Archives for February 2005

Well, this weekend was interesting. I was in Brainerd for “Spring Leadership Day” with Intervarsity, and to be honest, I didn’t get much out of it personally, but it was good to be there, and get to know some of the freshman better.

Yesterday, I was at the Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon watching my friend Rachel race. I originally went there to just watch, but ended up helping get the dogs ready for her race, and helped get the sled to the starting line. She’s doing the Mid-Distance race, which is a 2-day, 150 mile race. The Long race is 3-4 days, and is 400 miles. It was very interesting watching all the mushers and dog sled teams.

But today, I get to go to campus and get some hours in working for Computer Maintenance. I really wish I had more business, or more development projects to work on, as I’d rather be doing that to pay the bills than have to work on campus. It’s not that I don’t like working there, I really enjoy it there. I’d just like to see my business take off more, and be more successfull. It’s been real hard these last 2 months since my roommate moved out. So I’ve been having to cover all the expenses of having a house by myself. I’ve gotten a little behind in some of the bills, and I feel really bad about it. Especially since I’ve had to ask my parents for help a couple of times.

Right now, if I can’t find another roommate, or work doesn’t pick up for my business, I’m going to have to sell my house. I just can’t afford to live here by myself with my current level of income. So yeah, that sucks.

Well, off to campus to work!

I’m sitting here at the datacenter, working on my servers… currently in the process of updating them. I’ve fixed the hard drive issue I previously posted about and that is 100% perfect again. It’s really cold here in the datacenter. US Internet recently added 2 more AC units to help keep the place cool, and they’ve increased the number of vents in the floor. There happens to be a vent right in front of my rack, that I’ve been sitting over for the past 4 hours. I can’t feel my toes anymore, maybe I’ll go stand behind the rack and warm up for a little bit in the exhaust from my servers.

So I set up this blog site thingy with the intent to blog daily. Well, that hasn’t happened yet. Perhaps I should set this to my home page so I’ll remember to post more often. Because really, thats the point of these weblogs isn’t it?

Well, this weekend, I’m going to a leadership retreat for Intervarsity Christian Fellowship, an organization I’m a part of at my college. It will be pretty nice, to get away, and all that good stuff. The only thing, is the retreat is in Brainerd. I go to school in Duluth, and right now I’m at the Datacenter in the Twin Cities. So I have the joy of figuring out the best route to Brainerd from the Cities. I think I can take HWY 10 the whole way, but I’m not sure. I guess I’ll have to resort to Mapquest.

So, one thing I learned this week, is that Business is not about what you sell, but who you know. It is all about people. I went to the Duluth Boat & Sport show yesterday at the DECC (Duluth Entertainment and Convention Center). I went primarily to check out Jim/New Tech Concepts booth. I had just picked up my box of 500 new busines cards, so I took a handfull and went into the show.

I walked around a bit, didn’t see anything that interested me that much. As much as I enjoy fishing, I’m not going to be spending any money on it at the moment. So I went to Jim’s booth. He was talking with a guy I recognized. It took me a minute, then I realized where I recognized him from. He goes to my church! It turns out that he runs a business doing wi-fi hot spots up here.

Well we got to talking, and I found out that he provides broadband to end users via wireless, but doesnt deal with email and other ISP services. I mentioned that I provide email services through my hosting, along with anti-spam/anti-virus and that I’m all set up for it. He was like “Great!” and asked for my business cards. I gave him my whole stack that I had with me.

I’m hoping that a good business relationship grows from this. I’ve learned that for me to succeed in this business, not only do I need to be sensitive to God’s plan for my life and business, but I need to know others who are doing well in business.

Well, last night at about oh, 10-10:30pm, one of my businesses servers (phoenix) went down. The datacenter techs took a look at it, and it had a failing raid array. Now, normally, this is something that you really don’t want to have happen. Especially not this late at night, since its a 2.5hr drive to the cities.

So my buddy Chris and I sped down to Minneapolis around 11pm, and arrived at US Internet by about 1:30am. Sure enough, the raid array was borked. We tried rebuilding it, and that seemed to fix it, temporarily, but there were some massive inconsistencies. We checked both disks, both had current data on it, but they just varied slightly. So we re-imaged one disk over the other. This took about an hour and a half just for the re-imaging process. Good thing we were able to keep ourselves busy by tweaking our firewall (dagron). Unfortunately, we were still unable to figure out the one glitchy rule that was causing problems with some sites. That will have to wait for another adventure on another day.

Well, the re-imaging completed, but the array was still failing. I guess one of the drives is actually bad. So we re-hashed the setup to run off a single drive, got the system back up, and everything was all hunky-dory by 4am. Well, except for the bad hard drive, that will need to be replaced once I get a chance to order a new pair of 120gb hard drives.

So we clean up the rack, and head home. But first we needed to get gas. We stopped at a holiday station before we arrived at the Datacenter, but it was closed, and their pumps were turned off. I’ve never seen a holiday station that didn’t have at least 24/7 pay at the pump. Luckily, we were able to find another normal gas station (or petrol station as they’re called across the pond) and get fuel for my thirsty car. Our next point of business was to get fuel for our tummys. We found a perkins, but no one appeared to be there. We heard voices in the back of the kitchen, but no one came up to help us, so we decided to find another. The only other perkins we knew how to get to was in Roseville, all the way on the other side of the cities. So we went there, and ate breakfast, and had a pot of coffee.

The ride back was a blur, travelling in a caffeine induced sleepless state. We finally got back to duluth at about 7:30. I went straight to the bathroom because my can of Sierra Mist, plus a pot of coffee, plus a red bull and an amp energy drink were all crying to get out. All of those had been since 11pm when we left my house the night before.

So here I am now, at work (which started at 8am), no sleep, wired on caffeine. I’m probably going to read this post tomorrow and be like “What was I smoking!?!”

Well, my birthday came and went. It feels kind of surreal to think that I’m already 22. Sometimes I wonder to myself, “Man, where did the time go? It seems just like last week I was 16!” . One of the things I’ve come to realize as I grow older is that people need to cherish each and every moment, because they can never get those moments back. Hindsight is always 20/20.

I was rather suprised that the only person to actually wish me “happy birthday” on my birthday was my friend Jessica. She called and left a message talking about being an “old fart”. Every year I keep expecting a suprise party since I’ve never had one. I think that when people actually try to throw me a suprise party, I’ll have to try hard to act suprised because I expect one for some odd reason. Thats partially the reason why my family forgot my 17th birthday, because I never mentioned it, and no one remembered. I didn’t mention it was coming because I thought their silence meant they were planning a suprise party. Nope, they just plain forgot. Oh well, they’re human after all, and I still love them.

So, I guess this year, my birthday fell on the same day as the Super Bowl, whoop-de-friggin-do. I’m not much of a fan of football, and was more interested in the commercials. And I must say, that this year, the commercials sucked big time. Yeah, the only good ones were the ones about misunderstanding (the broker who was thought to be robbing the convenience store, and the boyfriend who looked like he was going to kill the cat). But nothing beats the commercials from back when it was the Cowboys vs. the Bills for like 5 years straight. Those were hilarious.