Ben's Blog

I started the week thinking most of my time would be spend interviewing candidates for the open Web Developer position at Grand Valley. Instead, two of the candidates had to cancel their interviews and reschedule – given their situations I would have done the same thing so I was happy to reschedule. The hardest part was finding a time that the entire committee could meet again within a short window of time; always a pain with 5 people’s unique schedules. We have everything set now so I hope to wrap this process up SOON.

In the midst of this, both production web servers decided to go haywire at the same time leaving the GVSU website down for hours on Tuesday. I don’t think we’ve been down that long since I’ve been there so you can imagine how everyone was running around with their heads cut off. Eventually we were able to cut over to a contingency server hosted off site but I even encountered issues there when that server was temporarily inaccessible when we wanted to cut over. People were calling or emailing left and right telling us their site was down – they must have had shortcuts to those sites in order to miss the homepage and every other site being down at the SAME time.

The remainder of the week has been spent trying to figure out what happened on Tuesday while still fighting remnants of the problem which continue to plague the one remaining web server in production (the other was taken down and restored to a out of date version). Luckily we’ve had access to techs at IBM to troubleshoot WAS and techs at Adobe to troubleshoot ColdFusion. The hard part is picking through what they’re recommending while pointing fingers at the other. We’re also fortunate to have a number of tech people in IT at GVSU who are looking through everything on their end to help us get the problem resolved. I really hope we can solve this yet this week so that next week isn’t so hectic.

One lesson learned from this is that we need to more closely monitor the server’s and watch errors as they arise and before they can pile up on us. To help with this I ordered 3 LCD TV to mount around the office to display stats, errors, slow queries, etc. We hope to also monitor twitter at the same time – sweet.

To make things worse, a friend’s website that I occasionally help with (http://www.phiredup.com) is down and I’ve taken the lead on dealing with Network Solutions to get things back to normal.  This is the second time in three weeks their site has been down for several days due to database issues.  I would have never expected such poor support from NetSol, but given the choice I would never host something there again.  It would be one thing if this was someone’s personal blog but this is their business site and an outage means perspective clients are getting a terrible first impression.  I have to say…Dreamhost provides much better service while offering much better rates!  If you want reliable cheap hosting go there!

Tomorrow will be better…come Hell or high water.  I have a very busy morning, but I will get through the crazy schedule knowing that the afternoon brings an office trip to Craig’s Cruisers, relaxation and good times with others in the group. We’ve had this planned for a while but unfortunately had to reschedule due to bad weather before the holiday break. All the better though – this couldn’t come at a more needed time!

I’ve been pretty busy these past two days webcasting at Grand Valley – yesterday I setup before the bug MLK event in the fieldhouse featuring Juan Williams from NPR and CNN.  We couldn’t work out the details to stream the event online, so I spent the time after setup testing all the remote viewing areas for today’s webcast.  I’m glad I didn’t have to webcast the Juan Williams speech – I was able to pay a bit more attention and really enjoyed his address.

Today marked the big America United celebration at Grand Valley, featuring pre-inauguration speakers and the live telecast of the PBS inauguration coverage.  The webcast went pretty well, but I wish I could have just been in the audience so that I could have followed more closely what everyone else got to watch.  I have to keep an eye on the streaming version of the event so my audio is always 20 seconds or so behind what I am watching live.  Today’s setup was pretty big – two big 20′ screens with the live coverage meant there wasn’t a bad seat in the house.

The turnout was great and it was very cool to join about 1500 people at the Fieldhouse to watch Obama being sworn in and the following address to the nation.  Political views aside, I have always found Obama very refreshing and motivating – I really hope he is able to make amazing things happen!

There seems to be no end to the snow this winter so I’ve decided to embrace the cold weather and spend more time snowmobiling.  Not sure that I would like snowmobiling, I bought an older ’96 Polaris Indy sled a couple years ago – it was nothing fancy, and at 500cc it wasn’t really the fastest thing on the trail.  This year I stepped it up a bit and bought a newer 2002 Yamaha Viper – its been so much fun that I’ve picked up new gear so that I can ride more and not get so cold.  The new sled is a bit faster too; at 700cc I haven’t found out how fast it will go but I stopped trying when the speedometer hit 97 mph.

It snowed so much this weekend we parked the sleds under a pine tree to keep some of the snow off the seats.  The Polaris is in the front, the Yamaha is in the back and the SkiDoo on the left is Mark’s.

This past weekend I joined my brother and friend at the cabin for a weekend of riding.  We had record cold temps, Friday when we arrived it was under 10 degrees.  Once we were all settled in, had the water and heat turned on inside the cabin (its usually winterized) we decided to ride to get dinner.  After dinner we kept on riding until my old Polaris that my brother was riding blew a sparkplug that was loose, at the same time the pull rope used to start my snowmobile broke so we rushed home before anything else could go wrong.  Saturday morning we ran to the repair shop and spent a good part of the day “wrenching” on the sleds until we could go back out later that night.  I always thought the older snowmobile steered poorly, and I found out on Saturday that the carbides (strips under the skis that bite into the snow) were worn on one side and missing on the other.  Good time to replace them I suppose and wouldn’t you know it was like brand new when done.

I’m hoping to get back to Tawas one more time in the couple weeks, but in any case we’ll be back on the trails again during the annual Perchville festival.

There are certain things that come with being married to a teacher, or at least a first & second grade teacher.  I’ve made the occasional trip to her classroom because apparently the kids find it fascinating that I actually exist.  I’ve even helped with a couple classroom projects…the ones that require tools – like drilling holes in coconuts for coconut bras and going to lowes to pickup supplies for art projects.  My favorite, however, is the correspondence that Holly brings home for me.  Sometimes this is a picture of an airplane or a likeness of Holly and I that hangs on the fridge…other times it is a quick story or a note for me.

Here are my two latest pieces of correspondence with a 7 and 8 year old:

After giving this much thought Holly and I have decided to become foster parents – with just the two of us in the house (along with Bailey and Lucy) we felt we had room for a new addition. Kids, you ask?  No just a 4 year old black lab named Toby.  Once you get past the 80 pound big hairy exterior, Toby is a pretty mellow and well behaved dog.

Toby belongs to my younger sister, Marie, but had resided at my mom’s house while Marie was in school, until my mom decided to start travel nursing.  My mom could have taken Toby with her but such a big dog in such small confines would not have been a good mix.  My brother took care of Toby for the first couple months but wasn’t really looking forward to another stint so we volunteered.

Luckily Toby and Bailey get along very well; Bailey has perfected the art of ignoring other dogs but Toby is really trying to get Bailey to play with him – we’ll see how that goes.  Lucy hates all living objects outside our home so it is no surprise she hasn’t taken to him yet.

It has only been a couple days but we’ve found a couple of interesting things about Toby:

• He can jump 5 feet straight up into the air but can’t figure out how to get around a plastic baby-gate.
• He carries around a nasty blanket, then cuddles up with it and sucks on it…yes, like a pacifier.
• He whimpers, then barks, then jumps and barks (in an escalating fashion, and depending on how long you pretend not to hear him) when he wants to go outside.
• He makes every attempt to get outside when you’re not paying attention, but lacks the obedient lab trait when you want him to come back.  We haven’t had any jail breaks yet and we hope to keep it that way.