Hello all,
Thanks to the introduction of Twitter, I will only be updating on Twitter, it’s so much easier to update, it’s only a sentence or two!!!
The address is: http://www.twitter.com/Extremo please drop by, take a read, and feel free to join and add me as your friend.
That goes for you, Pat and Curtis!
Add comment April 10th, 2007
Hello all, just a quick update, I mainly wanted to test out a function at www.last.fm, check it out in the right sidebar… as soon as I have time to update the template… 
My top artists for last week, ah, it was just Friday afternoon…
Add comment March 13th, 2007
Hi All, Apologies for the lack of updates, unfortunately my blog is the last thing I tend to do…
But having said that, I have been busy both at work and out of work…
In work, I have been busy finishing off our move within our providers datacenter, I moved three servers, a switch and a router and also introduced two new servers… I did that on the Friday before Christmas, so that was extremely fun.
In terms of other things I have been doing at work, well since Christmas, when we FINALLY got our new monitoring server so it was time for me to create a monitoring solution!
I had much earlier decided that it would be NAGIOS, something which I had little knowledge in, but I thought it would be good to get to know it a bit better, as plenty of people had seemed to be using it. Plus it was built on a Linux platform, so I needed to round my skills there also… I know that I definitely wanted to create this server as a virtual machine using VMWare, as I had learnt a bit about VMWare at Atomic, so I thought I had better continue my knowledge in it, but here we were talking the Server version of the software, FREE, instead of ESX, which to this day still costs a bundle!
Anyway, back on track, while looking around at NAGIOS and VMWare I chanced upon Virtual Appliances, a term which I had heard before but due to lack of free time I had not really investigated it at all. So while looking through the Virtual Appliances I found that a few people had created NAGIOS based Virtual Appliances…. Sweet!
After looking at what was on offer, I decided on one called Nagios VMA, a Virtual Appliance created by Matt General, who I assume works for Entisys, based on the creators website…!
Anyway, after firing this beast up after downloading via a torrent, how ingenious!
I fired this beast up, a Debian flavor of Linux loaded, grabbed an IP address from our DHCP server and I was in business!
Now this deployment has Monarch, a web-based configuration utility for NAGIOS, somewhere along the line I managed to destroy its ability to save the NAGIOS configuration files, thus I had to resort to doing them by hand. Better in the long run I feel, as I had to document this beast, the Word doco is currently 43 pages for our configuration…. Oh documentation, how fun…
So I configured this deployment of NAGIOS for our environment and have included just about every important metric we should be monitoring…. Here are the stats:
15 Hosts
132 Service Checks
Service Checks include: CPU load, Memory Usage, Page File Usage, PING Checks, Windows Service Checking, Current Web Connections, Domain Expiries, SSL Cert Expiries….
It all took a while, but the end result just kicks ass, I can watch our hosting environment from one interface, it emails alerts and as soon as management approve, it will send SMS messages via and email-to-SMS gateway, too easy!
Anyway, moving on… What’s going on in life…
Ah…. erm…. Not much really, had Donna and I first wedding anniversary before Christmas, a milestone is a milestone I say, we celebrated it.
I’m still playing cricket, it’s a pity I just stopped playing cricket over the Christmas\New Years break, as I seemed to have lost any sort of ‘conditioning’ I had, damn pity that… Going to have to develop it again… Training and such…
Might get dropped to a lesser side soon, last week I did not bowl an over, mind you we did bowl them out for 85… I seem to be the partnership breaker when I come on to bowl, but this week of cricket no partnerships needed to be broken…
Managed to grass a real chance while fielding at slip though… The keeper was standing up and the ball just appeared, to my low right, it hit my arm, I was nowhere quick enough… Oh well, the guy was out 2 balls afterwards, custard!
Other than cricket, my only real passion at the moment is World Of Warcraft, which is a game that I have been trying to dodge for ages now, as I knew it would consume my life, and it bloody well has….
Anyway, long story short, I’m currently a level 33 Dwarf Priest on the Dath Remar realm 
I recently, well yesterday, created a website for the guild I’m in, I thought they were a tad unorganised and things were boring, so I threw some weight around and gave them some ideas, which they have seemed to jumped at…
Having said that, I think I am the oldest member of that guild by some years, which is worrying, hell I’m only 25…
For those interested, Pat, the website is: The Ruby Dragons
I think that’s about all that is noteworthy… I’m bound to do another update in a few weeks, or when Pat reminds me…
Oh and for those that are on the Down Under BBS playing Major MUD, I’ve quit, my time for Extremo is up and Klevster is just a pain… Low level Mages’ suck balls…
I won’t be back unfortunately, I’m paying for WoW instead… Stay in touch though
What I’m listening to: The Streets
Add comment February 1st, 2007
Well the title pretty much sums up my life at the moment… Just ticking the days off, nothing too drastic has happened, just plodding along, getting things done, you know the drill..
Weekend just past was a busy one, one of the busiest social weekends we’ve had in ages…
On the Saturday we went to our great niece and nephews first birthday, yes that’s right cousins born on the same day, what are the odds? Anyway, we went to Ballam Park in Karingal, near Frankston for a BBQ party, it was good, not too many people there. It was windy and quite warm, but nothing too bad… A good day was had by all, we went back to their place afterwards and I managed to get in an hour of cricket with one of our future nephew-in-laws… Oh, yes that’s right, I didn’t play cricket on Saturday, got 1st wedding anniversary next Saturday and it’s a two-day game, so I though I better press the flesh with the in-laws
Anyway, onto Sunday where the real fun was to be had… Our cricket club had a social day at an RSL which had an old synthetic bowling green, lawn bowls that is, so we rocked up there at 11, played some bowls. Then the juniors turned up and took over the green to play some backyard cricket… Which I had no problem with, we were only interrupted by lunch, a nice BBQ, two in two days! After lunch we had a mini bowls tournament, JAmes and I were hot favourites as we’d both played before, but the bowling green and the bowls themselves were the definite equalisers They had indoor bowls for two of the three rinks, and these bowls would turn an absolute mile!
Long story short, we lost in the second round… And we then continued with the cricket, until Donna decided she was bored, so that was the end of cricket for me… Mind you, I did not once complain about attending her families BBQ… Hrm… Double standards?
Anyway, more later
EDIT: I will try and put some photos up soon, I’m considering using Flickr… will be easy and I’ve heard good things about it!
Add comment December 6th, 2006
Another week has flown by… Nothing much to report… (For those that can’t figure it out, the title is a Scrubs reference)
Donna was and still is struck down by a virus that has caused a, wait for it, throat, ear and chest infection… And before you say it, I will, yes, she is sick again
She is recovering well after having four days off work last week and a rather quiet weekend, still managed to head off to a scrapbooking event at someones house, but that’s another issue 
In cricket news, I’m still incredibly sore from the weekends cricket action, I bowled 17 overs, 12 of them straight at the end of the day, finishing with figures of 2 for 63… Now by my calculations that’s an economy of 3.7, which is just about my average for the season… Both wickets were caught behind the wicket, one caught behind by a juggling keeper, Crusty at the time, and one caught at first slip, thanks Daz
Anyhow, our opposition made 9-260 off around 77 overs for the entire day, yep that’s right, we spent the whole day in the field… But our captain has no issues with that score, as it’s a small ground and we have a good batting line-up… Mind you we’ve had good batting line-ups collapse like a deck of cards before
I’ve made the statement that if I bat, we’ve lost Simple as that, nothing against my batting, but coming in at number 11, all the work should have been done by the guys before me… Time will tell…
Work has been good also, getting through tasks quite well, getting documentation done… Big moment for me at the end of this week, with two projects coming to a close, getting some servers into our datacenter and getting a domain\file server up and running at our branch office in Boronia…
And now for my gaming update… I downloaded a few more Xbox ISO’s last week, including the new Call of Duty, the third one and Tony Hawks’ new one too, Project 8… I tried Call of Duty out, it’s quite good, not really down my aisle in terms of gaming, but I did play it for about an hour… I may play it down the track, then again I might not…
Finally had a bash of the new Need For Speed game, and I can tell you it shits all over Need For Speed: Most Wanted, that game was purely awful… But the new one titled ‘Need For Speed: Carbon‘ is quite good I must say… The new element is ‘wingmen’, which is quite cool… The problem is that my ‘wingman’ keeps beating me in practically any race I choose to run in… Mind you in this game anyone in your ‘crew’ can win the race, which is cool, but shessh, I wanna win damnit!
Played a few hours of it yesterday and I was pretty impressed, especially with the police chases you can have… I had a 15 minute police chase, I FINALLY lost them, after unmarked cop cars were chasing and nudging the crap out of me… Anyway, highly recommended…
UPDATE: Check this out, I thought my chase was long… Sheesh
Well that’s about enough of an update… Shoutout to Curtis, good luck with the new job, WHEN it finally comes through
Add comment November 20th, 2006
Right, time for an update I think… Man, had it seriously been that long… Three weeks since my last update, which means I have been at SAFETRAC for over three weeks… What can I say… I love this job…
Anyway, Donna is not well at the moment, she’s got a virus, that I think I passed onto her… Ooops.. Just a cold\virus thing… I came down with it on Friday and was running a fever on Friday, but still managed to play cricket on Saturday, we won, just, 2 runs in the end.
I bowled… Bowled 13 overs and took 1 for 17, pretty good economy, but like I told Donna, I like wickets not a good economy…!
Other than that no real big news to report from me, oh yes there is… One of my old colleagues\coaches\team mates from my golfing and lawn bowls days passed away last week, I was quite saddened by the news, as he had taught me how to play golf from a very young age… I then later on played pennant lawn bowls with him for my home town and played with and against him at club level in competitions… He was a character and was well respected in the greater Wimmera community, he actually died at an event held in his honour, the story doing the rounds says that he watched the first group hit off the 1st tee and passed away, true or not, that brings a tear to the eye…
It heartens me that they are going to make the event a regular occurence.
Well that’s all from me at the moment, might have to have a go at Donna, as she posts regularly on myspace and her own little bulletin board thing… sheesh, she’s a slacker…
Add comment November 14th, 2006
Well this week I started at a company called SAFETRAC, they make a compliance training and testing system, and have two offices. I’m going to be the network and systems bunny for them
Things have got off to a relaxed start, which is a far cry from where I have just come from… May take some adjusting I think But I’ll get there…
In other matters, cricket has started off well, I’m playing for Barkly Street Uniting Cricket Club for their 2nd side playing in the C Turf competition. They have four sides and for some strange reason I was immediately picked in their 2nd side… odd, but what can you do…
I’ve started reasonably well, took 1 for 27 odd in my first game, didn’t bat, we won. Took 1 for 25 odd in my second game, scored a couple of runs and ended up not out, we won again. And just last week, I took 1 for 23 off 7 overs, not bad, but considering I was 1 for 9 off 6 overs, the last over hurt, 14 runs off it… That’s what trying to bowl too fast will do for you… stupid low full tosses… hit the pitch boy!! To round things off last week, I was sent out with a couple of overs left in the day, we’re playing a 2-day game spread over two weekends, I was sent out as the nightwatchman… Talk about bad ideas, luckily I stayed around and will bat first thing this Sunday… don’t get much of an opportunity to have a decent bat and face some overs, so I think I’ll try to stick around come Sunday For the cricket inept, an explaination of nightwatchman can be found here.
Everyone in the family is well, Donna, the two fur babies, Emmett and Elliott, although Emmett has become a reclusive teenager of sorts recently, staying away and ignoring me… stupid cat…
The weekend holds a lot of free time alone for me, Donna is heading home as her mum is having an operation, nothing too serious, but Donna is freting big time, which I would be doing if it were my mum… I have no idea what I’m doing on Saturday, but sunday is cricket day this weekend… Might unleash some more Madden NFL 07 on the Xbox of course… We’ll see…. got a few weeks of NY Jets games to watch also… Hrm…
Oh, remember to check out the collection of ‘Little Superstar‘ Youtube videos I’ve put together… If you aint heard of it, drop by and have a look, well well worth it…
Add comment October 26th, 2006
What a wonderful surprise I had yesterday with an old friend coming to stay. We talked and talked for hours. It’s wonderful to say that she is my friend. It’s funny that I didnt realise how much I had missed her friendship. My one regret that I have been a bad friend in taking her for granted. I think that it is time to change that with my friends.
It’s funny that you dont even realise that it has happened until most times its too late you have drifted apart.
Add comment October 25th, 2006
Cody finished up at his job on friday and starts his new job on Monday….. New start for the Code-man….
Add comment October 21st, 2006
Well not a day but 2 weeks later has Elliott come out of her shell. Since she has gotten better her personality has shown itself. My goodness we bought home a cat who ate like a horse till she got sick. She still sneezes but she is an absolute cutey.
Elliott eats like a horse… my god we could have easily called her Hoover and the name would have fit her like a glove. At least she doesnt look emancipated like when we got her. She is getting a nice little belly on her.
She doesnt walk around the house she jumps or runs…. the cat has no slow button but she does have a stop one. She loves sitting on your lap, stomach or shoulder. Even the lap top is not safe. Last week Sam sat down to eat his Doughnut she jumps up on the couch and flopped down on top of his lap… Quite a change seeing as both our old cats would not even come out of hiding when the kids arrived
As for her relationship with Emmett lets not go there… she just wants to play and jumps around him… he just cant be bothered.. its funny to watch.
Enough about the cats. Be back later….
Add comment August 31st, 2006
