Archive for July, 2009

Marathon before 30?

Last fall my buddy Tom from work asked if I wanted to run a 5k…

I should have known that with my addictive personality that the 5k was just the beginning.  Since then I have run two 5k’s, a 10k, and a half marathon.  Next up??  Possibly the Portland marathon in Oct.  The marathon is 2 weeks before my 30th birthday, so yeah to me it is a big deal.

I will be sharing the ups and downs of Marathon training here on this blog for the next couple of months… stay tuned!

Linux

I started a new job last summer and one of my favorites aspects has been the exposure to Linux.  I have been a “Windows” system admin for 10 years now so it feels good to learn something new.  I am still working with Windows, but 2 of the projects I have been working on are rooted in Linux.  The first project was to provide a blogging platform and I was quick to suggest WordPress, which is a free open source software based on the “LAMP” stack… Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP.   I have been using wordpress on my blog for a few years now, but I feel like I know the software much more intimately now that I have deployed 40+ blogs at work.  The second project I have been working on is  VMware.  When I was brought on we had 2 different VMware farms running different versions of the software.  Now we are setup in a single farm all running the latest version.  VMware uses Linux as its service console to help you monitor and support the environment.  Of course over the last 6 months or so I have had the rite of passage that is vi.  I am not going to claim that I am an expert but I am quite comfortable with the core keyboard commands.

Just today I was asked to deploy Urchin which is very similar to Google Analytics, except that you get to store your data in house rather than Google using it to learn more and more about you.  I had the option of using Windows or Linux on this project and I think I might just go with Linux ;)