Personal Update

"As the sands flow through the hour glass...so do the Days of our Lives", pretty much sums my summer of 2009.

Recap:

• May 30 -- Moved from Bellevue 10 miles southwest of Nashville to Spring Hill 35 miles south of Nashville; from 1000 sq ft apartment to 1600 sq ft townhouse.
• June 1 -- Discovered a move to a major Interstate 65 makes commuting time go up way up! from 15 min to 45 - 60 min
• June 5 - 8 -- Seaside, Florida Weekend getaway!!

Future Plans:

• June 13 -- Wedding (Madisonville, KY)
• June 20 -- Wedding (Clay, KY)
• August 22 -- New Core and Server Distribution Network Upgrade at work utilizing VSS

All in all pretty easy summer...except for the sunburns :)

CCNA

So on my tasks, I had to get CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate). This task has been accomplished. It is official today as I finally confirmed it on the certification website.

I would like to thank:

GNS3 and Dynamips
Cisco Press
RCQs (Random Cisco Questions) from the guys at work

Without the constant stimulation probably wouldn't have gotten it.

Now I set the next task of getting CCNP, I think the first test will be BCMSN just because the LAN is where I am all day everyday.

Wish me luck on that one.

Tasks Ahead....

I have not posted nearly enough this year, the year before, or the year before that...I guess I don't post enough ever.  I am going to try my best and get this thing posting at least once a day.  We shall see how long this lasts.

A list of things to come in my life:

1.) Taking the CCNA exam on Thursday

2.) Configured VSS (Virtual Switching Service) on 6509s in new core and distribution, now coming up with new plan to implement new core, distribution with no down time :).

3.) Keep banging away at the Bourne series in book format by Robert Ludlum...still on Identity

4.) Also reading Watchmen...saw the movie not impressed but with the graphic  novel I should be able to walk away.

5.) Looking for Good to Great on audible.com...I want to get into audio books more.

That is the plan!!

Friday the 13th

I went to see this movie on Friday the 13th. Lets just say that in the first oh...10min of the movie you see....5 people get killed each in a different way, a pair of breasts, a sex scene, a forest of marijuana plants, and one ugly killer. Then the credits roll.

As the movie continues, they do lengthen out the next set of killings but it stays true to the Jason mantra. A set of high school to college age kids, made up of scantly clothed girls and pot smoking college guys, that all get killed.

If you enjoy Jason movies I think you will like this one.

GNS3 0.6 Beta

GNS3 0.6 beta came out a few days ago.  Pretty stoked, not a great deal of feature adds...except for a few new features.  One of the best of these and something I have been waiting for is the ability to view the interfaces on the diagram.  Just like in Visio you can now see your interface names right on the screen.  There are a few more front end tweaks but other than that its still the same great open source software.

Don't forget to check out GNS3 Labs for the future stuff and workable labs.

Nights in Rodanthe

Rant

Yes, I saw Nights in Rodanthe...I can admit that I saw yet another chick flick. What makes it better I saw the movie with my wife...so I can at least say I didn't go alone.

Review

The movie itself was pretty good. Diane Lane and Richard Gere are excellent actors and have impeccable chemistry on screen. The movie is based off of the Nicholas Sparks novel "Nights in Rodanthe". This is the same author who wrote the "NoteBook", as well as several other chick books that were made into movies.

Surprisingly enough I was satisfied with the movie. The plot is enough to keep you interested and everyone crying around you, to make you feel a little weird that your the only one not.

Go take a lady friend, your wife to see this movie...The after affects are well worth it :).

Amazon MP3 for Linux

Tonight I was looking up some music on amazon.com, I wanted to buy some music, which normally means I have to load up my Windows VM for the amazonmp3 down loader software.

To my surprise when I went to the page, Amazon had Linux versions of the down loader software. Finally a company that recognizes another OS is out there.

Kudos to you Amazon.

I had a little trouble with getting the rpm installed on my Fedora9 box.

This site helped me out: fedoraforum.org

Here are the commands from the website if you don't want to go there:

Super thanks to GoneSouth on the fedoraforums for posting this:

1. download the fedora 8 rpm (amazonmp3.rpm) from the amazon site
2. cd to your download dir
3. su -c 'rpm -i --nodeps amazonmp3.rpm' (this tells rpm to ignore dependencies)
4. cd /lib
5. su -c 'ln -s libssl.so.7 libssl.so.6'
6. su -c 'ln -s libcrypto.so.7 libcrypto.so.6'

The last two steps just soft link the .7 version of the libraries that come with F9, to the .6 file names that amazonmp3 is looking for. You should now be able to download amazon mp3s on your F9 install. Cheers !

Hope you guys enjoy the Amazon down loader as much as I did.