Holiday Beers

I have finally started to break out of my south Dallas shell and go to north Dallas in order to purchase beer. I have to admit that the Cedar Hill area is the worst area in order to buying beer if your taste exceeds trash such as miller light or Budweiser.By gosh I started shopping at central market in north Dallas and spent well over $100 on just beer. My new found pick-ups include Delirium Noel. While I have been putting away delirium while I was in college, the Noel came on pretty good although you could taste the alcohol in it. I was introduced to Shiner Cheer while visiting my brother in Austin and Ive been searching around for it so I picked it up as well. It's a good beer but after having 5-6 in a night, I started to get tired of it already. I was really psyched to get this beer so that was kind of a let down. What's becoming of my new fav, Sierra Nevada's Celebration Ale.
I've been in love with SN beers since I first discovered them by my older brother when he lived in Ca and before PA even carried them.Celebration has become my favorite to sink down on a nightly basis. It's got that hoppy pale ale flavor that is just about right and is prevelant in all their brews.Others that I have been dying to get are, Sammy smiths Oatmeal Stout, Delirium ale, and the Saint Sebastiaan's line of beers. I started drinking Sammy Smith's courtesy of Bowman and Russell's while on college. Man i miss that place. 100 beers either on tap or in bottle, Lord knows something like that is to die for here in Dallas. Saint Sebastiaans by Sterkins has become my favorite desert beer. Seriously, I could drown myself in Golden ale and be happy.
So my message for Christmas, forgo the gifts and excessive spending this yea and do all of us a favor, support your local micro brewery and throw down a few for me. Lord knows I will be.

St Patrick Comes Home

As you welcome me today as you did on the first day my friends… tonight, I'm coming home - Patrick Roy.

And we welcome you as well tonight Saint Patrick. Tonight was as much as forgiveness as well as remembrance and saluting your accomplishments.

WTF?

"We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded." - Barak Obama

Just say no thanks to socialism please. McCain - Palin 2008

McCain Palin 2008

Palinize: to slander and caricature a working-class female public figure for the noble advancement of liberalism.

Store your live shows on me

I was reading a blog somewhere about someone losing their music store and i remember the feeling of what I felt when I had a 200+ gigs lost one day when I had a hard drive fail. So i got to thinking today about housing others music storage. I can house your music storage for a nominal fee for $50 a year. if I got enough offers I could upgrade to a commercial internet address. How can I do this or what skills do I have to offer for this you ask? Im a systems admin responsible for more than 6+ Tb of financial data and more than 8 SQL databases. I currently have more than 3Tb of storage at home on a Solaris array where I store my music. Send me an email about what you need to store and I can guarantee uploading your music to my array where it will never get lost. I'd like to start a live music site where you can listen to live shows from Phish, WSP and the Dead.

I salute Sarah Palin

As anyone that knows me knows I lean very heavily towards libertarians, but this year I made my choice. While I agree the we need a change in Washington. Everything needs changed. One of my biggest arguments are retroactive term limits to the house and senate. Kick out bums like uncle ted stevens and nancy pelosi. While I would have sooner John McCain pick Bobby Jindal, but that leaves the door open for a dream ticket of Thompson/Jindal ticket at a later date, Im going to vote for McCain/Palin this time. I'm not a fan of republicans due to running on a social conservative and not being conservative at all. Being an economics junkie with an accounting background, I cant support someone who is going to raise taxes on anyone, impose windfall taxes, or not support strict immigration policies. Ive had it with the democrats and I'll have no part on helping elect and all radical Lib congress with a socialist president. McCain - Palin 2008

Michael Houser RIP 1/6/62-8/10/02

Mikey know that we love you and we miss you everyday.
I miss the honest tune with a lingering lead.

I love my new Job

I recently relegated my position at a .com for a cushy admin job in a financial institution once again. i love though. granted, I dont get to work with hardly any Linux machines, I still enjoy my work to make up for it. I get to work from home one day a week, benefits out the wazoo and I work with a great team once again. its a bit more challenging as I do alot more work with SQL 2000 /2005 but so far im enjoying it. It's one of my better decisions iv e made since moving down here to Dallas. Now I cant wait for Hockey to start in 3 months.

Windows Max Connections

At my work I was having a weird problem with a Server 2003 running MySQL 5.0.54 that would start dropping connections with an php XML based api call from our external partners. We have have a successful connection remotely and everything would be running fine and bang 5 minutes into the api call I would see mysqli cant connect errors. What made matters more funny, most usually the errors would come in pairs or sometimes triplets. To begin I increased the max_packet_size from 6M up to 10Mb, increased timeout_connection, and it seemed to correct the error. The issues surrounding the error, Mysqli was making a single connection, perform a query, a read, and an update if necessary. make a new connection and perform the cycle again. After increasing the max packet, we ran 10,000 record tests 3 seperate times with no errors. The next day, Start to get in the api feed and the same errors popped up again. Almost like clockwork, 5 minutes into the feed, mysqli kicked back can not connect in pairs about every 25-35 records. My last ditch effort, I researched max TCP connections and time_wait settings on server 2003. The default is 5000 open connections and 120 seconds windows will hold at time_wait until closing. using a registry hack, I set the max at 65534 and put time_wait down to 25 seconds. Bingo, all my problems went away. With the api, using a single mysql connection per api call and not having the benefit of mysql persistant connections due to using mysqli libs, I was hitting 5000 tcp connections about 5 minutes into my api feed and due to windows having the hold for 120 seconds, windows wasnt releasing the port back to free in time so 2-3 requests would come in faster than windows could close the port. interesting huh?

more quick updates

I'm finally online, well partially anyways. Https://mikeandkarishannon.com and my email is michael@mikeandkarishannon.com. Don't slashdot me bro!! I finally got around to hosint my own server in a secret location and and until TWC shuts me down anyways. Dave -- KNow my thoughts are with you during this time. I understand what you are going through.. michael

latest updates

A few quick updates, Kari and I are finally married. We got married at our home at a small party at our house here in cedar hill. Everything went very well and we will have a bigger wedding at some point once we get organized and my family can come down from PA. Amazon released their mp3 download client for Linux with .deb package to boot!! WOO WOO!!. So i finally dug into the checkbook and got 2 more Starflyer 59 cd's that I've been jonesin for a few months ( I hate buying music and Ill address this in another post). The next few days are going to be crazy at work as we are updating all our servers, PHP libs, apache servers, and windows updates across 50 servers. I don't know why I just don't deploy Wsus but i don't think it would do me any good as I hate to reboot even a single machine as we have them loaded down so much. We need windows to do our rendering as for right now we are reliant on windows media and direct show for the creation of our videos along with flash. We are currently looking at a few things including H264 and then we can render with linux boxen. We have gotten away from serving with the macromedia flash server and now just do direct progressive streaming from 3 load balanced web servers. I've been playing with server 2K8 on a vmware server i currently have set up and so far I like it actually. It seems to run pretty decent even with the limited resources that it has. Anyways, got to run..

New House

I recently closed on my house in Cedar Hill. So far I love it. We looked at 27 houses before we settled on this one. Ill post some pictures once i get the camera working. Work has been going so -so . ive been looking around to see what other positions have to offer and see if I cna angle for some more money. I figure the best time to look around is when you are still working.
Other than that, living in texas is ok other than the fact of being one of the more dry states and not selling beer by the case. The beer they do sell sucks. I'm sure ill have to look around more in the DFW area and find a place that sells more than the usual garbage. I have been getting Widmer's Broken Halo IPA and love it. Im considering setting up a kegerator in the garage and getting a keg of it. I figure if they wont sell me a case, Ill just get kegs and drink out on my deck.
I've been learning alot more about WMI scripting and pulling stats into MRTG with it to monitor my server farm. I've been trying to teach myself more sql to train myself into becoming more of a dba for future opportunities. Ive had little to no time to work on my own stuff so hopefully the time ill be saving in commuting ill be able o work on my sun boxes once again.

late night

This week I got a new Fiber run from Cogent communications and tonight I switched our network over. So now we have fiber right off the cogent Dallas backbone to our office so I'll be digging the nice fat pipe. Surprisingly, when I switched over, our dns records propagated pretty quick and I seen spam coming in in about 29 minutes. I'm also getting my FC to Sata Infortrend array in tomorrow afternoon and will have it installed in the morning. 10 Tb of storage goodness for all of our new projects coming up. i also deployed our very first linux dev server in hoping of moving to a mostly unix environment within the next 2 years. We are already looking at porting our render farm servers to linux so hopefully our dev team will be able to pull it off. on the house front I finally got the paperwork started on my loan tonight as we are hoping to close by feb 12th. ok enough for tonight, its time for a 6 pack.

new job, new town, new life

Ok many many updates. I got a new job as a systems administrator for a streaming media .com, moved to below Fort Worth, Texas, got engaged, and am about 2 weeks away from buying a house and moving to the Cedar Hill area. I'm completely new to the house buying thing. As my brother said to me, its meant to confuse and ripp off the suckers. I'm looking forward to posting pics of the new house, all the work that we are going to put into it and post new adventures of working as a sys admin working on new Apache / mysql farm.