to me. Watching big Andy Reid talk about how “we have to improve” and how he has to call better plays year after year is driving me nuts. The Eagles offense never changes, it never evolves, it just continues to suck when it is needed most. They are terrible in the clutch.

The Bills went 4-0 before exploding to the Cardinals. 4 and freaking 0. The Buffalo Freaking Bills. They are basically at the top of the AFC and still the Eagles fart along at the end of the pack. Oh well.

The Flyers are just getting their season underway and really, I can’t honestly say I am hopeful. The head office has made some changes, but nothing super dramatically different happened from last year. No big signings, no major changes. I can’t see the team getting that extra push it needs with signing cheap has-beens or even cheaper never-were players.

Penn State is 6-0 and ranked #6 in the country. So far, they haven’t (in my opinion) played any teams that have really tested them. That’s coming up though, I promise you.

The Soul won the Arena Bowl. Holy freaking crap. Although that still doesn’t make Philly a championship city. I think I am one of the few people I know that even cares about the Arena League.

The Phils have made it to the post-season this year. They look to be playing pretty strong, but I’m sure it is only a matter of time before they too rip my heart out and stomp on it. Give it time, it’s there.

Lastly, work kinda sucks. The whole “lets buy Macs” thing is really starting to burn me. They just don’t work the way we need them to. They aren’t lasting and/or taking the abuse that high school kids and teachers (more teachers it seems) dish out. But that’s what happens when truly uninformed people make truly uninformed decisions. I can hardly wait until their warranties expire, because that alone may drive our budget into the hole. So far out of about 450 MacBooks, we have had to replace 6 hard drives, 3 motherboards, 3 wireless cards, and over 120 batteries. I only say over 120 because at this point we have totally lost count. Add all that up and I would have to say that I am not impressed. Don’t even get me started on the supposed super friendly and even more super helpful Apple tech support. In a nutshell, it doesn’t exist.

Done!

Outback Bowl Champs

Posted by Matthew on January 1, 2007
Posted in: Penn State. Leave a Comment

Penn State beat the Tennessee Volunteers 20-10 in a great game this New Years day. The only bad part about the game is the constant replays. The ref really wanted his face on camera, because he really drew out explanations and went to the reply booth a ton of times. I know they “want to get the call right,” but it really does slow down the game considerably.

Anyway. Big win.