get on up.

Here comes part deux of my winter vacation, and it only now feels like vacation. I have been running around doing the Christmas thing for days now. Today I had to work, but really there is not much to do in these final days of Q4 2007. So, Tomorrow I am planning to do some snowshoeing, really my first real snowshoeing trip in about 10 years. Woot. we have had just a ton of snow recently, so I am hoping to find some nice powder higher up. I will take pictures and post them tomorrow.

well that is about all for tonight.

Kin Dang Mao farok ding.

winding down 2007 away from work.

Shit, yes, my peeples. I am offically on vacation till next year! can I get a what what? fo shor.

What, you ask am I going to do in my time off? Well, let me fill you in on the grand plan.

12/22 -- Hiking to the Avenues Twin peaks, Movie possible w/wife, an evening with Jeremy/Amanda.

12/23 -- Church, City Creek walk, SISTER COMES IN TOWN ZOMG!!!, dinner with the folks, then bar w/ da sister.

12/24 -- Emigration canyon walk, Dinner w/ family, sleeping over at Felecia's Parents house, and possible present openings. I CAN HOPE!

12/25 -- XMAS time! w00t! morning at Felecia's parents house, then the long road to Tooele to my parents house. Should be a full day of food/presents/boozahol.

After that I will probably fritter my days away in the snow and outdoors. If I do anything super exciting, I will be sure to write it down.

well, that be all for now.

Cheers and Merry Christmas!!!

Explore the abyss

I found a really cool website today called "Explore the abyss" (URL: http://www.exploretheabyss.com/). My whole life I have been fascinated by the creatures of the deep, so I have been spending a lot of time looking at the photos. It's pretty interesting that we have only really explored a mere fraction of the ocean, makes me wonder what cool creature we will find next.

keep it real Argyropelecus

been a while

Wow, I haven't update this is quite some time. Here is a quick refresh of the last 6 months.

New Job. Left iBahn, went to Mediconnect (Same area, different building)

New desire to shed the beer belly and get back outdoors. went on less hikes than I thought I would, but still did more outdoors in the last 6 months than I did all of last year. Also, I have a good exercise routine down, which is really going to help during the dark months of winter.

Sister moved to Seattle, which sucks, but I am happy she is in a bigger better city w/ BF and new jorb.

I have been actively learning new Database stuff lately, esp. w/ the new job I have had to come up to speed on Oracle, Analysis Services, and SSIS. I have really come to dislike SSIS, it just seems to be as kludgey and crappy as DTS. but that's a whole separate blog.

Other than that, Felecia and I have been staying busy with work, hiking, and general fun.

Commute

Can I just say how sick and feckin' tired I am of people driving and the commute in general?!?!?
Jebus Cristo, I even drive the opposite way of the main traffic (morning = N -> S, Evening S-> N), and I still cannot seem to break out of the dumb-asshatery that is most Utah drivers. I mean really, does it take that much common fuckin' sense that if you are going slow in the fast lane and someone comes up behind you going much faster that you should get out of the way? I personally wouldn't think so, but then I can use my brain and drive at the same time. This and soooo many other annoyances are driving me out of my car and onto my bike. Yeah, I figure since I shelled out the cash for a new cycle I should get the most out of it. SO, my plan goes something like this: In the morning I will cycle down to the Ball park trax station and ride it down to 100th south, then I can ride my bike over to the Jordan river park system, and then right to my work. Then, coming home, I can just reverse that order. W00T! Ok, so... lets see.. uhm... how much is a trax pass.. Ok, UTA will tell me. uh, click, click, fares, click... FUCK ME SIDEWAYS SALLY! $50! Are you fucking joking me? Sweet Mary, that is about half of my monthly gas allowance.

Lets do some MATH.

Andy sets aside $120 for gas to get him everywhere. (yeah, I drive an SUV.... fuck off.)
so if I half my gas needs to say $60 a month, and then purchase a trax pass for $50... hmm... I save a whopping $10 a month if I Trax it up to work. gee... thanks UTA, you make it so appetizing to want to use trax.

well, I still think I am going to do it. or at least try for a while. Even with the minimal saving, I still would rather deal with UTA than drive through another rush hour.

New Bike

I got a new bike on Friday, used a chunk of money from my bonus to get it. I did a bit of research before going and I am happy with my choice, I just wish I wasn't hung over today so I could go for a ride. My final decision on the bike came down the trek 6000, it was mid-range price wise and it had all the features I was looking for. So, yeah, I am looking forward to commuting via train/bike. Feck off Oil Barons!

Logical Andy gate

Listening to: Chelsea Hotel By Leonard Cohen

Well, here I am again at the threshold of a new job. Tomorrow is my last day at iBahn, and as I look back on the past year, I have come to a number of conclusions and discoveries.

Numero Uno: Work to live, live to play

With work comes Money and with money comes fun. But, you have to remember to give yourself breaks to get out and enjoy the finer things in life. if you get stuck in a job that doesn't give you much free time you need to analyze if this is really what you want to do. Money is not worth it if you cannot live.

Number Zwei: Never back down to a good challenge.

This is what drives ingenuity and sparks creative thinking. I have been lucky to have been placed into a place where i was challenged on a regular basis, and I think I proven myself under some very stressful conditions.

Number 00000011: Documentation IS important.

I cannot remember how many times I wrote code too late and too sloppy to be readable in the clear light of day. I finally learned how important it is to write at least a few comments on what I have done and where I left off. became very sick of re-writing code because I couldn't figure out just what in the hell I was trying to do. :)


The most important thing I have learned though, is never let a job suck your soul. No money is worth being a slave to a corporation. Freedom is paramount to a successful life.


Cheers

Vacation all I ever wanted...

Ahhh.... I am just now coming down off my vacation high. 5 days of Hiking, Biking, Scootering, and drinking. Life is good. Felecia and I just got back from Glenwood Springs Colorado, we spent 4 days there taking in the sights. we did a 16 mile Bike ride, a 2.5 mile hike (which ended at a hanging lake, very pretty, I will include a picture soon.), and numerous excursions into town.
Today we finished off our vacation with a scooter ride with English Rose scooter club, a very fun ride to Tibble Fork Lake up American Fork Canyon. It was a good ride with good people, Tall J even brought up his camera kit and took some cool pictures of us on our scoots.

It is going to suck to go to work tomorrow.

5k

at 6:30am Katie, Felecia and I all got up, brushed the tiredness out of our eyes and stumbled down to Liberty Park to start the 5k portion of the Salt Lake marathon. up until the moment the race started I was filled with doubt about if I reallllllyyyy wanted to be doing this. BUT, the moment the band (school of rock) started up with the wailing guitars... Man, I was hooked. endorphines and other previously absent chemicals starting flowing to my brain, pumping out long forgot thoughts of "you will win" or "Stomp those fuckers with strollers! more running room for the runners!". I felt like a champion boxer just before the first ding of the bell. Then the horn went off and the mass of runners surged forward in a slow crawl past the starting line, previously Felecia and I decided that we were just going to walk and do a bit of running, all that changed the minute I got passed the starting line. We all ran along with each other until we got out of the park and then I couldn't stop running, I was feeling great and didn't want to slow down, I looked back but I couldn't see the sister or Felecia, so I just turned and kept running. about a mile into the run I realized that this wasn't so bad and that my previous spurning of running was entirely unfounded. I was loving it, my lungs were burning but my legs were keeping up. As I rounded Pioneer park and making the last stretch onto Rio Grande road, I heard clapping and whooping coming from behind me, I turned around to look and I was greeted with a view of a very tall, very lean muscular Kenyan man running first place in the half marathon. Holy shit I thought, that man is totally kicking some ass! jebus he is all leg! shit, that's my new hero. I wanted to shake his hand at the finish line, but by the time I got there he was no where to be seen. oh well.

Anyways, I finished the race, but I am still hungry for more. I think I will be finding more 5k's to run and next year I want to hit up the 1/2 marathon. Hopefully my new hero will be back for another go next year.

Andrew Barrrett unofficial time for 5k: 41 minutes.

Felecia kicks balls

I went out and supported Felecia's kick-ball team last night. They played the Turkey Burgers and lost 7 to 1. oh well, at least she got to kick some balls!

Scooter

My Stella is quite a girl all tarted up in chrome.

Hike

Went hiking yesterday after work. It was just a quick jaunt to the avenues twin peaks, but it felt good to get outside and do something other than walk around the park, or the trail by my work. This has me really excited for hiking again, last year was a complete wash out due to the new job. This year however, I am going to push myself to do a shit-ton more hiking, going to try and knock out a few more of the Peaks ringing the valley here. Storm mountain is high on my to-do list. well enough blah-blah have to finish up work and hit the sack.

Application tuning

so yeah, work basically sucked last week. we ran into a huge issue last week with our systems. On a 10,000ft level, the application servers and attached equipment were causing the database servers to max out the CPU's. Now these DB servers are no slouches in toughness. they are equipped with 4 64bit dual core processors backed up with 25 gigs of RAM. 8 cores total were being maxed out by the application servers throwing massive amounts of simple commands at them. at one point I counted up each app server (total of 6 per POP location) dishing out well over 10k requests per 3 minute interval that I was tracing. It's not like the stored procs that were getting called were poorly tuned or missing some critical index, it was just the shear volume of requests that were coming in that was bring down the house. So, for 3 days we dug and dug and dug and dug to try and determine why exactly the application servers decided to all-of-a-sudden start beating down the database servers. Well, after 3 days of intense searching we are still stumped. for the most part it is in Engineerings hands right now, and the only thing I can do is wait and see what they come up with(their mess not mine! :) ). Hopefully Monday will come with a wonderful reward and our talented engineering group triumphantly vanquish this nasty little foe. Until then I just hope we haven't pissed off too many clients.

--Andy

Me and the Wife

The above is a snap of the wife and I at the St. Patrick's day parade in downtown SLC. Good times were had that day. We spent the morning at the parade with friends, went to Saundras for lunch, then went to the Republican for tasty adult beverages. Much Guinness was consumed on that day.