Merry Chirstmas 2010

Merry Christmas everyone.

Wendy and I have been very blessed this year. I know for me it has been the happiest year I’ve had so far.  We are still enjoying our home here in Utah. No kids yet as we are still just enjoying being a couple. The dog and cat are like characters from the Will Ferrell movie Step Brothers when they first met each other. Madie, our German Shepherd, knows she can’t hurt the cat, and Jamin, the cat, knows it so he chases Madie around the house. Never thought I’d see the day when a German Shepherd would run from a cat.

We’ve done a few improvements to our house. Changed out some light fixtures and updated some of the outlets with the help of my father in law Tim and my dad. We’ve also added new french doors to replace the sliding glass door that leads into our back yard. We are hoping to replace some of our single pane windows next year as you can feel the cold air rushing in the house as you walk by them. I’ve been put in charge of taking care of the outside of the house. The yard and what not.

Wendy and I have been enjoying our church we go to. There are a lot of great people there that we’ve enjoyed getting to know over the year. We found a small group Bible study class we really enjoy, and our pastors do a great job of delivering sermons. We both look forward to our Sunday mornings each week. (no, we haven’t converted to the local LDS culture).

Wendy and I have gotten to go on some fun trips this year. Our first trip was to Heber City about an hour from here. We went there for my birthday and valentine’s day. The motel we got was dog friendly so Madie went along with us. While we were up there we did some snow tubing and some snow mobiling. I never knew I could get so sore from riding on a snow mobile, but it was a lot of fun. Wendy and I plan to go rent another snow mobile again this winter.

As a chance to escape our winter and for me to see my beloved Cubbies play baseball, we flew to Mesa, AZ for Spring Training. I have dreamed of getting to go to spring training for a long time and I finally got to go. It was nice to be able to wear shorts and sit in the sunshine after a cold winter here in Utah. We are planning to go back again this Spring.

My brother Chris and his wife Lisa both finished their graduate studies at Virginia Tech this spring. My parents drove up for the ceremony, and Wendy and I flew out. It was a fun trip getting to be with my family. After visiting with them, Wendy and I rented a car to drive up to Washington DC. We were only there for about 24 hours, but we were able to see a lot of sights while we were there. Didn’t get much sleep, and it was a whirlwind visit, but we were excited to get to see some of the American icons that we’ve heard about our whole lives.

We flew to Seattle, WA this summer so I could get to see my Cubs play baseball during the regular season. I have always heard how nice of a ball park Safeco field is in Seattle, and I’ve never been to Seattle, so Wendy and I made a trip of it. We got to watch 3 games and the Cubs lost 2 of 3. It was a rough year, yet again, to be a Cubs fan. Seattle was a nice town. We were able to save some money by not renting a car and were able to get to see a lot still. The weather was perfect, and it only rained one day.

I spent most of my summer riding my bicycle. We live near the base of Little Cottonwood Canyon where Alta and Snowbird ski resorts are located. I rode my bike up that canyon several times a week. I never made it to the top, but I kept making progress. Wendy also got a bike this summer, and I am trying to get her to ride it more for next year. We went on a couple of rides together. We are both currently attending a weekly spin class. Our instructor does a great job of teaching the fundamentals of maintaining good positioning while on a bike.

Both Wendy’s parents and my parents came out to visit us this year. We enjoyed having them visit us and a chance to show off our home to visitors. My parents enjoyed it so much that they have decided they want to move out here. It will be nice to have my parents near by as it is difficult to get back to MS to visit.

Wendy and I continued our backpacking roots with a few trips this year. We planned a trip in September for Glacier National Park. In the mean time, we did a couple of shorter trips nearby to help us get ready for it. We went to the Uintas Wilderness for a 3 day trip. We took Madie with us, and I have never seen that dog so happy ever. She makes for a great backpacking dog. We had a great time too. We then took another 3 day trip to American Fork Canyon. Madie accompanied us on that trip as well. We wore her out hiking, but she loved it. We bought her some saddle bags to carry her food and water.

Our trip to Glacier was wonderful. We had planned to spend 6 days backpacking, but had to come out a day early because of an early snow storm that covered an exposed trail we were to cross. It was a very pretty park. Wendy and I were both glad to get back to the simple life of backpacking. We met some nice folks on the trail while we were there. Surprisingly, Glacier gets a lot of visitors from Washington State. My blog has a more detailed account of our trip.

For our first anniversary, we headed back to CO in September. We rented a cabin near Estes Park and enjoyed touring around Rocky Mountain National Park. It was a great time to visit as a lot of the leaves on the aspen trees were peaking. We had a great time there.

Wendy is still loving her job. She’s a pediatrician for an urgent care network in town. She works evenings and one day a weekend which leaves her with plenty of time to do things with me. We decided that me getting a job wasn’t as important for us as getting to spend time together. It’s been a fun year.

I eventually obtained my UT EMT Basic. It didn’t transfer from CO and I wound up having to retake my EMT Basic class again. Thankfully it wasn’t a hard class, but it was just frustrating having to go through the process again. There’s only one private ambulance company around here, and I may go work for them at some point in the future. I really do miss getting to work in EMS. I’ve also been applying to the local fire departments. My best luck so far has been with the Salt Lake City Fire Dept. I ranked #13 on their list. They hired 12 in November which leaves me #1 on their list for now. Their hiring list is good for another 1 1/2 years. I’m really really hoping they hire more firefighters as this will get me in. With the economy still recovering, local government hiring isn’t as promising as it once was. In the mean time I’ve been ramping up my exercise routines to make sure I’m in shape for any fire academy I get hired for.

Wendy and I are staying home for Christmas this year. We are enjoying having a nice quiet Christmas with just us and the animals. We’ve had a great year and look forward to many more to come.

We hope this finds you and your family in good health and joy.

Jason Cotting

My blog:
https://jasonblog.cotting.us/

Pictures:
http://anvilgear.com/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=10855

Sandberg denied the dream of a Cub and its fans

This week, the Cubs announced that they had made their choice, Mike Quade, for their new manager for their major league team. Towards the end of the 2010 season, Pinella left the team early to go home for “family” reasons. I can’t blame him for not finishing the season as the team was an embarrassment. Mike Quade became the interim manager once Lou left. Interestingly enough, the bench coach, Alan Trammel, was not even considered for the job. When Quade was named interim manager, Jim Hendry, the Cubs GM, stated that Trammel was not made interim manager because he was not going to be considered for the job of manager. Never mind that Trammel is the second in command and takes over when the manager gets ejected. Quade had started the season as the Cubs’ 3rd base coach. He had been the 3rd base coach for the Cubs since 2006, and was the manager for the AAA Iowa Cubs for 3 years. He has spent a total of 17 seasons as coach and manager in a number of baseball organizations in the minor leagues. Quade finished the 2010 season going 24-13.

A number of prospective managers put their hat in the ring for the managing job of the Cubs. Many fans seemed to think Joe Girardi was a prospective candidate for the job, I really doubt it. Granted, he’s an Illinois native, a former Cubs catcher, and really likes the Chicago area. He even applied for the job back when Lou was hired. He has been a successful manager and is currently in the last year of his contract with the New York Yankees. I don’t see him wanting to leave a job with a championship calibre team like the Yankees to try and bring a losing Cubs team a World Series that has eluded other managers for the last 102 years. That and he would come with a large price tag.

Many folks seemed to think that Bob Brenly was a good candidate. He is currently one of the broadcasters for the Cubs television games. People point to his World Series Championship with the AZ Diamond Backs. I personally don’t think that means anything. He came into that team after Buck Showalter built it from its first year as an expansion team, and walked right into a well built team for it to win the world series. He didn’t win any more World Series after that first year.

Perhaps the most notable name that was interviewing for the Cubs managing position was Ryne Sandberg. Yes, Ryno, the Hall of Fame second baseman for the Cubs. A player that has a very large following amongst not only Cubs fans, but baseball fans in general. Personally, I believe he’s the best second baseman to ever play the game, but I’m also a little biased because he was my childhood hero growing up. Ryno not only was a great player in his skills, but the way he carried himself was also really good. He has often been described as a class act.

I have mixed emotions about the whole thing, but overall I am disappointed, which is the same word Ryno used to describe how he feels about the decision. That link has a radio interview with him about an hour after the decision had been made. I’ve read much more negative feedback from fans about choosing to hire Quade instead of Ryno.
Continue reading “Sandberg denied the dream of a Cub and its fans”

Tech I use – KeepassX

I spend a lot of my time on the computer. I also spend a lot of time exploring to find out what I can use to make my computing time more enjoyable and more efficient. I think others can benefit from the things I have found, so this is my first of posts that I will make to highlight hardware and software technology that I have and I like.

KeepassX logoMy first post will be about a piece of software I’ve been using for about a year now called KeepassX. This is a program you can use to keep your passwords organized. It’s free, its open source, and best of all, its cross platform. More and more sites these days make you sign up to use their service. Whether its a forum you participate in, you bank, credit card, email, Facebook, Twitter, servers, websites, the list goes no. Some folks have a separate user name and password for each place they log into. This can be hard to keep track of. I personally have some passwords that are tough for me to remember. KeepassX will help you keep track of that. Have you ever forgotten what user name or password you use on a website? KeepassX is your solution.

Is it safe to keep all your passwords in one place on your computer? I believe it can be. The file that KeepassX uses to store your information in is encrypted with Twofish or AES. You must remember one password to get into this file. It is a lot easier only having to remember one password instead of a whole list of them. If you don’t want to use a password, it will allow you to use a keyfile as well.

This method is also safer than keeping a word or excel document on your computer with all of your passwords. This is also better than the piece of paper some people keep by their computer (like my wife used to do before we got married).

There’s lots of features that you can explore about it if you like. For example, it can remind you to set a new password after a certain length of time. It can generate a password and tell you how strong the one is that you are using. One of my favorite features is when you open the program, you can right click on the list of logins and have it copy the user name or password to your clipboard. Then you can paste it into the form field without having to type it in. For security, it clears your clipboard after about a minute.

I use two computers in two different environments on a daily basis. Overall, I use Mac OSX, Ubuntu Linux, MS Windows, and Android on my phone. All of those environments have a version of KeepassX that will allow you to access your logins and passwords. You can keep one file that has all of your information in it. I have a file server that I had been using to keep my keepass file on that I could use to share the file between computers. I recently started using a program called Dropbox to keep the file synched between computers. I’ll write more about that in a later post.

You can download KeepassX from the website for free for what ever of the popular operating systems that you use. The android app is called KeePassDroid and is developed by someone else, but uses the same file format.

Glacier National Park

Last month Wendy and I took a backpacking trip to Glacier National Park in Montana. We had planned to go there around this time last year, but instead we had our wedding. The plan was to take two days to drive up and two days to drive back while spending 6 days and 5 nights in the back country. Beforehand we did two shakedown hikes to help get us ready for the trip. Both trips were 3 days 2 nights. One was in Uinta Wilderness and the other was in American Fork Canyon. This was also our first time to take Madie with us, and she really enjoyed the trips.

When we left town, we left Madie, our German Shepherd, at doggy day care at Dogmode. She seems to really like it there, and we have been impressed with how well they treat the dogs. We drove all the way to Missoula, MT the first day by interstate. That took most of the day and left us with about another three hours to get to the park. More importantly about the day, according to Wendy, it was Wendy’s birthday! She opened gifts and had cake a couple of days earlier to celebrate.

The next day, we toured around Missoula a little. Missoula is one of the bases where the National Forest service keeps some of its smokejumper wildland firefighters. I was particularly interested in this and was excited to get to see the base. There was a college intern there that was taking care of the visitor’s center and gave us a tour.

This is the base for the National Forest service Missoula Smokejumpers

After driving around town a little more, we headed on to Glacier. We bought a National Parks annual pass earlier this year and used this to get into the park. Once inside we headed to the West Glacier visitors center. I have to say, I was not impressed at all with the visitor’s center. It wasn’t very big and it didn’t display much information. Even the gift shop was just a small room. We later discovered that the newer larger visitor center was on the East side of the park. From there we headed over to the backcountry office where we got our permit for staying in the backcountry. A number of national parks have gone to a backcountry permit or reservation system to help regulate the number of visitors to areas of the park. This helps with overcrowding issues that have been happening in national parks.

The sign to the entrance of Glacier National Park on the West Entrance

Continue reading “Glacier National Park”

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Fantasy Baseball 2010

I just finished drafting my fantasy baseball teams for 2010. I use Yahoo Fantasy Baseball. It’s free and I like the way their site works. Last year, I did terrible. I came in dead last in my rotisserie league (I was beat by a guy who didn’t even manage the team after the season started). I think my main problem was that my first draft pick was Jimmy Rollins, a former MVP, but had a horrible year that year. I did better in my head to head league. My team got to the finals and was beaten in the final match, so I got second in that league.

This year, I wanted to do better. I bought a couple of fantasy baseball magazines and watched the fantasy baseball 404 on mlb.tv. I also resided not to pick Cubs players for my team. I always pick them because I think they will do well, and I need to realize that they while maybe good players on the team, are not so great compared to the rest of baseball. The Cubs haven’t won a world series in over 100 years, maybe I should think about that. I also took some advice I read about not relying on rookie potential. It may be cool to land that next star that no one else took, but that won’t win you the league. However, Nelson Cruz worked for me last year, and this year I picked Jason Heyward fairly early on.

This year, I picked two teams again. One rotisserie and one head to head. I also picked another one as an experiment that I will outline later. The leagues are 12 team leagues. Yahoo uses the 5×5 format which keeps track of the following stats.

Batting:

  • batting average
  • runs scored
  • RBI
  • HR
  • stolen bases

Pitching:

  • wins
  • saves
  • strikeouts
  • ERA
  • WHIP

Yahoo fantasy baseball lets you have 10 position player positions and 8 pitcher positions. I also have 5 bench positions.

So for my first team, Splinter_hands, it is a rotisserie league, and my head to head team is blister. Don’t ask me where I got the names of the teams from, I’m horrible with being creative. This year Yahoo added an additional position to the position player group, another util spot. Yahoo also added another pitcher position. I was not aware of this until half way through the draft.

My draft picks are as follows:

Splinter_hands (7th draft position):

  1. 1B Prince Fielder
  2. P Roy Halladay
  3. SS Derek Jeter
  4. P Mariano Rivera
  5. OF Jason Heyward
  6. 3B Adrian Beltre
  7. P Josh Beckett
  8. P Heath Bell
  9. OF Ryan Ludwick
  10. IF Placido Polanco
  11. P Jorge De La Rosa
  12. P John Lackey
  13. OF Carlos Gonzalez
  14. C Benjie Molina
  15. IF/OF Mark DeRosa
  16. OF Brett Gardner
  17. P Clay Buchholz
  18. OF Juan Pierre
  19. P Andy Pettitte
  20. P Joba Chamberlain
  21. P Phil Hughes
  22. OF Austin Jackson
  23. IF Troy Glaus

Blister (5th draft position)

  1. OF Ryan Braun
  2. OF Matt Holliday
  3. IF Kevin Youkilis
  4. 2B Robinson Cano
  5. P Mariano Rivera
  6. OF Jason Heyward
  7. P Josh Beckett
  8. IF Gordon Beckham
  9. SS Elvis Andrus
  10. C Bengie Molina
  11. IF/OF Mark Derosa
  12. OF Ryan Ludwick
  13. P Jorge De La Rosa
  14. P Tim Hudson
  15. P Jon Rauch
  16. IF Placido Polanco
  17. C Yadier Molina
  18. P Clay Buchholz
  19. IF Maicer Izturis
  20. P Joba Chamberlain
  21. P Phil Hughes
  22. P Derek Lowe
  23. P Mark Buehrle

I feel better about this year’s teams than last year. I plan to rotate through my pitchers more on my head to head team. In previous years I had more luck in being able to hold just a couple of good starters and pick matchups that I liked each day to acquire pitchers each day. However, I just saw where I won’t be able to do that as much as Yahoo has put a 6 player a week acquisition rule in place. That puts a damper in my strategy. I wasn’t expecting to have great starting pitching picks as I would just choose each day who I thought would win. I’m going to have to keep an eye on the free agents and see if I can’t hold down some better pitching and just draft one pitcher a day for match ups.

I’m excited to be doing my fantasy baseball this year. I know I spend way too many hours looking over all the numbers and keeping an eye out for better players to get, but that’s just part of the engineer in me liking to analyze numbers I guess.

So the third team I drafted I am experimenting with pitching. Typically, hitters are picked in the first round, and hitters continue to dominate the picks for the first few rounds. Pitching tends to be picked later on. I thought I would take advantage of this. Since there is no innings pitched limit in head to head,  I loaded my team with pitchers and plan to rotate them through on the days of their starts. I did however take hitters on first two rounds as they were top tier hitters, and I need some hitting production to compete at all. I’m not too concerned if I win this one, but I’m curious what kind of position I can get in the end if my picks are focused on only half of my stats (pitching) that I need to win each week. Here’s the results of my draft:

bud_selig_is_evil (7th draft position):

  1. 1B Mark Teixeira
  2. OF Ichiro Suzuki
  3. P CC Sabathia
  4. P Felix Hernandez
  5. P Mariano Rivera
  6. P Josh Johnson
  7. P Heath Bell
  8. P Wandy Rodriguez
  9. P Clayton Kershaw
  10. P Ryan Dempster
  11. P John Danks
  12. P Randy Wells
  13. P Jorge De La Rosa
  14. P David Aardsma
  15. P Carlos Zambrano
  16. 3B Adrian Beltre
  17. C A.J. Pierzynski
  18. IF Placido Polanco
  19. IF Micer Izturis
  20. OF Brett Gardner
  21. OF Juan Pierre
  22. OF Cameron Maybin
  23. IF Troy Glaus

Now if I could only get Yahoo to make an Android app for fantasy baseball like they did for the iPhone

Our trip to Mesa, Arizona for Cubs Spring Training Baseball

This Spring, Wendy and I decided to go to Phoenix, AZ for a short trip, mostly because I wanted to go see my beloved Cubs at Spring Training. I had never been to Spring Training, but I had wanted to for quite a while now. We were there from 3/28-3/30. It was a great time to go as the weather was on the verge of being too hot, but still nice, and it was towards the end of Spring Training, so the regular season players would be playing more and be taking it more seriously.

Our first stop after getting our rental car was to grab a bite to eat. We drove around downtown Phoenix a bit, but had difficulty finding reasonable parking near the pizza place we wanted to try. Wendy found a soda fountain (thanks to google maps on the cell phone) called MacAlpine’s nearby that we ate at for lunch. It was a nice little place. It was set in the 50’s. The food was good and the strawberry cheesecake milkshake we had for dessert was even better. According to their menu, they are the oldest operating soda fountain.

From there we headed to the Hall of Flame Fire Museum which was located next to the Oakland Athletic’s spring training field where they were playing a game as we drove by. The museum was great. It had a very impressive collection of old fire equipment and history. It had lots of hand drawn and horse drawn wagons as well as old motor driven fire trucks. It was very interesting to learn about the history of firefighting through the years. They had a section dedicated to wildland firefighting as well. I would recommend it to anyone who has the chance to go see it. Pictures

Next we went to the nearby Desert Botanical Garden. Wendy was excited to see wild flowers. I thought it was silly to have a botanical garden in the desert, but they had a lot of cool plants after all. Pictures

After the gardens, we went to check into our hotel. Wendy managed to find a great deal for us at The Hilton Phoenix East. Normally above our price range, but we got it for a great price. It was a nice hotel with large and comfortable rooms. The pillows on the bed were really soft.

While we were out that night we had stopped at a Target so I could get a baseball and sharpies. I hoped to get some autographs at the game. For dinner the first night, we ate at Grimaldi’s Pizzeria. It was some great pizza. You have to build your own pizza, and it was a bit pricey. We got a pizza with pepperoni, Italian sausage, and onions.

Next day, we decided to try to get to the Cubs game early in hopes to get autographs. For breakfast we went to a nearby place called The Good Egg. Really good breakfast with lots of choices.

Continue reading “Our trip to Mesa, Arizona for Cubs Spring Training Baseball”

Make Your Own Inexpensive Energy Efficent Ubuntu Linux File Server: Part 3/4 – Installing Ubuntu Linux

Part 3 – Installing Ubuntu Linux

In part two, we discussed putting together the hardware of your server. Now that your computer is put together, plug in your power cord and your Ethernet cord to your router. Since you don’t have anything on this computer yet, you will need a spare keyboard and monitor while you set this up. Go ahead and plug these in too.

You will also need to have a copy of Ubuntu Linux Server edition so you can install it. If you would rather use the desktop edition, that is your choice, but this tutorial was written for the server edition. Also, I did this within a month of Ubuntu 9.10 coming out. It was very buggy at the time, and I had issues with it. So I decided to use 9.04. You will need a second USB key to make the install as there is no optical drive on this computer. If you have another kind of external drive (hard disk drive or CD Drive), you can try using that. This computer’s bios does support booting from USB.

Once you have gotten the iso of Ubuntu, you will need to put this on a USB key to install the OS. It will fit on a 1 GB drive. I tried extracting the files from the iso by using Diskmagic and WinRAR and copying them to the USB drive, but that didn’t work. The way I got it to work is by downloading a file from unetbootin, and using that to put the installation files on my 1GB USB drive. Visit this site to make your USB key so that you can install from it: http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

SETUP AND INSTALLATION

Once you have the USB key ready, insert it into one of the USB ports on the computer. Power up the computer and you will see the Foxconn screen as it begins its boot up sequence. At this point, press the delete key to enter the setup menu to have a look a the bios. This bios will allow you to boot up from a USB drive, which is VERY important for installing and running the OS as the two disk drives are planned to be used for data only.

First we will edit the system information so we can change the boot warnings. Here make sure that Halt on is set to All Erros But, and have Keyboard and Mouse enabled. Since this will be a headless system, we need to make sure it’s not going to halt the boot up because there is no keyboard or mouse present.

Hit ENTER on System Information
Hit ENTER on System Information
Make sure it says ENABLED by Keyboard and Mouse
Make sure it says ENABLED by Keyboard and Mouse

Continue reading “Make Your Own Inexpensive Energy Efficent Ubuntu Linux File Server: Part 3/4 – Installing Ubuntu Linux”

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Make Your Own Inexpensive Energy Efficent Ubuntu Linux File Server: Part 2/4 – Building the Computer

Part Two: Building the Computer

Our first post in this series covered the planning of building our server.

Lets get started making a server. First, be sure and read the directions that come with this box. I was successful in not breaking anything when I did what it had to say.

There is one screw on the back. A simple Phillips head screwdriver will get it off. This will allow you to slide off the side panel for access to the inside of the box.

Next, we will need to pull of the faceplate. Follow the directions that came with your computer carefully, and it will come off. There are flimsy plastic clips holding it on. They do come off, so don’t force anything. I managed not to break mine.

Now that you have all of the outside pieces off, you need to unscrew the internal drive cage that will hold your 2nd hard drive. It is designed to hold one 5 ¼ in optical drive. I bought an adapter that allows you to put a 3 ½ in drive into a 5 ¼ in bay.

Inside of computer once everything has been taken apart.
All of the components once it has been disassembled.
Closeup of the inside of the computer
Overhead view of inside of computer

Once you have it all apart, put your memory in.

Memory
Memory

Continue reading “Make Your Own Inexpensive Energy Efficent Ubuntu Linux File Server: Part 2/4 – Building the Computer”

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Make Your Own Inexpensive Energy Efficent Ubuntu Linux File Server: Part 1/4 – Introduction and Planning

Part 1: Introduction and Planning

This tutorial is about how to make your own Ubuntu Linux file server. If you are wanting to follow along and are curious about the difficulty of this endeavor, I would give it a 6/10, where 10 is some kind of rocket science thing. I did my best to make this a step by step guide for anyone who, like myself, has lots of questions and isn’t totally sure what they are doing. I tried not to leave too much up to assumptions.

I am still a beginner at using Linux, but have been using a PC since the command line days of DOS. The reason I have decided to write this post is because I spent many hours perusing the Internet looking for answers on how to do what I wanted. What I found is that no one had posted exactly step by step for the noob how to do everything I wanted. So I had to take bits and pieces of pages from blog posts, message forums, the Ubuntu documentation, Linux Reality Podcasts, and help from the good folks at ubuntuforums.org to get where I wanted. I documented in Evernote along the way what I was doing so if I screwed up, I wouldn’t have to start all over again figuring things out (it took more than one try to get it to work). I wrote this post because I wanted to help others who may be trying to do something similar but can’t find all the steps. A lot of learning took place for me along the way. I did everything through the CLI (command line interface). It was like writing a book in a foreign language. I had to look up everything as I didn’t know the commands needed to do what I wanted. Once I knew what the commands were, I had to learn how to use them.

Here is what I wanted. A safe place to store my documents, music, photos, financial information, and anything else that I didn’t want to lose without worrying about a disk dying on me or succumbing to a virus. I am fully aware that this doesn’t solve every risk, but it did enough to make me happy for now. (This post might give you some insight to my paranoia with not trusting an external hard drive for my needs.) I also recently got married and wanted to make sure my wife and I both had access to everything in a central location. Since I am now the family IT guy, I wanted to make sure I had her data in a safe place too. This was also going to serve as a print server, and possibly more some time down the road. I wanted this to be virus free, cheap, long lasting, and energy efficient as it was going to be on 24/7. Once I was done getting it going, I wanted to be able to walk away and leave it sitting on a shelf doing its thing without needs for reboots, security updates, etc. I wanted it to be a headless system. That means no monitor, keyboard, or mouse. Just a power cord and an Ethernet cord. I’m sure my task would have been much easier had I just bought a fancy new computer and put windows server something on there or used OS X server, but apparently, I enjoy doing things the hard way (and I’m cheap).

The following is my setup:

Continue reading “Make Your Own Inexpensive Energy Efficent Ubuntu Linux File Server: Part 1/4 – Introduction and Planning”

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Blank Ballots on Baseball Hall of Fame?

I was reading through some sites today when I came across a blog mentioning that five of the voters of the Baseball Writers Association did not vote this year. Big deal right?

This isn’t five voters who forgot to vote, they intentionally turned in blank ballots. Why? We don’t know all of the reasons why except for one guy, Jay Mariotti.

I didn’t vote for anybody in the baseball hall of fame this year. Ya know why?  To me…the first ballot is sacred. I think Roberto Alomar is an eventual Hall of Famer, not the first time. Edgar Martinez, designated hitter, eventually, but not the first time. Same goes for maybe Fred McGriff. As far as Blyleven and Dawson…if they haven’t gotten in for years and years I cannot vote them in now. Ripken, Rickey Henderson and Gwynn. They are true first ballot Hall of Famers, but I didn’t vote for anybody, throw me out of the Baseball Writers. I don’t care. SOURCE

Wow, I’m sure that was a great reason.

Personally, I can’t believe that five voters who have a pretty big responsibility didn’t have the consideration to at least vote. If they don’t want to vote, they should give the responsibility to someone who does care about the Baseball Hall of Fame. For crying out loud, Jay even asked to be kicked out. Please, someone do it.

Why is this significant, ask Bert Blyleven about how he feels about missing out on the Hall of Fame for the 13th time. Guess how many votes he needed to get in?

5

I can’t believe that five people don’t think that following baseball players were worthy of the Hall of Fame, at all:

All are All-Star calibre players that any manager would have loved to have on their team. Great players whose names any baseball fan knows. Are they all worthy of the Hall of Fame, no, but you can’t tell me that none of these players deserve to get in. I also don’t think it’s right to leave the ballot blank just because you want to make a statement.

Something needs to be done about the Hall of Fame voting.