7Oct09 Daily Update 10-6-09 Greatest Game Ever

I know, I know.  This update is a day late.  I have good reasons.

I think I jumped in elation, cussed in anger, shed tears of joy and sadness all in the span on 30 minutes last night as my beloved Tigers participated in what was probably the greatest baseball game I have ever witnessed.  This wasn’t a great game because it was the 2 greatest teams in the two biggest markets of the USA going at it.  It wasn’t great because the players we’re the top stars in the league.

This game was great because two teams with mostly average guys were pouring their hearts out on the field in a very hard fought and emotional battle.  At least for me it was, and I was just sitting (mostly) on the couch.  I am biased towards the Tigers, so I can’t speak on the trials and tribulations of the Twins, but their were several things in this game that defined my team’s season.

The $12 Million Dollar Man

Earlier in the season, Tigers fans we’re on the edge of quitting on Magglio Ordonez.  He was batting poorly and was a liability in the field.  I heard all sorts of talk about him being cut because of his contract situation.  “We can get to the playoff’s without him”, was the talk.  The truth is, that the Tigers would never have gotten to this point without him and would have never been in the game if it wasn’t for his RBI single and home run.  I am looking forward to next year, Magglio.

The Inning that Defined a Season

Ryan Raburn had probably the worst and best inning of any player in recent memory.  In the 10th, after botching a play in the field that turned a single into a triple, he cut down that same runner at home for the inning ending out.  I can’t imagine what he was feeling after that bad play but I am sure it felt good to make up for it later with no damage done.  I know I was a complete wreck that whole inning.  The truth is that this was the Tigers season in a nutshell.  Morale killing stretches followed by weeks where they couldn’t lose.  The Tigers and their fans were like Jekyll and Hide.  The emotional roller coaster was defined by these two plays.

No Love for the Closer

There aren’t many closers in baseball that can guarantee a 1-2-3 inning in the ninth in a save situation.  Fernando Rodney is not one of those.  He always seems to make our hearts skip a beat in every game he is in.  The numbers, however, don’t lie.  He was able to save all but two games he was in and only one of those blown saves was a loss.  The last game of the season.

Some will blame him for the loss, when in reality, the Tigers should never have been playing game 163 at all if they would have taken care of business earlier in the week.  Rodney pitched almost 4 innings before the game was lost, almost 2 innings more than he had pitched all season.  I credit him and Leyland for staying with him for that long.  He was there best chance to win.

Re-sign this guy!  Or we may just be watching him shut us down in the ninth inning wearing another uniform.

The Chess Match

Two teams that had multiple injuries and sub-standard players that had no business competing for a playoff spot, were doing just that.  Jim Leyland and Ron Gardenhire are probably the 2 best managers in the major leagues and Hall of Fame candidates.  Watching them go toe-to-toe in this game was a sight to see.  The possibility of a hit and run, sacrifice bunt or a suicide squeeze are always there.  These guys are masters of their craft and have shown that with the results they got on the field this year.  I look forward to many more Twins-Tigers match ups next year.

Final Thoughts

The greatest game ever had the greatest game ever last night and even though the outcome was not to my liking, I still look on it fondly.  I will be a wreck for a few days but give me a couple more games of Lions football and I’ll be ready for Spring Training.

No Comments Posted by Jason Beebe in Off-topic
Tagged
5Oct09 Daily Update 10-5-2009

I know you are probably thinking, “What is the daily update nonsense?  I haven’t seen a blog post in months!”.  Well, you are right.  There hasn’t been much in the way of posting here recently.  My previous…ahem…free…hosting provider decided to discontinue service so I was forced to backup and search for a new one.  After months of procrastination, I finally settled on FatCow and transferred the site.  So far, I am very pleased with the service and hope it continues.

So, I would like to give a daily update here, with just a few paragraphs describing what is going on, mostly professionally, with a few personal tidbits here and there.  Not much technical detail will be given in these posts, but I am hoping they will spur some dialogue with my readers.

I have been working pretty diligently lately on creating a hardware independent disaster recovery(DR) image for our upcoming DR test.  The goals I set for myself when starting this project were:

  • Image must be able to handle different Hardware Abstraction Layers(HAL)
  • Image must be able to connect to the network and have an acceptable screen resolution on first run
  • Image must have all necessary software required for a DR scenario installed and working
  • The Imaging process should be simple enough that a non-technical person can perform the process

The bar has been set pretty high by the nice gentlemen previously in my job and his work is really good, but since our environment has changed so much since the last test, it’s necessary for me to redo the entire thing.  After putting in a few days on this project, I have settled on at least a few tools to accomplish it:

  • Use Windows 7.  Even though we are still stuck on XP, I feel I can customize the OS to a certain point that our users aren’t taken off-guard when they first boot up.  Since I haven’t found a cheap and effective way to use a single Windows XP Image on multiple HALs, I decided Windows 7 was the way to go.
  • Use a customized Windows PE boot image to deploy the image with GImageX.  I have been pleasantly surprised by how easy it is to setup a WinPE image.
  • Use Windows Deployment Services(WDS) for the deployment of the images with a bootable WinPE DVD as backup.  I really like WDS as a deployment platform and would prefer to use it in a DR scenario if the server and network are available before the workstations are deployed.  A DVD deployment method will be used just in case they aren’t.

All of this research and testing I have been doing have gotten me thinking that I should write about these things here so expect a several part blog post soon explaining the process from WDS setup to final image deployment.  I hope to have the first post up within a few days.  In the meantime, do any of you have any interesting deployment scenarios you would like to share?  What do you think about the direction I am taking so far with my project?

3 Comments Posted by Jason Beebe in Blogging
Tagged ,
2Jun09 Tech Tip #10: Running Word 2003 and 2007 Simultaneously

I recently upgraded a few end-users here at work to Office 2007.  Unfortunately, a few of the documents they were editing in Word were not formatting properly and were causing compatibility issues with some of our document processing.  To combat this, I had to install Word 2003.

When you run Word 2003 and Word 2007 on the same PC, there will be a small delay while the software registers itself before it opens.  For example, I open Word 2007 and it starts the configuring Microsoft Office wizard with no prompts.  After it is complete, Word 2007 will open fine and will open fine each subsequent time, until you open Word 2003.  It will then have to re-register.  If the end user is swapping between both programs frequently, the delay can cause a bit of frustration and time lost.

The Word 2007 Bible Blog shows a way to prevent the re-registration process from running by employing a small registry hack.

Under \\HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\11.0\Word\Options add a DWORD value called NoReReg and set the value to 1.  Do the same for \\HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Options.

After this change is made, the delay in starting either version of Word will disappear.

1 Comment Posted by Jason Beebe in Tech-Tip
Tagged , ,
1Jun09 Back to Work!

I am back from vacation and as refreshed as I can ever be.  I visited several wineries, did some horseback riding and dipped my toes in the ocean.  The horseback riding and ocean part were firsts for me!  I enjoyed myself extremely.  I was only in California for 4 days so I had 4 extra days to relax at home, which is wonderful considering the jet lag and the amount of alcohol I consumed.

I spent the last four days of my vacation catching up on household chores, playing some video games and starting a new workout routine.  With my first two days of P90X under my belt, I am so very, very sore.  Day 1 was Chest, Back and Abs and day 2 was Plyometrics (a form of high impact jump workout that is good for your legs).  Each workout is an hour to 1.5 hours in length and very high intensity.  I had to stop every 5 minutes to catch my breath and prevent losing my lunch.  It feels good to be getting this type of physical activity in my life though.  IT is mostly a sedentary job so its hard to maintain weight and figure.  I might give periodic updates on how my workouts are going here.

Anyway, now that I am back at work, I have found that I have a new appreciation for my co-workers.  Usually, if I leave for vacation, I find a ton of stuff piled up on my plate when I get back.  Not so this time!  My co-workers are awesome and I came back to a nice and easy Monday.  I love where I work!  My supervisor gave me some very cool projects that I will be working on in the next few weeks that I am very excited about.

We will be doing an in-place upgrade of our Enterprise Vault 7.5 server to version 8.0.  I have already started digging through all of my support resources at Symantec to develop an upgrade and rollback plan.  I have a feeling it won’t be all that complicated though.  I am also going to be organizing and leading an organization-wide Office 2007 training and roll out.  To be honest, I have already started this but the training goes in to full swing tomorrow.  I am pretty sure I will be spending my next few weeks running training sessions and upgrading computers in between.

I should have some more tech articles up on EA in the next few days.  I have a few more Enigmas and will probably post an upgrade guide for EV 7.5 to 8.  By the way, you can still email egotisticaladmin@gmail.com for any tech questions you would like answered.  I am always looking for new and unique content!

No Comments Posted by Jason Beebe in Blogging
Tagged
21May09 Off-topic: Wine Country Vacation Preview

There comes a time in an IT guy’s life where he must take off the work boots, khakis, polo shirt and ESD strap in favor of flip flops, shorts, t-shirt and sunglasses.  Yes, it is vacation time!  My first official vacation this year will be spent wandering through the beautiful countryside of northern California’s wine country.  I am not much of a wine enthusiast.  Those that know me personally would consider me a beer connoisseur.  I actually brew my own beer from time to time.  The beer brewing does give me an appreciation for other spirits so I will be wholeheartedly into the whole “tasting” aspect of this trip.

I will be staying at the Fairmont Sonoma Inn & Spa in Sonoma.  The “Spa” part is more of a benefit to my traveling partner, Rachel than for me, but a nice massage isn’t out of the realm of possibility.  There are three main things that I am most looking forward to in this trip, so lets get started.

The Food

I’ve been told by my resident expert on wine country, Eric Reasons, that “The local economy demands such quality out of their food that every meal is the best you’ve ever had, and you leave a lot of places spending less than you would at TGI Fridays.”  Needless to say, I plan on gaining several pounds at least.  Here is a preview on some of the places I intend to visit:

Zazu Restaurant – The chef, Duskie Estes, has was part of a Mac & Cheese Food Network competition.  I am not sure who won, but considering the fact she was even in the competition must mean it is good.  My mouth is watering already!

Culinary Institute of America – I have been told that this is a great lunch stop.  I am assuming the food here is pretty damned good.  It is a college for chefs for goodness sake!

Rosso & Bianco presented by Francis For Coppola – The salami and cheese plate is supposed to be fantastic as well as the wine selection.  I have had some of the wines before so I am looking forward to see where it comes from.

The Wine

Once I again, I consulted my resident expert, Eric, on the wines.  He says, “Don’t go to any winery whose name you recognize. The big wineries (i.e. the ones that distribute in Michigan), are more shopping malls than winery. If you have to pay for a tasting, walk away. The small wineries are great at being friendly, enthusiastic about seeing you, and have excellent wines.”  This sounds like great advice and I kept it in mind when choose the wineries I wanted to visit:

The afore mentioned Francis Copolla Winery – The Skywalker Merlot, made from grapes grown on Skywalker Ranch, is supposed to be great.

Gundlach Bundschu Winery – This is close to the hotel and is supposed to have great Zinfandels.  I may be able to stumble home afterwards.  That is always a bonus.

Teldeschi Winery – This one is a bit of a drive but probably worth it for the Zins.  It is about 25 miles away from Sonoma in Healdsburg.

Preston Family Vineyards – This is just a short jaunt from Teldeschi.  I have been told that once I visit here, I won’t want to leave.

The Countryside

Yes, I am looking forward to getting away from the urban sprawl that is Detroit.  I am craving fresh air, the sound of nature without the road noise and the sunshine.  Although this isn’t my typical get back to nature vacation, it will accomplish the “get back to nature” task I try to set for myself every year.  Of course, there is always my Colorado trip in October as well!  Au revoir!

3 Comments Posted by Jason Beebe in Off-topic
Tagged ,
Pages (10): « Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next » ... Last »