Last Sunday I had the opportunity to play in the Vice Chairman’s Golf Tournament during the National Indian Gaming Association convention in Phoenix, Arizona. The vice chairman of NIGA also happens to be the tribal chairman for Bois Forte, so it was really an honor to be a part of the Fortune Bay team.

The tournament was held at We-Ko-Pa Golf Club in Fort McDowell, Arizona. There are two 18-hole courses there – Saguaro and Cholla. We played the former, which has been rated the number one public course in Arizona the past four years by Golf Week. It also sits at number 85 on the top 100 modern courses list for 2011.

The weather and people were great, the scenery breathtaking and my golf game actually not that rusty.

Now to bring some of this warm weather back to Minnesota…

7MM NIGA 2011 Golf Tournament Photo Gallery

I’ve read a few people say that Twitter and Facebook are killing the blog. I’d have to say that’s mostly true for me, as my last post on 7 Minute Miles was now more than a month ago. My current Twitter count stands at 6,581 updates and I’ve uploaded more pictures to Facebook lately than I have to the photo gallery. I do like having all three, though, and will spend a little time this month sprucing up this site (WordPress plugin updates, update/remove the stamps sections, page review for out-of-date info, etc.).

So, what’s new? I’ve been at Fortune Bay for seven months now and have seen a lot of snow and ice. The lowest temp I’ve witnessed on the outdoor thermometer was -38F, but the MINI has always started right up. Strangely enough, the Twin Cities has received a lot more snow this year than we have. I’ve been told the snowmobile trails were still pretty good, though. We lost a little bit of snow cover last week, but it’s cold again this week and there is a bit of snow in the forecast.

I moved from the resort hotel to a house on the west end of Lake Vermilion about two months ago. It’s way bigger than I need, but the resort owners gave me a great deal that goes through the end of April. Don’t use the hot tub much, but it has satellite TV and wireless internet (and warmth). Lake Vermilion is a huge lake, so it takes about 25 minutes to get from Fortune Bay (on the east end) to the lake house.

Work has been going well. The winter is the slow season, so we try to do technology and facility upgrades now when there aren’t as many people around. My department has upgraded several key systems and I’m now working on an internal web site for employees to use for training and knowledge retention. Business levels have been above expectations, so maybe we’re finally seeing signs of the recession ending soon.

It’s tough being away from the family, although I still see them almost every weekend. The kids are growing up so fast – hard to believe my oldest is now a teenager! Two more years and I’ll need new car insurance. Wow. I miss a lot of my metro friends too and have been trying to keep in touch online and on Fridays – I usually work four ten hour days each week, so I can usually visit on my “day off.” If I haven’t talked to you in a while, please give me a call (218-248-0468) or drop me a line at dk@7minutemiles.com and we’ll get something scheduled.

I’m signed up for two marathons this year (Grandma’s on June 18 and Twin Cities on Oct 2) and have my name in the New York City lottery again too. It’s been a tough winter for running, but I have tried to stay active with the new snowshoes and cross country skis. Boston was the goal for this year, but now that the goalposts have moved, it may not happen for a while. I’ll still try, though, as I need to lose 20 pounds anyway.

As I posted on Facebook, my birthday last month was memorable. I had a business meeting that morning in Two Harbors, so I spent the rest of the day skiing at Lutsen. On the sixth run of the day, I fell on “The Plunge” and crashed into a safety fence. One of the support poles did a number on the left half of my face and I was a bloody mess. No concussion or broken bones, though. The ski patrol cleaned me up and I drove to Grand Marais for dinner at Sven and Ole’s Pizza. It took about three weeks to clear up, but my face is finally back to its old ugly self.

That’s about it for now – not much on the calendar the next few weeks. Might be a Phoenix trip in early April if I’m good…

It’s been almost a week and a half since I started working at Fortune Bay and so far things have been wonderful. The people on staff here are great to work with, it’s been interesting learning all the new technologies in use and I love the overall excitement of working in a casino. They assigned me a nice office just off the casino floor and I’m slowly getting used to where everything resides and how to get access to all of the tools I need to do the job.

There have been a few issues to deal with: we had a big storm last week that included a lighting strike behind one of the buildings that knocked out all of the cash registers and one of my staff members quit this week before I even got to meet him. I also still haven’t figured out what I’m going to do about housing next month, but I’m starting to find some leads.

The evenings last week were fun. A friend from the Twin Cities called me late Monday afternoon and said he was a half hour away. We played 18 holes at The Wilderness in two hours and 35 minutes, then had a nice dinner at the Grill. I played another post-work round on Thursday night – the course is spectacular and it’s hard to stay away when it’s right outside the door.

The other nights I spent scouting some of the nearby cities: Tower, Ely and Virginia. I looked at a few houses, drove by the schools and basically just checked out the overall vibe of each place. Based on the people I’ve talked to, Virginia and Ely probably have the best schools. My favorite house was in Tower, but I liked the general feel of Ely and Virginia has some nice bigger city amenities (Target, movie theater, McDonald’s).

I’d still love to find some lakeshore and build new, but prices on Vermilion don’t seem to be impacted much by the recession. This week I drove along the south shore and saw some amazing properties, but they were all way out of my price range. I’ll probably just rent for now and see what happens. The family comes up this weekend to check things out, so their input will help firm up plans too.

Tonight I ran for the first time since Grandma’s and I stopped in at the wellness center, which is located about a mile from the resort. Employees can use the facility for free and I spoke with the manager for a bit. She said the building is five years old and doesn’t get used much. All of the equipment is top of the line and the workout room overlooks the lake. I’m really excited to get trained on all of the machines and start getting back on track for TCM in October.

The rest of this week brings a bunch of meetings, the visit by the family (and maybe a few other friends), then one last consulting trip for 318 in Phoenix. I also found out today that my first business trip for Fortune Bay might be a September conference at the Palms in Las Vegas. Could this job get any better?

I guess it’s time to let the cat out of the bag. Next week I start a new chapter in my life as IT Director for Fortune Bay Resort Casino on Lake Vermilion. Everything has happened very quickly and there are still a lot of unknowns, but I’m very excited.

We stayed there two years ago and loved the place. The golf course has been rated the top public course in Minnesota the past two years by Golfweek (7MM Photo Gallery), the casino is the perfect size and has a great mix of games, the hotel rooms are all new and the location on the south shore of Lake Vermilion is very scenic.

I’ve always thought about working for a resort (specifically, Brainerd, Lutsen, Colorado, Pebble Beach, Hawaii or Florida). When I saw this position posted on their website, it seemed like a perfect opportunity. Here is the job summary:

The Information Technology (IT) Director is responsible for the overall management and security of information technology systems of gaming, hospitality management, sales, computer technology, and all company and corporation telecommunications services and programs. The IT Director will manage such areas as computer systems analysis and design, database and network administration, systems programming, telecommunications systems, and other information technology applications while meeting all budgetary requirements, policy and planning responsibilities, and payroll objectives. The IT Director shall provide effective leadership and personnel management to all Information Technology staff and contribute to the overall goals and mission of Fortune Bay and the Bois Forte Development Companies.

From a career standpoint, I couldn’t be more excited – lots of new things to learn and people to meet in a high-profile position in a well-run organization with a bright outlook.

I’m also excited about the lifestyle change. That part of the state is beautiful, offering lots of outdoor activities (hiking, mountain biking, golf, skiing, running, boating) and a more relaxed pace. Plus Duluth is only 90 minutes away and a return to the Twin Cities is about three and a half hours in the MINI.

We’ll spend the next few weeks looking at the various cities (Ely, Tower, Virginia) to see what schools and amenities are available and decide what we want to do. My longer term goal would be to get some land on one of the lakes and build a not-so-big cabin, just like I originally wanted on Lake Superior.

My job has taken me to Loveland, Colorado, the past two weeks to work on a large education project. I’ve enjoyed working on this one a lot – the scope is large and interesting, the client employees are great and I’m working with a very knowledgeable co-worker for the first time. Loveland and Berthoud are very nice towns with the typical western U.S. look to them (and majestic mountains off in the distance).

Food and lodging have been pretty nice – the Best Western I’m at was recently remodeled and the locally-owned restaurants I’ve been to have been excellent (Bent Fork Grill and 4th Street Chophouse). I’ve been loving the Chick-fil-A across the street from the hotel too (maybe loving that a bit too much).

Last week I took an evening off and drove down to Morrison, Colorado, to catch the Joe Cocker/Tom Petty concert at Red Rocks. That venue was amazing and is by far the best place I’ve ever seen a live show. I took a walk around the Trading Post trail before the show and got a little winded on the 1.4 mile trek. Stunning scenery, though.

As for the concert, both acts were firing on all cylinders. I enjoyed Joe Cocker’s set more than I thought I would, with lots of great songs (You Can Keep Your Hat On, With a Little Help from My Friends, Shelter Me, You Are So Beautiful, etc.). The official Tom Petty site has a nice summary of the show with photos and here is the setlist:

• Kings Highway
• Listen to Her Heart
• Won’t Back Down
• Free Fallin’
• Oh Well
• Mary Jane’s Last Dance
• Driving Down to Georgia
• Breakdown
• Jefferson Jericho Blues
• Taking My Time
• First Flash of Freedom
• Running Man’s Bible
• I Should Have Known It
• Good Enough
• Learning to Fly
• Don’t Come Around Here
• Refugee
• (encore) Running Down a Dream
• You Wreck Me
• American Girl

Heading back to Minnesota tomorrow night. Up next: Tapemark on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, then off to Hurley, Wisconsin, for another week.

Here are a few shots of what I’ve been working on lately. Various 318 projects this month have taken me to downtown Minneapolis, Novi, Michigan and Hurley, Wisconsin.

Nerd overload…

Last week, I had the opportunity to visit a state for the first time (which hasn’t happened in a long time). A project for 318 took me to a client in north-central Nebraska, which turned out to look a lot like southeast Minnesota. The towns we stayed in all had populations under 3500 people and all the people we met were very friendly.

In hindsight, it probably would have been quicker to drive, but we flew Air Tran to Omaha (via Milwaukee) and drove about three and a half hours from there. Lodging for this trip was the Super 8 in O’Neill and our Mazda 3 came from Enterprise. Not a perfect travel experience, but nothing too awful either. Side note: Budget at OMA rents all three current MINI models.

You know you are in a remote area of the country when the nearest Walmart is almost two hours away. AT&T’s cell coverage was surprising good, though, and it seemed like every restaurant had free wi-fi. We ate at all the local spots in O’Neill and Atkinston and I sampled the Nebraska beef more than once.

With Nebraska off the list, I’m down to 11 states left to visit. A drive from Minnesota to the Gulf Coast (via Kansas City) would cross off half of them, but I’m not sure when (or if) I’ll try that. Might be fun, though…

As I alluded to in my Disneyland post, I’ve started a new position with a California-based company called 318, Inc. My new title is technology consultant and I will be based in Minnesota. You can reach me now at 952-232-9296 or via email at dkingsbury@318.com.

318 calls itself a “boutique technology solutions company delivering comprehensive technical support services and software solutions to SMB and Enterprise businesses.” The headquarters is located in Santa Monica, with offices in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle. I will be working with noted tech author and 318 partner Charles Edge to establish a new Minneapolis office.

318 has a platform agnostic philosophy, but is also one of the largest Mac consultancies in the country. Founded by Kevin Klein in 1995, they have a mission statement I really like:

“Helping business grow profitably through the smart use of technology.”

I’m very excited to work with Charles, who moved here from California about two years ago. He’s brilliant (not trying to kiss up here) and I feel this will be an excellent learning opportunity for me. I’m currently studying for both Apple and Microsoft certification tests and gain new client experience every day.

318 has internal expertise in many areas, but especially shines in Xsan, Final Cut Server, Podcast Producer, OS X Server, imaging/mass deployments, Filemaker development and Kerio mail servers. If you need technology help, check out the web site or give the service desk a call at 877-318-1318.

This week I had the chance to travel to California again – this time for meetings in Santa Monica. I flew the “new Delta” both ways – out in Delta equipment and back in an old NWA plane. LAX terminal five was actually very efficient and the air travel part of the trip was surprisingly stress-free for a change.

The weather was, of course, perfect out there – sunny and near 80 both days. I stayed at a quaint little motel on Main called the Sea Shore Motel. It was an easy walk to the beach and about a mile from the pier.

I had good food all trip. For dinner, I ate at the World Cafe, which was a block down Main from my motel. The sirloin and au gratin potatoes were excellent and I couldn’t pass up “David’s Housemade Butterscotch Pudding” for dessert.

For breakfast the next day, I had the jerk chicken omelet at Swingers Diner Santa Monica, followed by lunch at Fritto Misto. Turns out this is the same Fritto Misto as the location in Hermosa Beach that I’ve been to several times. The spaghetti carbonara was to die for!

I planned to walk out on the pier, but ended up walking along the beach south of the pier and looping back to the motel early. I wasn’t that familiar with the area and the lighting at night wasn’t the greatest – I’ll have to explore more during the day next time.

There was also a familiar sight near the pier – the big blue Kooza tent that was in Minnesota this summer is in town through December 20. It was great hearing the music again as I walked past…

Yesterday I was invited by my long-time friend and Apple employee Paul “Pash” Pashibin to a meeting of the Apple Consultants Network that was hosted by Apple retail. Pash used to support the national sales channel and now is a business manager for the four Minnesota Apple Stores (Mall of America, Rosedale, Ridgedale and Southdale). Managers from all of the stores were on hand to introduce themselves and hear ten-minute presentations from local ACN members.

I went with the intent of doing a “test-drive” of ACN to see if 7 Minute Miles, LLC should apply for membership. In order to become a member, I need to pass at least one Apple certification test, obtain business insurance and pay the membership fee ($60 application fee and $395 annually).

Apple currently offers three primary levels of OS X certification:

• Apple Certified Support Professional (ACSP) 10.6
• Apple Certified Technical Coordinator (ACTC) 10.6
• Apple Certified System Administrator (ACSA) 10.6

There are all new classes, training materials and exams for Snow Leopard and currently only the first test is available (the others should be available next month). I think I can pass the first two tests without taking any classes, but I do need to study before plunking down $150 per exam.

I met a number of talented consultants at the meeting, but I was especially pleased to finally meet Charles Edge in person. Charles is the Director of Technology for 318, Inc., author of multiple books, prolific technology blogger at krypted.com and a prominent speaker. Charles had asked to be my friend on Facebook a while back, but I was pretty sure I hadn’t met him before (although we share a number of friends). He recently moved from Los Angeles to Minnesota and we had a very nice conversation after the meeting.

Here are some of the other ACN members who attended:

• Rashan Moore of Digital Coordination
• Clinton Little of Clintron X
• Brian Reichow of Escape Systems Corporation
• Bruce Greenberg of Northbrain
• Jason Hawke of Core Computer Consulting
• Kevin Kourajian from TechCheck LLC in Sartell
• Joe Skelley of Joe’s Tech Support
• Patrick Rhone of Machine Methods Consulting
• Chris Raymond of MacWorks
• Steve and Terri Zeh Jacobson of TechSource IT (and RSB)
• Tim Nyberg of The Mac Guys +
• Chuck Hauge of CPH Solutions

I was impressed by the Apple Store staff who spoke, as well as the ACN members. If I apply for the program, the local Apple Stores would stock my business cards and sell sheets, which I think would be very beneficial for future growth. I could also use the stores for client demos and other presentations. All of this means more business for Apple, so it seems like a win-win to me…

As some of you may have noticed, there have been a few changes here at 7minutemiles.com:

• All of my former .mn sports sites now re-direct to this site. New sections have been created for golf, hockey, running and skiing. Archived posts from each site have been consolidated on 7MM and separate RSS feeds are available for each category.
• Photo gallery images from the old sites have also been consolidated in the main 7MM gallery.
• Links to other sites we like have been consolidated in the 7MM blogroll area in the sidebar.
• I added page anchors to the fetishes page, along with a drop-down selector so you can jump down to the exact section you’d like to read.
• A new 7 Minute Miles, LLC services randomizer box replaces my personal “to-do” bucket list section, which has moved to the footer.
• Information on the contact page has been updated to add the new 7MM PO box mailing address and the return of my iChat/AOL account name.
• Minor updates to the about page and the biography sections.
• A new company page has been created to describe services the new 7 Minute Miles, LLC, organization is now offering.

Speaking of the LLC, I decided at the end of the summer it was time to start a new company. With the help of Doug Podolak and attorney Kevin Johnson, I founded 7 Minute Miles, LLC, on August 28, 2009.

The legal framework is now in place and I opened new business checking and savings accounts with U.S. Bank earlier this week. A former co-worker from Northwest Airlines, Mumtaz Walli-Ware, will be providing small business accounting and tax services and I will be purchasing business insurance from Tapemark Charity Pro-Am presenting sponsor, Anderson Agency.

The new company is a technology consultancy that specializes in WordPress web publishing and Apple system administration and management. Our first two new clients are the Tapemark Charity Pro-Am and the Macalester College Relations department. With are in negotiations with several other organizations and hope to have more news to announce soon.

Please take a look at the services we offer and contact us for a free initial consultation today!

About a month ago, I ordered a netbook from Dell for work. I have two admin needs for a Windows machine – to manage our new Watchguard firewall and to make changes to our voicemail system. I’ve run Windows XP on my Mac Book Pro using VMware, but the Watchguard in particular didn’t seem to like the network sharing that occurs between the Mac and XP sides. I figured that for a grand total of $388 (including tax and shipping), the Mini 9 was worth a try.

My initial impressions were mostly positive. It took me the better part of a day to install all of the usual anti-spam, anti-virus and anti-spyware tools that Windows requires, along with the multiple security updates from Microsoft. After a quick download and install of Firefox, Flash and iTunes, the machine was pretty much ready to go. Wireless worked fine right away and all of the sites I use on a regular basis performed and displayed just as I expected.

Here are the specs:

• Intel Atom Processor N270 (1.6GHz/533Mhz FSB/512K cache)
• 1GB DDR2 at 533MHz
• Glossy 8.9 inch LED display (1024X600)
• Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) 950
• 16GB Solid State Drive
• Genuine Windows XP Home Edition
• Wireless 802.11g Mini Card
• Integrated 0.3M Pixel Webcam
• 32WHr Battery (4 cell)
• 1Yr Ltd Warranty and Mail-In Service

I also decided to order a 16GB SDHC memory card for $34 from Amazon to double the storage space.

So it is what it is – not a powerhouse by any means, but good enough for simple browsing and email. It’s got a dirt cheap price and is very portable, although a little thicker and heavier than I expected – nothing like the Sony netbook (that costs three times as much). The battery capacity isn’t great and will drain completely if you don’t use it for a few days.

I probably would have recommended it after a week for people looking for cheap and small, but after using it regularly for a few weeks, I find that I really don’t want to use it unless I absolutely have to. After carrying it in my backpack with the 17-inch Mac Book Pro, it now sits in the server room next to the Watchguard.

Typing on the keyboard is just painful – almost as bad for me as my iPhone. Start-up speed from sleep is glacial and I forgot just how bad it is having to constantly update and monitor all of the Windows anti-everything utilities. After not using it for a week, it took almost an hour to download and install security and anti-virus updates alone. The quality of the screen is fine, but the whole unit just feels small, cramped and not terribly well built.

All in all, I’ll stick with my big laptop for “real” work and plan on my next iPhone to get more power and speed for those small and cheap needs.

It’s still too early to say the battle is over, but so far the new bad-ass switches from HP have not gone down once since they arrived. The web-based management features are great for monitoring what’s going on and I was able to turn on two new (for us) features:

• “This switch features automatic fault detection capability which can protect your network from being brought down by problems such as network loops, defective cables, transceivers and faulty network interface cards.”
• “Multicast Filtering (IGMP) – Direct multicast packets to only those portions of the network where they are needed. This improves network performance in networks using the IGMP protocol with high levels of multicast traffic.”

As I wrote in February, the network at HSRA has been a frustrating troubleshooting nightmare. With the help of many others (friends, colleagues, outside consultants), I now basically have a new network. Here are the key pieces:

• HP ProCurve 2848 – 48 port gigabit Ethernet switches (5)
• Watchguard Firebox X1250e firewall

Combined with all the gear I just brought back from Seattle, the server room is getting pretty crowded. Still lots to monitor, clean and organize, but I may finally get to move on to other projects soon. I’m still worried there is bad cable out on the floor, but the new switches seem to deal with that much better than the el cheapo stuff from Best Buy.

This week was sort of bittersweet for me – after more than four years of service, I was tasked with decommissioning my work servers from the data center in Seattle where we have been leasing a half rack. digital.forest has offered us great service over the years and I’ve been a friend and colleague of their tech VP, Chuck Goolsbee, who I first met many, many years ago in his role as list-mom of the very useful Mac Managers mailing list.

Over the years, we placed many different pieces of equipment in our half-rack. The service and pricing structure of digital.forest were miles above what was offered in the Minnesota market and more than offset the physical distance issue. Their tech support staff handled most issues on-site for me and they patiently dealt with my literally hundreds of DNS support tickets over the years. I really only needed to travel to Seattle to install new gear or perform major upgrades.

The trip this week involved taking five servers, one switch and one tape backup unit off-line, removing all of those items from the rack, packing them up and getting them back to Minnesota. I planned to do this over the HSRA spring break so I could minimize downtime. Originally I thought about driving out, but ended up flying out on Tuesday afternoon and returning on the early Wednesday morning red-eye flight.

Since Sun Country isn’t flying to Seattle right now, I flew the “new Delta” and took one of our studio Anvil cases along. The flight out was full and I waited until the end to board. That was a mistake, as my reserved exit row aisle seat had already be giving to someone else because they booked a child into an exit row and had to move people around. The flight attendant wanted me to sit in a middle seat in the row in front of the exit row – you know, the one that doesn’t recline. Since they make you pay extra for exit rows, I was a little pissed off. They offered to move me to a middle seat in an exit row, but a Delta pilot came down the aisle and said that was “his” seat. Jerk. At least the lead flight attendant came by later and offered to make him move.

When I got to Seattle, I decided to go to my favorite fast food place at SEA-TAC, Ivar’s Seafood, and get some late lunch. The fish and chips were great and I meandered down to baggage claim to get the Anvil (which they only charged me $15 for, despite being oversized). Everyone from my flight was still standing around – I think it took about an hour for the baggage to arrive.

After that, things went pretty smoothly. I rented a Mazda mini-van from National and packed two servers in the Anvil case. I removed the hard drives and put those in a small box along with a Mac mini server and a small ProCurve switch. The three other devices got packed in some extra Dell boxes that digital.forest had laying around and were sent home via FedEx (those items didn’t need to be put back online right away).

After a nice dinner with Chuck, I went back to the airport, returned the car and hauled the heavy Anvil to the check-in area. After some confusion about what they would or would not accept, they decided to charge me $190 and let me check it. Their scale said it weighed 81 pounds, but it had to be much, much more than that, so I was happy. Got through security and hung out in the WorldClub lounge for two hours until the plane left.

This time I claimed my exit row seat early and ended up having no one in the middle seat, which was nice. It was still hard to sleep, though, and I ended up driving straight to the school to get the three servers unpacked and back online ASAP. Fun airline fact – the baggage handlers at MSP will put anything down the regular carousel, including extremely heavy Anvil cases. That thing could have destroyed smaller, inferior luggage if the timing had been better.

I spent most of Wednesday working to get everything back online. Two of the three were online by Wednesday night and the last one came online this morning. Overall downtime was minimized, but it took much more work than I planned, especially on the DNS side of things. Everything seems to be up and running fine today, but the real test will come on Monday when staff and students return in force. I decided to put all of the HSRA workstations back on the wired network too, but I’ll write more about that next week.

Special thanks to Chuck and his staff at digital.forest – if you need a co-location facility, they’re awesome.

7 Minute Miles Seattle Photo Gallery

During my oh so fun network adventures the past few weeks, I did run across one wonderful new tool. iStat is a $1.99 iPhone application (normally $2.99) by a company called Bjango that can be used to remotely monitor Mac servers (and regular computers).

Very easy to set up, iStat actually has two parts: the iPhone program and a Mac program called iStat Server that runs on the machines you want to monitor. It transmits data on port 5109, so you may need to make adjustments to your firewall in order to get the two programs to talk to each other. I set this up on several Xserves running Mac OS X Server 10.4.11 and 10.5.6, as well as two Mac minis that I use as servers running regular 10.5.6 (see screen shot on the left).

Once your firewall rules are correct, configuration on the phone side was easy – enter an IP address and enter the 5-digit passcode that the iStat Server displays. As you can see in the sample screen shot on the right (provided by Bjango), iStat gives you a nicely designed layout for each device that provides live updates for CPU usage, RAM allocation, open hard drive space on each volume, network traffic (in both directions) and, depending on the machine, internal temperatures. Device uptime and system load are also displayed.

The program also allows you to see information about your iPhone: memory usage (with an option to free memory), open storage space, IP addresses in use, uptime, load, your phone’s unique identifier and the wi-fi MAC address. The last two items also have buttons to email those bits of data to whatever address you want.

There are also options for ping and traceroute, but I haven’t had as much luck using those as the normal monitoring features. That is probably more of an AT&T issue than the program, though. When connected to a wi-fi network, it seems to work better. Bonjour is also supported, so it can see devices that are running the server software.

Since my network has been wonky, iStat was a nice discovery to allow me a chance to get out of the building, but still watch what was going on in the server room. The look and feel are perfect and it works as advertised (aside from the ping issues). A steal at $2 – this is an application I would have paid much more for – especially when you look at the price of tools like Intermapper.

Now if Apple would come out with iPhone editions of Server Admin and Workgroup Manager, I’d be all set…

It took me another two weeks, but I think the HSRA network is finally stable. As I mentioned in the previous post, this was perhaps the most frustrating and hardest-to-troubleshoot technology issue I’ve dealt with in all my years of doing this type of work.

Lots of red herrings and false starts during this nightmare – old switches in the server room, stray switches everywhere, loop-backs, cabling, copier network card, server network card, firewall, power surges, mice, squirrels, strange liquids dripping from the ceiling, people bringing in foreign network devices. I tried isolation techniques to pinpoint the problem, but it always seemed to come back after a few hours. It also didn’t help that everything would work at night, only to fail once students and staff came in during the day.

After one all-nighter and four days in a row of late-night re-wiring sessions, I finally decided last week to switch over as much gear to the wireless network as I could. It seemed to be more stable through all of this and I was getting desperate. I just added four new Airport Extreme base stations this year, so I knew it should be able to handle the load from 50 new iMacs. I removed all of the older eMacs from the floor, as they do not have wireless cards. Amazingly, the network stayed up all day.

I added an isolated switch to the firewall and started connecting essential wired devices: printers, network security cameras and a few primary workstations (that lacked wireless cards). The key measure to see if the network would stay up was the system log on the server – link errors would appear there when the network was about to lose it’s mind:

Didn’t realize we still had AppleTalk turned on – it was apparently being used for printer setup. Turned it off on the server (which made the server log errors go away) and started reconfiguring all of the clients as well. Bonjour-only printer setup from now on…

With a functioning wireless network (and limited wired components), we decided that the issue had to lie with the physical wiring on the main student floor. This area had been re-constructed over the summer, with walls being torn down and wires pulled out of the old connector boxes. I already had pulled all of the stray Linksys switches off the floor, so we spent one morning last week with a Fluke wire tester and checked all 35 active ports – all checked out fine. I also checked all of the patch panel cables in the server room – also fine.

With the cables cleared of guilt, we started adding back student iMacs one advisory at a time using the wired Ethernet ports. Links errors reappeared within two minutes. At first we though it was one computer out of the first five, but after further testing, they all would give a link error.

I remembered reading a forum post that talked about manual Ethernet settings and IPv6. I couldn’t find the exact post again, so I just started experimenting with the settings. Out of the box, a new iMac is set to have IPv6 turned on and Ethernet set to automatic. After turning off IPv6 and setting Ethernet to manually, 100baseTX, full-duplex, flow-control and 1500 MTU, we experienced no more link errors.

Eureka!

I tend to think that the IPv6 change wasn’t necessary, but I’m keeping it off at this point. I added two more new 24-port Linksys switches to the server room and converted all of the machines back to the wired network successfully. We will hopefully be moving to HP ProCurve gig switches soon, but at least we are solid now.

Students were also experiencing two other issues that I considered unrelated: network login rejection when the server was at high CPU-utilization and kernel panic crashes on logout. These were both known issues that I found mentioned on the Apple discussion forums. The former was a server bug that has since been addressed in this weekend’s security update and the latter is caused by duplicate fonts in a student’s network directory. I deleted all fonts from the student home directories on Friday, so we’ll see if that helps this week.

Today I finally got to install the new iLife ’09 and iWork ’09 updates school-wide using the awesome K-12 site license we purchased ($250 for each suite). Bravo to Apple for the great recession-friendly school pricing.

We’ll see how this week goes, but it seems good so far…

The past few weeks at work have been the most stressful I’ve had in several years. The network gremlins have been out in full force: students can’t login to the server, printers drop off the network for no reason, users can’t access the internet, etc., etc.

Normal troubleshooting hasn’t unearthed any regular pattern or source of the trouble. I’ve slowly been replacing and/or eliminating individual items – firewall, switches, cabling, server settings. Lots of little things have turned up, but nothing that has completely eliminated the troubles. At this point, almost everything has been touched at one point or another and it seems like I’ve rebuilt the network from scratch.

While I was on vacation, I had a consultant come in and do some troubleshooting and benchmarking. It was a bit expensive, but I needed the backup and I thought another set of eyes may see something I didn’t.

One of the outside recommendations was to increase server capacity. We’ve added a lot of computers this year, but I had more computers in LA last year with the same basic setup. Still, we had a great stroke of luck in that a company in St. Cloud wanted to donate some older servers to a school. The picture shown here is our old rack enclosure with all of the donated gear added. The new machines aren’t online yet (needed to order software, a new power supply and an extra RAID card), but we’ll soon find out if that helps with our peak login issues.

Once the HSRA network and server infrastructure is stable again, I have about 10 web projects to work on, including several non-profit side projects. Speaking of side projects, I’m also trying to learn iPhone programming. More on that in a future post…

UPDATE: Just after I posted this story, I checked the main HSRA server from home and couldn’t see it. I drove in to troubleshoot, and five hours later, I think I found the source of all our trouble. I’ll post a full report tonight.

UPDATE 2: All was well until about 1PM yesterday, when all hell broke lose again. Back to the drawing board…

7 Minute Miles has totally been neglected for almost a month. Facebook and Twitter seem to get all the attention these days, but I need to get back to the original programming here too.

The holidays were great, but I got sick right before them and there is still this damn cough that just doesn’t seem to go away. This was especially bad, as I was signed up to run the 2009 Walt Disney World Marathon yesterday. I ran a total of 12 training miles the entire month of December and hadn’t run at all in more than 3 weeks. The lack of training, combined with a really hot and humid day, led to a very slow time of 5:07:51 (more details on my Facebook page – bah).

Aside from the physical pain of running a marathon, it’s amazing I haven’t keeled over from an anxiety attack at work. I spent hours and hours the week before I left for vacation trying to pin down some network problems at HSRA and was sure I had it fixed the day before I left town. Everything was humming along the morning I left, but the dreaded call came an hour before I was supposed to get on the flight. I’ve been on the phone a lot since we got here with a contractor, but I’m mostly mad at myself for not building a more robust infrastructure. I guess it is aging, but it makes me look stupid.

I’m trying my best to actually be on vacation the rest of the week. We are planning to just hang out tomorrow, then go to Animal Kingdom on Wednesday, dinner at the Animal Kingdom Lodge Wednesday night, lunch at the Canadian pavilion in Epcot on Thursday, followed by some additional time in the Magic Kingdom. We travel back to MSP on Friday, then head to Las Vegas on Sunday for two nights to celebrate my 40th birthday.

I’ll try to be better about spreading the news around all of the sites – although I might be busy looking for homes and jobs in Florida the next few months…

Tonight I stopped by the Apple Store at the Mall of America to pick up a new MacBook for a colleague at work. After 30 minutes of unpacking and configuration, I have to say, it’s a pretty nice machine.

The previous edition of the Mac Book has served many people I know very well – my wife has one and I purchased quite a few for the school here and in LA. Aside from a few notable melt-downs, they have worked great for the price.

My biggest issue with the new edition was the lack of a FireWire port. This has been talked about all over the web and I understand the reasons Apple dropped it, but I will still miss the convenience of FireWire target mode and the ability to use the huge pile of FireWire hard drives I have laying around.

The build quality of the new machines is top notch – the block of aluminum process creates one solid-feeling laptop. It’s a lot lighter than I expected and the glossy LED-backlit screen is bright and vivid without too much glare. The entry-level configuration is somewhat pricey, but has specs that are usable right out of the box without needing any extra upgrades. No video cable in the box sucks, though.

This is not the laptop for me (I’m a 17-inch matte screen guy), but it’s very nice and would likely serve the needs of 80% of the laptop market quite well.

The first part of our new equipment lease at HSRA Minnesota arrived yesterday on three large pallets. It’s always fun to un-box new computers, but the novelty wears off by about the fifth one and the rest just become a chore.

Should keep me out of trouble all week, though…

A few years back, we bought up a bunch of “.mn” domain names at work. That extension is the country code for Mongolia, but it also works well for Minnesota-based sites.

I have several domains in production now (golfing.mn, hockey.mn, run.mn, proam.mn), but we have a bunch that we don’t plan to use:

• bride.mn
• cabins.mn
• concerts.mn
• deals.mn
• homefinder.mn
• seats.mn
• sexy.mn
• theater.mn
• zoo.mn

If you would like to take ownership of any of these domains, drop me a line at dk@studio-4.com and we can chat. I hate domain squatters, so all we are looking for is to recoup some of our costs (.mn domains are more expensive–starting at $49.95USD per year).

August means the end of summer, the Minnesota State Fair and the beginning of the school year. It’s that last one that means my workdays will be getting longer soon. Here’s a short list of things going on:

• Rebuild and upgrade the networking infrastructure in the server room and big advisory space at HSRA Minnesota (pictured above)
• Execute a new Apple lease for Minnesota and take delivery of a boatload of new equipment that needs to be configured and deployed (50+ workstations and 25+ laptops)
• Install upgraded studio and pre-production equipment in Minnesota
• Reposition security cameras and upgrade and enhance digital recording systems
• Upgrade Minnesota server operating system and re-configure
• Re-image older workstations in Minnesota
• Deploy site licenses for Final Cut Pro, Logic Studio and Aperture
• Upgrade and deploy enhanced graphics lab in Minnesota
• Plan for tech contingencies at HSRA Los Angeles and a possible late August visit

On top of all that, I’m still dealing with DNS and firewall issues in Seattle, an overall cleanup of the four Seattle servers, test installs of Elgg, Moodle, Buddypress and Drupal and a re-design of the HSRA New York website. Oh, and I’m trying to learn Ruby on Rails and subversion on the side. Fun, fun.

Yesterday I had an unexpected visitor in my office at HSRA Minnesota: the Honourable Ken Krawetz, Minister of Education for the province of Saskatchewan.

Mr. Krawetz and his assistants were being hosted in Minnesota by the talented education architect Randy Fielding. They visited the School of Environmental Studies in Apple Valley in the morning and were on their way to the new Minneapolis Central Library.

It was a pleasure meeting the delegation. I made sure to thank Mr. Krawetz for all the great hockey players (the Wild has three Saskatchewan natives: Derek Boogaard – Saskatoon, Josh Harding – Regina and Nick Schultz – Strasbourg).

So is Studio 5 one better than Studio 4?

I just realized this year’s WWDC was my tenth. I started going in 1998 when it was still held in San Jose and only missed one year (2002 – dark days in my airline career). The company names on my badges have changed quite a bit, even though I’ve really only worked two places my entire life.

I thought of asking “When was my first WWDC, where was it held and what company did I represent?” at Stump the Experts this year, but I wasn’t sure of the company until I dug through my junk drawer today. My how time flies…

Another WWDC is history. This is always a highlight of the year for me: a great city and loads of professional development. My head is full of new ideas and things I want to work on this summer:

• Ruby on Rails
• Leopard Server upgrades in MN and LA
• Remote system administration, imaging and automation ideas
• Javascript and Ajax
• iPhone web development
• Cocoa and Xcode
• Graphic design and Illustrator

Yesterday was the beer bash in Yerba Buena Gardens and the surprise musical guest was Barenaked Ladies. I’m not a big fan of them, but they were funny, clued in to the audience and entertaining to watch. Plus they’re Canadian, which is always good in my book.

I’ve never seen so many nerds packed into one place. They did the same regional food stations as last year and the caterer was mostly able to keep pace with the hungry crowd. I had some Italian, Chinese and “All-American” finger foods, all of which were pretty good.

For lunch yesterday, I went to Lark Creek Steak in the Westfield Centre. This is one of the restaurants associated with Bradley Ogden, whose namesake restaurant in Las Vegas is one of my favorites in the whole world. I had the steakburger with sharp cheddar, fries and a shake. It was one of the best burgers I’ve ever had–so good.

Hanging around downtown until my Sun Country red eye later tonight. There are lots of people still at the convention center, even though the sessions are over (labs go until 6:30). I’m currently using the high-speed wireless to watch the live Tiger/Phil stream from the U.S. Open. Kung-Fu Panda is showing across the street, so I might go and catch me some animated JB too…

Last weekend I planned an executive retreat for my company at Mystic Lake Casino Hotel in Prior Lake. This was actually my second choice for venue (none of the Cabins at Deacon’s Lodge were available), but it turned out to be very nice.

I picked up the HSRA LA program director from the airport on Friday morning and took her to Al’s in Dinkytown for breakfast. Afterwards, I dropped her off at The Marsh spa in Minnetonka for a massage.

The actual retreat started with a dinner meeting Friday night at the buffet, which ended up lasting more than three hours. Everyone had their own rooms Friday and Saturday nights and we had a lovely meeting room from 8-5 Saturday and Sunday (the Winuna Room).

We used up all nine hours both days for meetings (with a few delays here and there), but I did manage to get in some fun things too. On Friday, I played a twilight round of golf on the Meadows course with a neighborhood friend. Also played a little video poker both days and lost $45–almost as expensive as the golf.

The family came out and stayed both days, taking advantage of the extra bed and the swimming pool. I didn’t get to see them much, but we did have dinner at the Meadows Grille on Saturday night (it was family BBQ night). Kid one went to a friend’s birthday party sleep-over Saturday night, but they all got to go to Canterbury Park before that to watch the Preakness (and see the live horses too).

In hindsight, I probably could’ve used a massage before this retreat as well. It was a little tense at times and was mentally draining. Our organization is small and has a loose, unstructured culture that is very different from my past corporate experience. That’s not a bad thing, but it does drive me crazy sometimes.

We’ve scheduled a follow-up meeting in California for the end of June. I think the next few months will be a very interesting time for Studio 4. More details coming soon…

Thanks to the kind people at LubeTech and this grant, I was able to load up the MINI with five brand new twenty-inch iMacs today, purchased from Mike Meirovitz at the Mall of America Apple Store.

I went directly to the store so I could get them prepped for online science testing tomorrow (before they get loaded up for the Sweat Equity Enterprises program).

Always fun to have new toys…

Just wrapped up another week trip to HSRA Los Angeles. Same old, same old – troubleshoot tech issues, upgrade workstations, install more security cameras, dis-infect Windows machines, etc. School goes until late June, so I may be out one more time before then. If not, there is a lot of upgrade work to be done this summer (Leopard, Office 2008).

I didn’t stray far from the South Bay this time, visiting some of the same restaurants (In-N-Out Burger, Mickie Finnz, Uncle Bill’s Pancake House, El Pollo Loco) and trying some new places (El Torito on the Redondo Pier, Ruby’s Diner, Buona Sera, Noah’s Bagels). There are a bunch of places I want to try farther north, but the freeway headache is just too much for me right now. My red Prius rental car with the video rear-view monitor was nice, though.

Can’t believe I haven’t gone to Disneyland yet while working with the school. My brother is running the Disneyland Half Marathon in August, so maybe I can time a school visit for that. That would be worth fighting traffic for…

After a very crowded flight on Sun Country, I rented a car and drove to Digital Forest in Seattle to pay a visit to my co-located servers. There were several tasks I’ve been waiting a while to complete:

• Install and configure a new HP ProCurve switch within our half rack to better manage bandwidth between servers.
• Re-configure a hardware RAID and upgrade to Leopard Server on Xserve 3.
• Configure the firewall, mail server and iCal server on Xserve 3.
• Clean the tape backup device and re-configure to auto-clean in the future.
• Install a demo version of BRU backup software on all four servers.

I’ve finished most of the on-site stuff and plan to work on the configuration tweaking while watching the Wild game on Versus tonight. If it weren’t for the cold I think I’m catching, this would have been a near perfect trip.

Oh yeah, also had lunch with Digital Forest geek wrangler Chuck Goolsbee at a place called New Teriyaki & Wok. We both had the chicken and beef combo, which I thought was very good. Always nice to visit with Chuck, keeper of the Mac Managers mailing list.

One night in the Seattle rain, then back to spring in Minnesota.

I was saddened to learn that Rick Wolf, the part-time school psychologist at HSRA Minnesota, passed away this week. Rick was a great guy to work with and was a tremendous asset to the students of HSRA.

Rick and I had talked about doing a web project together for the past few months using a product he developed on his own called the Team Empowerment Assessment. He had created a printed version of the assessment several years ago and had boxes of them left in his garage (I could totally relate to that feeling with my own golf CD project from 1999). He wanted to create a web version of the assessment and attempt to salvage some of his previous investment in the project.

Here is the obituary from the Star Tribune:

Wolf, Rick Age 64 of Eden Prairie. School Psychologist and past member of the Eden Prairie School Board. Preceded in death by his father, Fred Wolf. Survived by his loving wife, Kate; children, Jeff (Trish), Erick (Page) Wolf, Heather (Kevin) Cook, and Abbey Wolf; grandchildren, Alexis, Amber, Jeremy, Jordan, Macy, Freddy, Tori, and Lindsay; mother, Lorana Wolf; brothers, Randy (Prudy) and Roger (Gail) Wolf; nephews, Tad and Brad Wolf; niece, Becky Nuell. Memorial service Thursday, April 10 at 7 PM with visitation beginning 5 PM at the Washburn- McReavy Eden Prairie Chapel, 7625 Mitchell Road (1 blk N of Hwy 5), Eden Prairie. Memorials preferred to the Intermountain Children’s Home, Helena, Montana, www.intermountain.org Washburn-McReavy Eden Prairie Chapel 952-975-0400

My thoughts go out to his family in their time of loss.

The best hire I ever made, web developer Jake Schutz, is moving on to greener pastures next week. He’s headed for the division of Garmin that used to be Paul Douglas’ weather firm, Digital Cyclone. I think he’s leaving because I was working him to death (see above).

Jake is an extremely talented programmer and systems administrator that I would have loved to retain, but we just couldn’t afford to pay him what he’s worth right now. I’m very happy for him, though, and would love to have an opportunity to hire him back again sometime down the road.

Jake and I had the opportunity to travel around the country, both on business and for fun. Business trips included server setups in Seattle, WWDC in San Francisco and the new school in Los Angeles. Free tickets and my Mini Cooper took us east to New York to watch the 2006 U.S. Open at Winged Foot.

We’ve become good friends over the years and I look forward to continued nerd chats, ping pong, hockey games and golf outings for many years to come.

Good luck, Jake!

Never seen a laptop screen get messed up quite like this one. Not sure what she did with it, but this HSRA laptop needs some serious screen replacement…

It’s not every day that I read about something in the paper and find something mentioned that can have a major positive impact on my job. That happened yesterday, though, when I read a story in the Wall Street Journal about companies trying to manage online video use by employees and the effect it has on network performance. A service called OpenDNS was mentioned and I went to check it out.

Schools that receive federal funding for Internet access must comply with CIPA regulations (Children’s Internet Protection Act), which include measures to block or filter Internet access to sites that are considered obscene or harmful to minors.

This has always meant purchasing firewall equipment with expensive annual content filtering contracts from companies like Sonicwall or Astaro. There are a few free options available for schools, but I hadn’t found any that really met all of my requirements.

OpenDNS addresses content filtering in a different way, one that doesn’t require any dedicated hardware or specific software on each client. This made it easy to set up and configure using a simple web-based administration page and a few changes on the local school server.

Today was the first day of use at HSRA Los Angeles and after a few follow-up tweaks, it seems to be working great. Best of all, the service is free–OpenDNS makes it money from advertising that appears on the page that is displayed when a site is blocked or can’t be found.

I’m anxious to see how it holds up the rest of the week, but so far I’m very, very happy.

Bravo David Ulevitch!

Last month, reporter Mitchell Landsberg of the Los Angeles Times wrote an in-depth story on the High School for Recording Arts Los Angeles. This week, the school paid to have it reprinted on their own site.

The story is long, well-done and a great boost in recognition for the program. It was picked up by several other papers in the country, including the Chicago Tribune. Be sure to check out the multi-media Flash presentation too (which the paper would not license).

I was really surprised to see the licensing terms the Times offered the school for online reprints. This is a non-profit school, but the terms were pricey and had lots of restrictions. I know newspapers are desperate for revenue, but come on…

Returned Thursday afternoon from another week in not-so-sunny SoCal. At HSRA Los Angeles, I found the new Cisco VoIP equipment in the server rack (above), along with their new phone headsets (which turned out to be way different from the ones on 24). Sun Country helped me transport a new video editing workstation with two 23-inch Cinema Display flat panel monitors 1,528 miles without damaging or losing anything. Hurray!

This trip also included:

• binding six new graphics and video machines to the network
• running a new network cable to the video production room
• installing system and Office security updates on 150 machines
• fixing the camera on their ID card system
• installing additional RAM in two video machines
• rebuilding one advisory Mac mini from scratch
• managing issues surrounding full hard drives on managed student accounts

Still need to troubleshoot some issues with ARD clients dropping from the admin computer lists and some other miscellaneous issues, but overall, it was a productive trip.

The studio director and I didn’t get out to the beach all week, as it was too cloudy, cold and rainy every morning. We did walk to the top of the hill on the last night, as I wanted to see how big the waves get when the wind blows off the ocean (not very).

As for food, this trip was all about saving money. Aside from the trip to Canter’s Deli I wrote about earlier, I ate lunch at In-N-Out and El Pollo Loco (and skipped lunch the other day). The other two dinners were both in Redondo Beach: Hennessey’s one night and Gina Lee’s Bistro the other. Everything during the week was decent–not bad, but not spectacular either.

Next work trip will probably be an overnight to Seattle to visit my servers at Digital Forest.

President’s Day weekend was a wild one in the Kingsbury household. Birthday activities for kid one included dinner Saturday at Lucky’s in Mendota (her past birthday favorite Don Pablo’s mysteriously shut down), roller skating at Skateville on Sunday afternoon and tickets to the Wild-Nashville game Sunday night (birthday pictures are up in the private album).

Sunday was not kind to me, as I nearly lost all functioning of my right wrist in a rather embarrassing sequence of events. First, I played several hours of Guitar Hero III (a new birthday present), which made the wrist a little sore. Then I decided to try roller skating again after a thirty year lapse. Two bad falls and the wrist was really hurting. Finally, the Wild made their game way too exciting, causing much clapping with the sore hands. By the end of the night, I couldn’t even unzip my jacket when we got home.

Some ice and Advil helped me recover enough to catch a 7am flight to LAX today. Lugged a bunch of video gear to the school and drove to Hollywood for a late lunch at Canter’s Deli on Fairfax. We drove by Pinks first, but there must have been at least 100 people in line. A nice drive down Sunset to the 405 completed the day. The Kings are on the local FSN channel tonight versus Phoenix, but I’m almost out of gas and the wrist could use some rest.

When I first heard of Twitter, I thought it was stupid. But here I am today testing out how we might use it at HSRA for online collaboration (staff and students).

Via Alex King’s Twitter Tools WordPress plug-in, my three latest tweets appear in the sidebar, and every post on 7 Minute Miles should be added to Twitter.

Not sure how this will fit in with my email-chat-blog work flow, but it’s fun so far…

I lucked out last week, scheduling a technology visit to HSRA Los Angeles during bluebird weather in Southern California. Minnesota, meanwhile, dove into the deep freeze (sorry family). On the day I came back, it was 65 degrees on the beach and -15 when I left the Wild-Ducks hockey game that evening.

Ouch.

It was a productive trip for me, configuring several Windows machines (not fun), installing two new security cameras, running workstation upgrades and finally fixing a spell-check problem that has been an issue since the start of school. I also have a plan for dealing with the data-loss issues associated with running portable home directories on Mac OS X Server. Just waiting for a good time to flip that switch.

The good weather was combined with unusually smog-free views that let us view Malibu across the bay and snow on the mountains to the east. I tried to bike or walk along the beach almost every day and found a nice housing development a block away that would be perfect if I ever hit the lottery. Only $1.5-2.1 million, according to Zillow).

Lots of new food places this time: Roscoe’s Chicken and Waffles in Long Beach, the Union Cattle Company in Hermosa Beach (great steak), Hennessey’s Tavern in Hermosa Beach, Mickie Finnz Fish House in Redondo Beach (also owned by Hennessey’s) and Chicago for Ribs in Redondo Beach. No In-N-Out Burger this time–a first!

Here is a short piece produced by Matt Jung, a collegiate journalist at USC, about the school in LA:

The last tech support trip to HSRA Los Angeles was very productive. My primary goals were to install new security cameras, troubleshoot a student data syncing problem, get their ID card machine working, re-image some old machines, install some new software and do the usual software updates across all 150 machines.

My co-worker who came along did a lot of great work getting machines moved around and cleaning up the ID card machine. I got most of the things done that I wanted, but there are some parts that need ordering to get the rest of the cameras installed. Overall, I’m very happy with the progress.

We got to do a few fun things this time (for a change). In addition to the Vegas jaunt, we went to see the Wild beat the Kings at Staples Center on Saturday night. Very interesting to see how they do things at another arena–especially one with a lousy team and a lot of empty seats. Makes the Minnesota experience seem magical by comparison. Vote for Lubo!

Restaurants included the awesome Kincaid’s Bayhouse at the Redondo Beach pier, the Rocky Cola Cafe (also in Redondo Beach), Good Stuff on the Strand in Hermosa Beach and (of course) a visit to In-N-Out Burger.

It rained the last two days and temps were cool for LA. How I long for that weather now, though…

After celebrating our 16th wedding anniversary with my wife on Friday at Trattoria da Vinci in downtown St. Paul, I headed out on my favorite local airline to LAX.

Here’s a shot of the Redondo Beach Boardwalk–more pictures and posts to come after I get some rest…

UPDATE: Pictures are now available in the Los Angeles album of the photo gallery.

I spent last week out at the LA school and got about 80% of the things done that I wanted. It’s almost like time moves twice as fast when you know you have to leave town at a given time.

The weather out there was very un-Southern California: cloudy every day with highs around 60 and lows below 50. In hindsight, it was actually very nice, but I would’ve packed different clothes (hence the new sweatshirt I picked up at Downtown Disney). It seems that the air quality had recovered from the recent fires.

I ate at a lot of the same places this time, finally trying something new on the last night. The Bluewater Grill was located right on the harbor in Redondo Beach and had some really good seafood. My co-workers had an oyster sampler and swordfish, while I tried some halibut from Alaska.

Looks like I’ll be back again in December to wrap up things for the year.

Not many posts lately, as writing web entries here has become too close to “work” for my taste. Plus I haven’t really done much the past few weeks except golf (which I cover on the Golfing in Minnesota site) and work, which has mainly involved flying back and forth to California way too often.

It finally struck me this week that my job currently makes me feel not happy. I decided to write a private not happy list, which I can summarize as:

• compensation
• no time for entrepreneurial projects
• organizational issues
• too much stress

I really like the work I do, my office and toys, most of the people I work with and the flexibility I have to make my own rules. Huge increases in responsibility and work hours with no increase in salary or ability to delegate tasks, though, makes me not happy.

So I’ve decided to follow two paths: 1) update my current job description and create a proposal to improve things internally and 2) update my resume (for the first time in four years) and start putting out feelers. The former is much preferred to the latter, but I like to be prepared.

Especially if it makes me happy again…

Very striking sunset over the Pacific tonight outside the Studio 4 apartment in Redondo Beach. Wrapped up another visit today cleaning up first-week-of-school issues at HSRA LA. Heading back to Minnesota in the morning…

Arrived back from the latest trip to Los Angeles last week and felt totally exhausted. I’ve got one week to recover, then it’s back out there again.

A few notes from this trip:

I’ve been working my way down the South Bay–first trip I stayed in Manhattan Beach, second time Hermosa Beach and this time Redondo Beach. My co-worker and I stayed at the Best Western Sunrise Redondo Beach Hotel, which was very nice, but a little pricey for this type of hotel. The location was great, the room was in good condition, the staff was friendly and the breakfast buffet was convenient. Unfortunately, the free in-room internet access didn’t work, but it did work in the lobby. When I told this to the front desk worker, he apologized and offered me a $50 gift certificate for a future stay. Well done.

I got out for a couple of six mile runs along the beach in the mornings. I ran from the Redondo Beach marina up the Strand through Hermosa Beach and out to the end of the Manhattan Beach Pier. From there, I ran along the beach front itself back to Redondo, dodging the waves and birds. I left by 6:30 both days, so the crowds were light. Very fun run that I hope to do again next time.

Speaking of next time, I’ll be spending it at the new “company” apartment in Redondo Beach. Located about four blocks from the ocean, the two bedroom apartment will make a nice home away from home for future visits. It will be great to not spend all that time looking for good hotel deals.

Restaurants this time included In-N-Out Burger, Sushi Casa Arigato in Redondo Beach and Uncle Bill’s Pancake House in Manhattan Beach. LOVED Uncle Bill’s–reminded me of Key’s, except by the beach. Manhattan Beach as a town is probably my favorite spot in the South Bay. Definitely need to spend more time there in the future.

On the last night, Jake and I drove over to Knott’s Berry Farm and took advantage of the half price after 4pm deal. I wanted to do the Chicken Dinner Restaurant again, but it was either that or go in the park. We did stop at a “Chicken Express” window, but it was nowhere near the same quality as the real restaurant.

The log ride was closed for renovation and the Xcelerator shut down before I got back there to ride it, but I did get in a few rides. Rode the GhostRider once right away (and again before we left), then did the Calico Mine Ride, followed by the old school Montezooma’s Revenge and the jaw-compressing Silver Bullet. Knott’s really seemed much larger when I was kid, but it’s still worth a stop every now and then.

Big gap in posting since Grand Marais because it seems like I haven’t stopped moving since then…

Here is a shot from the balcony of the HSRA Los Angeles program director’s home. And no, she doesn’t own the place (HSRA schools are not the place to make that kind of money). Very nice house and very nice dinner the first night we were in town. Thanks Jenn!

The L.A. school project is coming along, but there is still so much to do. One more return trip in the next few weeks will hopefully wrap it up.

I’ll upload some new pictures to the photo gallery tonight and will attempt to write more the next few days.

Arrived back from LA yesterday on Sun Country. Flight was fine, but the airport experience was not pleasant. In addition to very long lines, I got the dreaded “SSSS” designation on my ticket (extra special screening). I’m sure it was because I was traveling alone on a one-way ticket, but don’t you think the system could be a little more intelligent?

The week finished up OK, although there are still a ton of things that need to be completed out there before school starts. I’ll likely return in mid-August for a few days to complete the roll-out. The wiring and construction contractors should be finished by then and I’ll have more practice with imaging machines here that can be replicated out there.

On Sunday I drove straight east from my hotel to Buena Park and Knott’s Berry Farm. The classic chicken dinner at Mrs. Knott’s Chicken Dinner Restaurant is worth the always-constant one hour wait in line.

The rest of the day didn’t go great–I dropped my doggie bag in the dirt and the crappy internet access in the hotel was broken all day. The wireless provider for the hotel, “Zoxzones,” was pathetic. Not only did they charge for the service, I had to call every single day to have them reset the access point so I could login. Never again.

Today was IKEA day for me and the new office. People know me as an IKEA freak, but you just can’t beat the pricing and style–especially for small business and school offices. $1.50 for a hot dog and glass of lingonberry juice is pretty awesome too…

While Minnesota only has one IKEA, California has eight. I decided the Carson location was the closest and went over lunch. It was really different from the Bloomington store–smaller, one additional floor, not as much selection and no full buffet restaurant.

My ugly rental car came in handy, as I managed to get three tables, six chairs, a locking cabinet, two desk lamps, six light bulbs, two power cords and a small love seat in that thing. I got most everything put together today, despite cutting a finger open with the scissors, getting a blister in the palm of my hand and dropping the love seat box on my foot. Also got to drive back to the store again after I received mixed table legs for one of the tables. Everything should be good to go by lunchtime tomorrow, though.

When I got back, I rested for a bit in the room, then walked down the PCH to Pier Avenue and over to the Hermosa Beach Pier. The weather was gray and grim, but it was still fun to see the big waves and watch people attempt to surf.

I had a quick dinner of fish and chips at the Hermosa Fish Market Cafe, located at 20 Pier Avenue (right by the start of the pier). Always great to sit outside and eat anywhere, but this atmosphere was especially fun.

I walked back to the hotel by following the Strand and was knocked out by the cool beach-side houses. Zillow says $1 million to $7 million for that stretch. Sheesh again.

7MM Los Angeles Photo Gallery