We had a terrific show with the Sargent Tucker band on Friday night in downtown Vacaville (big thanks to all who came out!). We were marvelously entertained later by The Rhythm Method band too.

We attended the Dixon Mayfair parade on Saturday morning and then came home and ventured out on a refreshing 15 mile bike ride with Denise and Wyatt to the Morning Sun Herb Farm on Pleasant’s Valley Road for their pre-Mother’s Day extravaganza. We got a flat along the way, but that’s typical. A quick tire repair along the road and we were back on our way. Later that night Denise and I attended our monthly Wine Club meeting. Chardonnay this month. (after your first two tastes, they really all tasted the same. Can you tell I’m a red wine guy?)

And then a Mother’s Day visit from Denise’s parents yesterday. We all visited the Dixon May Fair later and watched as Lauren and Elizabeth’s 4H rabbits won ribbons galore! Lauren’s rabbit won 2nd in breed and first in the costume contest. and their entire 4H unit won 1st place in having the cleanest cages.

Lance Mackey

I read that the Iditarod sled race in Alaska was won a fourth time by the same guy recently, but I just found out today that he (Lance Mackey) is a tonsil cancer survivor too! Simply amazing. Apparently he went through radiation and chemo therapy using Cisplatin and suffered such severe nerve damage in his fingers that he had one amputated. He suffers from the cold like most of us do, but he still has won this thing four times.

That which does not destroy us only makes us stronger.

Way to go Lance!

Read the story here.

Elizabeth and Rosalina

Elizabeth and Lauren made today’s edition of The Vacaville Report for participating in a local 4H event where they demonstrated their presentation skills using their rabbits and presentation boards they had created. Elizabeth even got her photo in the newspaper too. We’re so proud of them for being in 4H. It’s such hard work, and even harder work for Denise in coordinating, transporting and helping keeping everything straight. Way to go girls!

Here’s a link to the article in The Vacaville Reporter.
http://www.thereporter.com/ci_14496791

2009 was a tough year for me personally. Giving this battle with tonsil cancer all I had was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. There were times during the treatment when I felt like I was never going to have energy, or even feel healthy and strong again. All those thought are behind me now. I’m feeling better all the time. Good enough to take a trip to Europe earlier this year and a Christmas trip to Disneyland with my family. I have been blessed with a wonderfully loving and supportive family. And my friends have been there for me all the way through this challenging year. So let’s say goodbye to a difficult and not-so-great 2009 and hello to a much more prosperous, healthy and happy 2010!!

Since our kids have another set of parents, Denise and I spent a relaxing Christmas morning by ourselves and went for a nice breakfast. Our road trip later that night would require me to drive through the night non-stop, so we took the opportunity to take a long nap during the afternoon in anticipation of the crew arriving later in the evening. We planned on leaving at 10pm and driving the 6 hours to Anaheim. When everyone arrived, we celebrated a Christmas night together around the decorated tree and then packed up and headed out. The drive to Anaheim was uneventful and I was able to pull into the Paradise Pier Hotel at Disneyland at 5:00am, right on time!

Our 5-day park hopper passes allowed us early entry into the park on 3 separate days, so we enjoyed a quick breakfast in the hotel and walked across the street to the park for the opening at 7am. We spent the day at the park and during the afternoon, we all started to crash and burn from lack of sleep, including me operating on zero sleep. We napped back at the hotel and went back to the park at night for the Fantasmic show in Adventureland. All I can say is it was amazing! Fireworks, costumes, watershows, sailing ships. Disney really does these types of things the right way.

Anyway, to make a long story somewhat shorter, we spent the next 4 days skipping back and forth from Disneyland and California Adventure, standing in lines, using Fastpasses, eating yummy food where we could and really enjoying ourselves. One thing that was helpful for us, is realizing that feeding our 6-person family at Disneyland easily gets to $60 or more for every meal, so we went grocery shopping outside the park and carried our own snacks and made sandwiches back at the hotel whenever we could. We really saved some money avoiding park meals when we could. However there are some occasions like eating dinner at the Blue Bayou in Adventureland that you just have to do.  The meals we all had were really good, and the service there (like everywhere in DL) is great!

So on our 5th day at the park, we were all pretty worn out and it had started to rain too. Denise and the girls made it into the park early for Mickey’s Tunetown Madness while the boys and I packed up the truck. We joined them

in the park, went on a few rides and all decided we’d had enough. Our drive out of LA was terrible with traffic worse than I’ve ever seen, but once we had hit the Grapevine, things smoothed out and we arrived home in Vacaville at midnight. Just in time to celebrate Elizabeth’s 13th birthday party on New Year’s Eve!

A few post-trip thoughts:

• Everything at DL is pricier, but worth it. The cast members, parades, environment, food, amenities are all top notch. They pull out all the stops.
• If you have a birthday at DL you’re in for a treat. Wearing the birthday button on your short means you’ll have cast members telling you happy birthday all day long.
• Get to the park early as it really fills up later in the day and the lines for rides get very long.
• Take your own food, drinks and snacks when you can. In a backpack!

If you’re interested in seeing photos of our trip to DL, you can following this link.

http://gtaber.smugmug.com/Family-Photos/Disneyland-Christmas/10827459_99QBK

Also Saturday started my week long (9 days actually) stay-cation over the Thanksgiving holiday. I’ll be hanging around the house, finally getting to chores I’ve been postponing for months. Icky things like cleaning the gutters of years of pigeon poop and fixing the backyard fence.  Oh yeah. Jealous?

I’ve played around with the Wolfram Alpha tool a few times in the past, but after reading about the top 100 innovations for 2009, and that Wolfram|Alpha was named as the “Best of What’s New” Grand Award winner in the category of computing, I thought I’d check it out once again. I was not disappointed.

If you think of Google as a fantastic research tool, well, I think of it as providing you “road signs” to information that may or may not be what you’re ultimately looking for.  Wolfram|Alpha takes that idea and expands it into offering you the information you were looking for without having to blindly click link after link. And the type of information you can derive from Wolfram|Alpha is in my estimation without boundaries. It has the ability to take your question in terms of a sentence, mathematical equation, dates, calculations, comparisons or just about anything and give you meaningful results almost instantly. Wolfram|Alpha is not designed to replace Google by any means, since it would be unfair to classify it as a simply a search engine. However in terms of quick and powerful data research, you simply can’t do any better.

Take it for a spin yourself and prepare to be amazed.  http://www.wolframalpha.com/

Or watch this video hosted by Stephen Wolfram himself. Make sure you’re sitting down first.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/screencast/introducingwolframalpha.html

Oh, and if you take the Wolfram|Alpha and mix it with an iPhone, you get the a very powerful combination indeed! http://products.wolframalpha.com/iphone/

First some history: In the not too distant past I actually ran all of these services from multiple rack mounted servers in my garage, but over the years and after paying way too many high PGE bills, I consolidated all of my servers into a single Dell small form factor server running on my desktop. My PGE bills naturally went down, but I was still at the mercy of how reliable my DSL connection to the world was each day. And with a business DSL connection, the fastest upload speed I was able to get in the comfortable price range was 768 megabits per second. Not nearly fast enough for a robust email and web server environment in my opinion.

Well, when this little Dell went down a few weeks ago, it occurred to me that the time had come to end this home server experiment and move all of my sites and services into a hosted environment. But I couldn’t do all of that overnight, so I quickly ordered a replacement fan for the Dell server and until that arrived, I was able to continue operating the server with the case open and by pointing a small fan at the open CPU. This kept things cool enough to run each day. When the replacement power supply arrived, I was able to get that installed in a record 10 minutes (for me anyway), close the server case and resume normal operations!

The next step was finding a suitable Linux-based hosting provider with affordable monthly rates, shell access and the type of granular control I would need to continue hosting my websites and email. After evaluating a few candidates, I settled with a company called HostMonster.com. In addition to unlimited domains, unlimited email accounts, unlimited server space and unlimited bandwidth, the price per month dropped to an incredible $3.95 if you paid for three years up front. Sounded like a great deal, so I signed up and started the migration process for all of my websites and email customers.

Fortunately with shell access and using rsync over SSH, I was able to upload/copy all of my data (and there was a lot of it) over to the new HostMonster server. The migration process took a number of days, since my upload speeds from the house are so slow.  A couple of highlights include that HM used the Dovecot IMAP mail server, so the formatting of my existing mail boxes was exactly the same as where they would ultimately be hosted. What a time saver! Setting up Apache and the various domains was pretty easy, in addition to keeping things clearly compartmentalized on the server too. I’m also very happy with being able to offer my customers a much better webmail experience too. Not only does HM have SquirrelMail (which my customers had already been using), but Horde and RoundCube webmail are also available.

The last phase of my server migration involved moving my entire Nagios server/services monitoring application from my home server to the Amazon EC2 Cloud. I got this done today. Essentially I brought up a new server instance in the Amazon Ec2 Cloud, installed all the LAMP stack requirements and then installed and configured Nagios. I was able to save a great deal of time by rsyncing my existing plugins and configuration files from the old server. With a few tweaks here and there, Nagios came up clean and is now monitoring all of the sites and services offered by my employer. And I can sleep better at night knowing that the monitoring is now being done outside of my home network, which can be spotty on its own, and lead to erroneous notifications.

And finally, the coup de grâce. I was able to power off the little Dell home web/email server this morning. Sleep well buddy, you done good.

In Winters

On Saturday, Denise and decided to take our first Fall bike ride. The ride was actually my first in nearly a year and something I had been looking forward to for a long time. We felt we could make the 18+ mile ride into the small city of Winters and back, for a nearly 40 mile ride. We left Vacaville at 10am and as luck would have it, we suffered our first flat tire just outside of Vacaville, near I505. I had never changed a flat tire on a road bike, so this was a good learning experience for me, although I can honestly report my mood wasn’t the most pleasant at that point.

I got the tire patched and repaired in short order and we rode on northward. The fall weather was great for riding and as we got about 2 miles outside of Winters, Denise suffered a flat tire. Our second of the day! Seems like I might have angered the biking gods somehow this day. Nevertheless, we pulled over into a nearby walnut tree orchard and I repaired my second tire of the day. By this time it was getting into the early afternoon and neither Denise and I were in the mood any longer for the ride back. So we stopped into a local Winters coffee shop, called a close friend (Sara D.) and were graciously taxied back to Vacaville. We got in a solid 18 mile ride and for my first lengthly bike ride post-treatment, I think I did pretty well. Although when I got back home, the tidal wave of hurt and fatigue came over me, pretty much keeping me out of action for the remainder of the day. If anyone has any road tire advice, feel free to let me know!

Next time (hopefully soon), I’ll pre-load more calories and we’ll make the ride there and back. Can’t wait!

Mt. Shasta

Well after a 5 1/2 hour drive back into Vacaville on Tuesday, we finally made it home. Just in time to attend Elizabeth’s 4H awards event in Vallejo. Yeah, I know..more driving. Actually the drive home was very relaxing and beautiful as we drove through the rest of southern Oregon and into some scenic mountainous country of northern California. I always love driving past

Shasta and seeing it looming in the distance. However it was a little disappointing driving past Lake Shasta as the water line was quite low. I can’t imagine how low the boat launches must be to get boats into such low water. I was also amazed to feel the change in temperature from Ashland (46°) into Red Bluff (82°). Quite dramatic!

Elizabeth's 4H Award

The 4H awards event was pretty long at just about 2 hours, but it was great to see all the 4H’ers and their various awards. 4H is a very well run organization and takes good care of all it’s members who in turn work very hard. Elizabeth won an award for her presentations for her rabbits.