I'm angry. Yes, ANGRY. I just found out that my old friend Suzette Bates, (update: I found the link) a 34 year employee of Lyon College was summarily fired about a month ago. Yes, after 34 years of service was handed a pink slip one day after work. She has been a Programmer/Analyst there for well, the past 34 years and was one of the people who probably let me play too much on computers so many years ago. I know Lyon's had some hard times as of late (which I DEARLY hope that the change in administration helps fix - the last one had the personality of a turnip) but please -- you DO NOT treat someone who has been that loyal to your institution, who has been a faithful employee, who never misses work, who has been recognized by her peers for outstanding service, and is such a stickler that if they take 5 minutes too long for lunch will stay 20 to make it up the way you treated her. Period. If you folks up there are reading this then know that I am ASHAMED of you. Find those with less seniority, those with fewer deep ties, ones who can more easily change careers. You do not treat your own that way (if I recall correctly, Suzette was #2 or #3 on the seniority list there. She's outlived every single member of the administration and all the faculty but 1). There are better ways to save a buck.

Don't bother asking me for a donation this year. You won't get it.

I hate my phone, a Pantech Duo. It sucks. It has a buzzing noise in the handset which an RMA return didn't fix, the slide thing is stupid, and it is SLOW. I thought that it was cool when I bought it over a year ago. Doesn't everyone think that there phone is cool when they first buy it? Anyway, I now have a Blackberry Bold. Also, the AT&T Store in Jonesboro, AR SUCKS. THE WORST CUSTOMER SERVICE EVER. Welcome to the boycott list.....On the other hand, Rebecca with AT&T Wireless Customer Care was one of the best I've ever dealt with. She was willing to send me the phone at the Wal-Mart price if I couldn't get them to sell it to me (I'm a month away from the upgrade and had cleared it BEFORE I went into the AT&T store). Kudos to her!

As promised, here are some pics of my new VW Jetta TDI. It was pretty late in the day and the light was a little warm for a black car, but I'll get some better pics soon. Btw -- 36.4mpg over the first 600miles. Not bad eh?

Meant to write this earlier, but on 13 June I bought my first brand new car, a 2009 Volkswagen Jetta TDI. It's black with beige interior, auto transmission, sunroof, and has a 2.0L turbocharged diesel engine. Driven 500 miles+ on 3/4 of a tank. Not bad, eh? Pics to follow....

As I wrote about last time, Pleth's move from VMWare Server to VMWare ESXi has been very successful thus far, but in the process we've discovered a couple of "neat tricks" and have proven to ourselves that the technology choices we made a few years back were indeed the right ones.

When you copy a .vmdk (vmware disk image) over from a VMWare Server machine, you have to convert it over to ESXi format. This process makes the resulting disk image the whole size that you've allocated. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if you had it set to thin provisioning in VMWare Server your disk usage just went up. WAY up.

As I posted last time, we decided to move over to ESXi and so far, its been pretty smooth. ThePlanet installed ESXi 3.5 on our servers, which I quickly upgraded into 4.0. When you install the vSphere Client there is an option to install the host update utility. Run it, point it to the zip file you've download from VMWare's website, and wait a bit. It works like a charm (put the machine into maintenance mode first!!). Since the servers had no clients running on them, I did it during the day (which let me sleep last night! lol!!) I've been copying over the VM's from our VMWare Server machine with good ol' scp and using the vmkfstools command on the ESXi box to convert them into ESXi format. Takes about 30-40 min per server for the whole process, which isn't exactly quick, but we're moving low-traffic boxes in very off hours. I moved the server that this website runs on during lunch today....;o)

I'm teaching at UACCB this summer, and my Microeconomics class is taking their fist test. There's not a lot of smiles in the room....(which means my work here is done...lol). Anyway, spent the morning reading about tuningVMware ESXi, which was just released in version 4.0, and supports hardware that we can get in our private shelf at ThePlanet. We ordered 2 new servers this week, both dual-processor Quad Core Intel Xeon powered Dell Poweredge models with 16gb ram and a ton of disk space. This should make things a bit faster than our current configuration. We were going to migrate everything to VMWare Server but with the release of 4.0 and ThePlanet supporting ESXi in their datacenters, this move makes much more sense.

I love to take pictures. I was bitten by the photo bug years ago, and never really got over it. As any good photo-geek should, I've got more than a couple of cameras (an old 35mm Canon T-series, a Mamiya C220 Medium Format, and a Canon EOS 20D, among others), and as all good photo-geeks know, you can never have too many or one with enough buttons. I sold my old Canon EOS Elan 7 a few months back because it hadn't been used in a couple of years. Before that I used to use an old Canon AE-1 which I loved dearly. I almost hated parting with those cameras, but since I wasn't using them, it was time for someone else to give them a new life. Now that my 20D is getting on up there in years, it's about time to start looking for a replacement for it as well.

I posted a few weeks back that Pleth had transitioned some of their equipment over to VMware Server and for the most part it's been a very smooth process. But, as of late we've ran into some slowdowns, especially on the VPS with Plesk (which happens to host several of our websites). After doing a bunch of research and spending many a late hour digging through tons of mpstat and other sysutils data I think I found the culprit(s).

VMware Server, unlike the ESX/ESXi products, does not run in a Type 1 Hypervisor. This means that the underlying OS (in our case Red Hat Enterprise Linux was tuned out of the box for a general all-purpose server. This configuration isn't always optimal for a Type 2 Hypervisor. It works just fine as long as things are "normal," but as the new VMware server got a larger load (in terms of I/O and CPU) performance went downhill.

RANT RANT RANT!!!

I normally don't speak out quite so angrily, but today was my first and last trip to our local (or any other one for that matter) Walgreens. Period. Batesville just got one, and it's been the buzz of the town for the last couple of days. Why am I boycotting them? First and foremost, they lured their new pharmacist away from his established practice of 30+ years and promptly fired him after they got his customer base. Yeah, I know he had a reputation, but still. That's harsh. Their prices are too high, they treat customers like crap (been my experience at every one I've ever been in), and they lack the ability to print photos without making them blurry or dark. So there. I shall no longer spend any money at their locations. The ONLY way to retain your rights as a consumer is to vote with your dollars. Spend them at a local business ran by local people. Not only will it help someone directly, it will keep your cash in your local community.

Welcome to my boycott list Walgreens (other notables include Pier One, Wal-Mart Tire/Lube, Red Lobster, and many more....)