Sick, Christmas & Poker So I'm breaking the norm and skipping anything work related. Not because there isn't any happening. I admit work slows down in December, but lately I have not been doing too much work. I have been extremely under the weather with the flu for almost 2 weeks now. I've had some ups, and them some downs, but it hangs on, and seems to be back somewhat. I am functional now, but for a while before Christmas I was residing mostly on my couch or in my bed.

I've been pumping the vitamins, and cold medication. For a while I started off my days with a double neo citron ... and took the cold/flu pills with that. It made for an interesting buzz and I think I'm missing a few days in there somewhere ... but whatever. Drinking gallons of tea, and I rediscovered my love of Sunny Delight. I tried some new cold medicine, as the usual (Contac) changed their formula so there is less pain killer, and less juice in them. I bet there was some medical regulation and they were originally too powerful. That's why I used to use them all the time ... because they were soooo powerful ... gots me well in a hurry.

So still being sick the Christmas holidays did not wait for me to get better. I ended up jamming on some festivities (a lot actually) because I was so under the weather. Rich and I did manage to get our pictures with Santa at the Sunridge mall though. He still has my picture from last year. But the tradition lives on. Rich ended up heading to Flin Flon. The Youngs are all in Hawaii for Xmas. I drove them to the Airport, and as such I have Robyns new Tundra while she is gone. Man I love that truck. Big V8 ... so fun to drive. I feel like king of the road. Jono came over to my place on Christmas eve. We watched a little football, and then watched the original Star Wars. I just got the first trilogy on DVD. It was relaxing. Christmas day I slept in, and when I got up I headed over to Mikala's for dinner. Her Mom and Dad were in from the Island, as well as her sister Penny. Of course Mahlah, Peyton and Aaron were also there. We had a delicious dinner. BBQ turkey with trimmings, and even stuffed peppers. It was a feast for sure. I didn't stay too long, as I'm still not 100% so being out and about tears me down quickly.

I've been on a bit of a poker tear lately. Since I've spent so much time sitting around at home, and have no energy to do anything productive I've been sittin in the poker rooms online. I got 4th in a tournament with 600 people. Then 2 2nd places in about 100 person tournaments, and then I won a tournament on Christmas eve night after Jono left. Today I woke up to a message on my phone from Johnny P. He was driving back to Calgary from Regina, and said he wanted to pick me up and hit the casino for a poker tournament. We headed down to the Cash Casino. $50+6 tournament, John said he thinks he was the first person out of the tournament. I was playing prime, and I ended up getting 3rd place winning $620. It was a fun night. John had some time to kill, but ended up watching the final table I was at. It was a fun night. I think a break from the poker is needed. Back to working on the projects is the plan tomorrow. I'll explain all of that later.

Happy Holidays!  ¶ 1:15:00 AM 0 comments

  NTP, Backups & P/M Steve Patterson I had a little task that was requested of me to setup NTP service on a couple of servers for a network. Apparently NTP traffic is mistakenly identified as P2P traffic and throttled at the doorstep on the network. Should be easy enough yes? Well it would have been had I not found out about the network limitations until after I had it working. ;-) I had installed ntp-server packages then I started changing some configurations. Since I have never run my own NTP server, as I do not have an atomic clock in my possession, I was learning as I went along. I mean I know how NTP basically works. I had to find some nice stratum 1 servers I could freely use, and although ntpq -p showed all the right things (eventually ... not more jitter of 4000). I could not make use of the servers with ntpdate from my machine. I spent time checking configs, reading up on the web, checking everything on my system, my firewall. Everything seemed correct, and I simply could not figure it out. Then I got the bright idea to try another server on the same network and bingo ... all is well. I am glad that the entire network has available NTP servers.

I also had the bug to fix some backup routines for ourselves. I have changed my method of backing up parts of kolab to simply taking an rsync share of /kolab. It's just way easier to restore when you have the whole tree. There is no recreation of LDAP, not reconstruction of mailboxes. Nothing to copy. Simply make sure the kolab users and groups exist and start kolab. So things moved around, and I'm backing things up to a USB drive. Gregg came back to me with some access issues. Seems in my rsync of the file server shares, I also synced the backup directory with symlinks to the file server with the backup directory with symlinks to the file server with the backup directory with symlinks ... well since windows has a 256 char limit on paths ... oops. I rectified that immediately. I also discovered the joys of using --link-dest option with rsync for differential backups. Hard links make things much nice, and easier to care for. I need to do some more testing, but that is definitely the way to go.

Last night I attended a special band practice for the Calgary Police Pipe Band. I had not been around the band for quite a while. It was nice to see everyone, and I even sat in a little bit on the practice. It was a truly special event because they were having a special presentation to the the former Pipe Major Steve Patterson. Steve had stepped down, and retired from the band this year. We headed to the cuff for drinks and pizza. Al Redford, the previous band officer, gave a set of kind words for Steve, and presented him with a plaque from when we performed with the Strathclyde Police Pipe Band in George Square in downtown Glasgow.

When I joined the band Steve was the PM. In his thank you speech he mentioned members he played with in the band over the years. And although as a leading drummer I played with Steve near the end of his time, he thanked me personally in his speech. I was quite moved. I also owe Steve a thank-you in return. Steve did many things over our time together to help me. From arranging uniform fittings at the airport when the taylor had a 20 mintue layover, to meeting me in parking lots with uniform parts, to hand delivering my #1 tunic to my apartment the day we were leaving for Europe. But I will forever be indebted to him for one special act.

I do not remember the exact dates, but the trip deposit was due for our trip to Europe in the early year of 2004. Just before it was due I was in a car accident and spent almost $8000 to fix my vehicle. When it came time to push of shove for the deposit I had to back out of the trip. Steve paid my deposit out of his own pocket to get the money in for the deadline. I repaid him in due time, along with a bottle on single malt as a token of appreciation. The point is that had it not been for Steve's generosity, I would have never been able to make it to Scotland. I had never been in my life, and Steve told me neither had he. So the best way to say this is "Steve ... we lost our cherries together". Thank you Pipe Major Steve Patterson.

slainte,  ¶ 12:06:00 AM 0 comments