Darrel Clute//www.darrelclute.net/2018-06-09T11:30:00-04:00Ramblings from yet another IT ProfessionalCiscoLive! 2018 and Tech Field Day Extra2018-06-09T11:30:00-04:002018-06-09T11:30:00-04:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2018-06-09:/2018/06/ciscolive-2018-tfdx/It is that time of year once again, Summer Camp for Geeks otherwise known as
<a class="reference external" href="https://www.ciscolive.com/us/">CiscoLive! US</a> has arrived. I am headed down
to Orlando to join with around 30,000 others for several days of training,
hallway tracks, socializing, and a bit of fun.<p>It is that time of year once again, Summer Camp for Geeks otherwise known as
<a class="reference external" href="https://www.ciscolive.com/us/">CiscoLive! US</a> has arrived. I am headed down
to Orlando to join with around 30,000 others for several days of training,
hallway tracks, socializing, and a bit of fun.</p>
<p>Tech Field Day will be present again this year with presentation on Monday 6/11
through Wednesday 6/13. I have been asked to be a delegate for both the Monday
and Wednesday sessions. The full sessions for this <a class="reference external" href="http://techfieldday.com/event/clus18/">Tech Field Day Extra are
available and will be live streamed from here</a>. Monday's sessions will have a focus
on data centers with Wednesday's sessions having a focus on cloud and
multicloud technologies. I am honored to once again be involved with Tech
Field Day at CiscoLive! this year. You can find the previous events that I've
participated in at my <a class="reference external" href="http://techfieldday.com/people/darrel-clute/">Tech Field Day Delegate Page</a>.</p>
<p>My plane will be boarding shortly so will wrap up this short post for now. See
everyone in Orlando in a couple of hours.</p>
PGP Transition Statement2015-07-27T13:00:00-04:002015-07-27T13:00:00-04:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2015-07-27:/2015/07/pgp-transition-statement/<p>I have created a new OpenPGP key <a class="reference external" href="https://www.darrelclute.net/pgp-key.txt">0x54816ED6261FCA30</a> and am transitioning
away from my old key. If you have signed my old key. I would appreciate
signatures on my new key as well. I have created a transition statement which
is included inline below, and can be downloaded for verification from
<a class="reference external" href="https://www.darrelclute.net/pgp-transition-statement.txt">https://www.darrelclute.net/pgp-transition-statement.txt</a>.</p>
<p>I have created a new OpenPGP key <a class="reference external" href="https://www.darrelclute.net/pgp-key.txt">0x54816ED6261FCA30</a> and am transitioning
away from my old key. If you have signed my old key. I would appreciate
signatures on my new key as well. I have created a transition statement which
is included inline below, and can be downloaded for verification from
<a class="reference external" href="https://www.darrelclute.net/pgp-transition-statement.txt">https://www.darrelclute.net/pgp-transition-statement.txt</a>.</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre><span></span>-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512
OpenPGP Key Transition Statement for Darrel Ray Clute, III
I have created a new OpenPGP key and will be transitioning away from
my old key. The old key has not been compromised and will continue to
be valid for some time, but I prefer all future correspondence to be
encrypted to the new key, and will be making signatures with the new
key going forward.
I would like this new key to be re-integrated into the web of trust.
This message is signed by both keys to certify the transition. My new
and old keys are signed by each other. If you have signed my old key,
I would appreciate signatures on my new key as well, provided that
your signing policy permits that without re-authenticating me.
The old key, which I am transitioning away from, is:
pub rsa4096/0x778346C225CA8B71 2014-02-24
Key fingerprint = B6D4 6D64 F0C2 2513 B5EA 5E5C 7783 46C2 25CA 8B71
The new key, to which I am transitioning, is:
pub rsa4096/0x54816ED6261FCA30 2015-07-06 [expires: 2016-01-04]
Key fingerprint = 58A5 4A51 58F1 C5DA C51E A537 5481 6ED6 261F CA30
The entire key may be downloaded from:https://www.darrelclute.net/pgp-public-key.txt
To fetch the full new key from a public key server using GnuPG, run:
gpg --recv-key 0x54816ED6261FCA30
If you already know my old key, you can now verify that the new key is
signed by the old one:
gpg --check-sigs 0x54816ED6261FCA30
If you are satisfied that you've got the right key, and the User IDs
match what you expect, I would appreciate it if you would sign my key:
gpg --sign-key 0x54816ED6261FCA30
You can upload your signatures to a public keyserver directly:
gpg --send-key 0x54816ED6261FCA30
Or email darrel@darrelclute.net (possibly encrypted) the output from:
gpg --armor --export 0x54816ED6261FCA30
If you'd like any further verification or have any questions about the
transition please contact me directly.
To verify the integrity of this statement:
wget -q -O- https://www.darrelclute.net/pgp-transition-statement.txt --verify
Darrel Clute
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v2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=/ShQ
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
</pre></div>
"DevOps Engineer"?2014-06-20T21:00:00-04:002014-06-20T21:00:00-04:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2014-06-20:/2014/06/devops-engineer/Recently talking with someone about their hiring woes and they mentioned that
they were having an extremely hard time finding a "DevOps Engineer". This
struck a chord with me as I don't typically consider this to be a job title,
and I know from several conversations on Twitter that I am not alone in that
assumption. In fact this is something that I have given a great deal of
thought to and am finally given it enough thought to codify it here. Why the
conflicted understandings between the two of us?<p>Recently talking with someone about their hiring woes and they mentioned that
they were having an extremely hard time finding a "DevOps Engineer". This
struck a chord with me as I don't typically consider this to be a job title,
and I know from several conversations on Twitter that I am not alone in that
assumption. In fact this is something that I have given a great deal of
thought to and am finally given it enough thought to codify it here. Why the
conflicted understandings between the two of us?</p>
<div class="section" id="what-is-devops">
<h2>What is DevOps?</h2>
<p>DevOps is intentionally a very vague and ambiguous term, by design of those
that coined the phrase. Too often people confuse DevOps with lower level parts
of the overall movement such as Infrastructure as Code or Agile Operations.
Although these parts tend to be vital to an organization succeeding with being
a DevOps organization, it itself is not DevOps. As you can see with just
trying to clear up some of the easy to distinguish aspects that it still
doesn't necessarily clear up any of the confusion.</p>
<p>The main reason that DevOps visionaries such as Gene Kim and Jez Humble try to
leave the definition of DevOps as ambiguous as possible was to allow
organizations to better adapt it to themselves. As time has progressed there
has been some clarity on the relation of these tightly knit sub-movements into
a singular movement. DevOps itself is usually best described as the cultural
components of the overall movement, but not divorced from the other aspects.
Being cultural means that it has influence over how the organization operates
and integrates IT as opposed to it being a separate business unit or cost
center.</p>
<p>The other two components that I mentioned, Infrastructure as Code and Agile
Operations, outline the processes and methods of enabling more efficient IT,
and by extension the types of tools in a general sense. These two components
can be implemented by an operations organization in a traditional enterprise
and they would still gain benefit, but this is rare to find outside of
organizations moving towards DevOps enablement.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="why-not-a-devops-role">
<h2>Why not a DevOps Role?</h2>
<p>I stated in the opening that effectively I don't see DevOps belonging in a job
title. As DevOps is encompassing across roles it is no less ambiguous to state
that you are a DevOps Engineer as opposed to an IT Engineer. With either of
those titles you would have no way of determining if the individual you are
speaking with has their specialty in development, testing, or operations, or
where your job will be focused if you are looking for a job.</p>
<p>I know what you are thinking: "Right, but isn't that the point of DevOps,
eliminate silos?" Well, yes and no. Depending on how an organization embraces
DevOps, and this doesn't necessarily depend on size, the silos may be gone or
present. In my personal opinion having division of workforce is necessary for
management purposes, and as such makes sense to make those divisions with
functional groups. This is where culture comes into play. Without the open
nature of the DevOps culture communication breakdowns will be a detriment
regardless of whether you have silos or not, more so if you do. What does not
make sense to me, at least until you get to massive scale, is having divisions
beyond the 3 overarching disciplines; Development, QA, Operations.</p>
<p>"OK, so if there are still silos, what have you achieved?" Well, for an
organization embracing DevOps, just because there are still departments or
divisions inside of IT doesn't mean that there are silos. Departments exist
for management hierarchy, but should not exist for each department to work
toward different goals than that of the organization. When each department
works independently of the others, that is how a silo is formed. When you have
departments, but individuals across those departments function as a single
team, you don't have silos in the traditional sense.</p>
<p>Taking that further, say that an organization has decided that all of IT will
be a single department, without traditional sub-groupings, do all of the
engineers do exactly the same job and have exactly the same title? Well, of
course you could do this, but it doesn't necessarily make the most sense. You
will still have subject matter experts even after you start down the path to
enabling DevOps, so why obfuscate out that distinction?</p>
<p>Even if you feel the need to give everyone a common title, make sure that you
also give them a subtitle that denotes what their primary subject matter is, it
makes it easier to know where to send people when they are having a particular
problem. Here is one that I am going to leave up to you the reader, if you
give everyone the same primary title, with differing subtitles, how do you
handle those truly unique and hard to find engineers that can rightfully be
called subject matter experts in more than one discipline? Likewise how have
you addressed this in traditional IT departments?</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="clarity">
<h2>Clarity?</h2>
<p>The prior two sections definitely help provide clarity around some of the
confusion that I see come up with regard to DevOps. And it definitely will
help frame deeper conversations that I have with others regarding my
opinion on DevOps as a term in a job title. But does that help provide clarity
to the situation I opened with?</p>
<p>Back to the individual I was speaking with, what struck me as even more
peculiar came when I probed more about what they were looking for. They were
looking for an operationally focused position, but not a traditional operations
engineer. They are looking for an individual that is a developer first, with
operational experience managing infrastructure. I knew that this sounded
familiar to something that I had heard of before, but couldn't place it at the
time. I also knew that it sounded like something that I had heard or read
about in relation to DevOps, but not directly.</p>
<p>It was when I read <a class="reference external" href="http://www.standalone-sysadmin.com/blog/2014/06/the-difference-between-site-reliability-engineering-system-administration-and-devops/">Matt Simmons article</a> on his take aways from the
<a class="reference external" href="https://www.usenix.org/conference/srecon14/program">SREConf</a> that he recently attended. Reading his article I realized that the
individual I was speaking with was looking for a non-traditional operations
engineer, specifically a Site Reliability Engineer. What sets Site Reliability
Engineering apart from traditional infrastructure engineering is in how the
role is typically filled, in addition to typically only being found at
extremely large web properties. My last statement is not an indication that
you only need this type of operational mindset when you get to a certain scale,
simply that they are more likely to occur at those types of scale.</p>
<p>SRE from a personnel perspective is typically filled with an individual with a
BS or higher in Computer Science, has extensive experience with development as
well as infrastructure operations. This is not to say that traditional
infrastructure operations staff cannot fill a role in SRE, it is just far less
common. The reason for the desire for a full development background is that
they will not only operate the environment, but they will also develop the
necessary tooling, monitoring, and scaling infrastructure to support the
application in ways that a pure infrastructure engineer cannot, typically by
writing large scale distributed applications.</p>
<p>SRE goes beyond typical Infrastructure as Code, where you treat the
infrastructure configuration as code, and typically utilize a configuration
management tool to provide a declarative definition of your needs instead of
imperatively defining it. From my impression of SRE teams, they will do this
as well, but will also build applications which manage the applications, and
which the applications that are being consumed are dependent on the
applications that the SRE team has developed. It is likely that SRE teams were
the designer and original developers of the early PaaS implementations that so
many today consume.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="conclusion">
<h2>Conclusion</h2>
<p>There is a great deal of ambiguity and confusion around the still emerging
trends around DevOps, SDN, and other related movements and disciplines. In
many respects the ambiguity is intentional so that organizations can choose the
best path for themselves to be able to embrace the movement, and work toward
having high performing IT teams. Other times the ambiguity comes from how
early everything is in the life cycle that not everything is well understood,
such as the case with SDN.</p>
<p>Was I able to help out the individual come to a better understanding of what
they are looking for to fulfill their operational position? As of the time of
this writing I cannot answer that question, as we haven't delved that far down
into the conversation yet. I felt it was more important to get this out there
to use as a jumping off point, and hopefully help others as well at the same
time.</p>
<p>Want to explore this in more depth with me? Feel free to get in touch with me
below in the comments, on <a class="reference external" href="https://twitter.com/darrelclute">Twitter</a>, or <a class="reference external" href="https://plus.google.com/+DarrelClute">Google+</a>. I think that conversations like
these need to be had across the industry, and not just on the server and
application side as has been the majority of focus to date, networking needs to
be there as well.</p>
</div>
Here Comes Cisco Live 20142014-04-11T15:30:00-04:002014-04-11T15:30:00-04:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2014-04-11:/2014/04/here-comes-cisco-live-2014/It is almost that time of year again. <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ciscolive.com/us/">Cisco Live US</a> is right around the
corner and there is a lot to look forward to. <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ciscolive.com/us/">Cisco Live US</a> this year is in
San Francisco California, May 18th through the 22nd at the Moscone Center. I
will be in attendance again this year, third year in a row and fourth total.<p>It is almost that time of year again. <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ciscolive.com/us/">Cisco Live US</a> is right around the
corner and there is a lot to look forward to. <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ciscolive.com/us/">Cisco Live US</a> this year is in
San Francisco California, May 18th through the 22nd at the Moscone Center. I
will be in attendance again this year, third year in a row and fourth total.</p>
<div class="section" id="weeks-activities">
<h2>Weeks Activities</h2>
<p>I will be arriving in San Francisco on Saturday the 17th at about 2:00 PM PDT.
With registration being open on Saturday I will be ensuring that I get all of
that out of the way prior to event sessions starting on Sunday.</p>
<p>My tentative schedule of sessions is in the tables at the bottom of this
article. I say that this is tentative as I am subject to make changes to this
as slide decks are posted to <a class="reference external" href="https://www.ciscolive.com/online/">Cisco Live Online</a> and I review to ensure that I
am getting the best of the event.</p>
<p>In addition to the sessions there are other activities that I typically partake
in and even draw benefit from. The customer appreciation event is a good wind
down to the multitude of sessions. This year Lenny Kravitz and Imagine Dragons
will be performing for us at AT&T Park. For those of you that aren't aware of
the weather in San Francisco in May, it will likely be a good idea to have a
jacket for the customer appreciation event, as this is an outdoor stadium.</p>
<p><a class="reference external" href="http://www.ciscolive.com/us/attendees/social-networking/">Cisco Live Social Networking</a> is ever growing and gives you an opportunity to
meet and talk with people you interact online with <a class="reference external" href="https://twitter.com">Twitter</a>, <a class="reference external" href="https://plus.google.com">Google Plus</a>,
or your social media platform of choice. There will be opening and closing
TweetUps specifically for this, in addition to the social media lounge being a
place where a number of us hang out when we are not in a session.</p>
<p>Mixing it up a bit this year on the exam front. Every prior year that I have
attended a Cisco Live event I have taken the CCIE Route/Switch written exam,
and usually haven't had sufficient time to study, and recently traditional
route/switch has not been my focus. This year I will be attempting the CCIE
Data Center written exam. Although I have not really had time to devote to
studying, these are the technologies I have been interacting with more
regularly as of late.</p>
<p>New this year, Cisco <a class="reference external" href="https://developer.cisco.com/site/devnet/home/index.gsp">DevNet</a>, formerly Cisco Developer Network, will have a
<a class="reference external" href="https://developer.cisco.com/site/devnet/events/devnet-at-cisco-live/">DevNet Zone</a> where you can come and try your hands and working with the APIs
and SDKs through a learning lab or the hackathon. There will be theater
sessions and ask the experts where you can get high level overview or deep
dives with the expert respectively. Additionally they will have partners in
the <a class="reference external" href="https://developer.cisco.com/site/devnet/events/devnet-at-cisco-live/">DevNet Zone</a> to talk specifically about their technologies and how they
are leveraging Cisco's programmability features. The <a class="reference external" href="https://developer.cisco.com/site/devnet/events/devnet-at-cisco-live/">DevNet Zone</a> may
preempt some of my sessions as a significant amount of my free time has been
around addressing automation, and being able to better control and monitor
environments.</p>
<p>There will likely be other activities after hours that I will be partaking in
as well, and if last year is an indication I will probably be hanging out with
people I interact with online more than day-to-day.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="closing-thoughts">
<h2>Closing Thoughts</h2>
<p>I am really looking forward to attending Cisco Live again this year. If you
are in the networking space, or any aspect of the data center space, I highly
recommend you attend at least once. For me personally I attend as the
educational consumption model works better for me than other venues.
Additionally it gets me out of my inverted shell a bit for a short period of
time. Look forward to seeing everyone this year and being able to talk in
person with people I haven't seen in nearly a year.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="tentative-schedule">
<h2>Tentative Schedule</h2>
<table border="1" class="docutils">
<colgroup>
<col width="82%" />
<col width="3%" />
<col width="4%" />
<col width="10%" />
</colgroup>
<thead valign="bottom">
<tr><th class="head">Session Name</th>
<th class="head">Date</th>
<th class="head">Time</th>
<th class="head">Location</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody valign="top">
<tr><td>TECACI-2009 – Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) - The Policy Driven Data Center</td>
<td>5/18/14</td>
<td>8:00 AM</td>
<td>Moscone West 2004</td>
</tr>
<tr><td>BRKCDN-2968 – Cisco DevNet: Overview of Cisco's new development community, sandbox and associated tools</td>
<td>5/19/14</td>
<td>8:00 AM</td>
<td>Moscone South 305</td>
</tr>
<tr><td>BRKCRS-3011 – APIC-EM (Application Policy Infrastructure Controller - Enterprise Module) - SDN in the Enterprise</td>
<td>5/19/14</td>
<td>10:00 AM</td>
<td>Moscone West 2014</td>
</tr>
<tr><td>Exam – CCIE Data Center Written</td>
<td>5/19/14</td>
<td>1:00 PM</td>
<td>Exam Center</td>
</tr>
<tr><td>GENKEY-2200 – Cisco Live Welcome Keynote</td>
<td>5/19/14</td>
<td>3:30 PM</td>
<td>Moscone North, Hall D</td>
</tr>
<tr><td>BRKSDN-2777 – Open Network Environment (ONE) Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC)</td>
<td>5/20/14</td>
<td>8:00 AM</td>
<td>Moscone North 113</td>
</tr>
<tr><td>GENKEY-2300 – Cisco Live Technology Keynote: Infrastructure for The Agile Enterprise</td>
<td>5/20/14</td>
<td>10:00 AM</td>
<td>Moscone North, Hall D</td>
</tr>
<tr><td>BRKPCS-2048 – Software-Defined Networking: People, Process, and Evolution</td>
<td>5/20/14</td>
<td>12:30 PM</td>
<td>Moscone South 309</td>
</tr>
<tr><td>BRKDCT-2367 – OpenStack Deployment in the Enterprise</td>
<td>5/20/14</td>
<td>3:00 PM</td>
<td>Moscone West 3011</td>
</tr>
<tr><td>BRKSEC-3691 – Deploying TrustSec Security Group Tags in the Data Center</td>
<td>5/21/14</td>
<td>8:00 AM</td>
<td>Moscone West 3018</td>
</tr>
<tr><td>GENKEY-2400 – Cisco Live Partner Keynote: The Internet of Everything Ecosystem– Bringing IT and OT Together with the Internet of Things</td>
<td>5/21/14</td>
<td>10:00 AM</td>
<td>Moscone North, Hall D</td>
</tr>
<tr><td>BRKNMS-3132 – Advanced NetFlow</td>
<td>5/21/14</td>
<td>1:30 PM</td>
<td>Moscone South 307</td>
</tr>
<tr><td>BRKARC-3471 – Cisco NX-OS Software Architecture</td>
<td>5/22/14</td>
<td>8:00 AM</td>
<td>Moscone West 3001</td>
</tr>
<tr><td>GENKEY-2500 – Cisco Live Celebrity Keynote: Reinventing Education—The One World School House</td>
<td>5/22/14</td>
<td>10:30 AM</td>
<td>Moscone North, Hall D</td>
</tr>
<tr><td>BRKDCT-3237 – Versatile architecture using Nexus 7000 with a mix of F and M modules to deliver FEX, FabricPath, Multihop FCoE, MPLS and LISP all at the same time</td>
<td>5/22/14</td>
<td>12:30 PM</td>
<td>Moscone West 3011</td>
</tr>
<tr><td>BRKCDN-2303 – DevOps in Programmable Network Environment</td>
<td>5/22/14</td>
<td>2:30 PM</td>
<td>Moscone West 2016</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
</div>
Site Redesign and Workflow2013-12-24T00:00:00-05:002013-12-24T00:00:00-05:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2013-12-24:/2013/12/site-redesign-workflow/In my previous post I stated that I would be leaving the <a class="reference external" href="http://www.blogger.com">Blogger</a> platform to
better work into my flow. As part of that I have additionally redesigned my
site so that things are hopefully easier on readers. Here is the workflow that
I have developed that will work best for me, but first some notes on the
redesign.<p>In my previous post I stated that I would be leaving the <a class="reference external" href="http://www.blogger.com">Blogger</a> platform to
better work into my flow. As part of that I have additionally redesigned my
site so that things are hopefully easier on readers. Here is the workflow that
I have developed that will work best for me, but first some notes on the
redesign.</p>
<div class="section" id="making-changes">
<h2>Making Changes</h2>
<p>I personally was not liking the look of my site. Additionally I was not seeing
any use case where having Google Ads on my site was of any benefit to me or my
readers. So since I was going to be changing my workflow and migrating away
from <a class="reference external" href="http://www.blogger.com">Blogger</a>, I decided to take some time and rebuild the site layout.</p>
<p>As I had decided that I would use a static site generator, specifically
<a class="reference external" href="http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.3.0/">Pelican</a> and more on that below, I started reviewing the available public
domain themes. I ended up selecting <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/giulivo/pelican-svbhack">svbhack</a> as the base, took some design
queues from <a class="reference external" href="http://www.textandhubris.com/">Text and Hubris</a> in the use of the <a class="reference external" href="http://fontawesome.io/">Font Awesome</a> icons, and
made my own customizations, which you can view in my <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/darrelclute/dcnet-theme-svbhack">dcnet-theme-svbhack</a>
repository.</p>
<p>Over the past four years or so my blog has been hosted at blog.darrelclute.net.
The reason for this was as I was moving to <a class="reference external" href="http://www.blogger.com">Blogger</a> after leaving an employer,
at the time <a class="reference external" href="http://www.blogger.com">Blogger</a> did not have the ability to utilize a naked domain as
Google refers to it. Now that I am no longer utilizing <a class="reference external" href="http://www.blogger.com">Blogger</a> I decided to
make a change and migrate both my blog and my main site to the same site.
Hopefully anyone subscribed through an RSS reader will receive the appropriate
update to their configurations. I have setup the former blog to redirect with
a 301 to the appropriate location on the combined site.</p>
<p>I've also made some changes to how feeds are generated. Instead of separating
out personal posts to a separate site I am going to leave them as a single
site. Although I don't expect to post many personal posts I am thinking of my
potential readers. In addition to having a feed for all posts, I also have
separate feeds for each category. I will also be migrating away from
<a class="reference external" href="http://feedburner.google.com">FeedBurner</a>. I am having <a class="reference external" href="http://feedburner.google.com">FeedBurner</a> redirect subscribers to the all posts
feed, so if you do not wish to get all of my posts please update your RSS
reader appropriately.</p>
<p>That is about it for the changes to the site, let's delve into how I plan to
become more effective in authoring content, by looking at the planned workflow.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="authoring">
<h2>Authoring</h2>
<p>After reading <a class="reference external" href="https://leanpub.com/Technical-Blogging-Writing-Arse-First">Greg Ferro's book on blogging</a> it became clear to me that I
needed to rethink my workflow. Part of my problem with authoring over the past
few years can in part be directly contributed to the blogging platform I had
chosen. The biggest problem with this for me was that there was not a good
method to interact with the platform from the command line. Now you are
probably thinking to yourself:</p>
<blockquote>
Whoa, did he just say command line?</blockquote>
<p>Yes, as I have extensively and nearly exclusively utilized Linux on the desktop
for well over 12 years now, I can accomplish things much faster from the
command line. In fact the majority of my writing is completed in <a class="reference external" href="http://www.vim.org/">Vim</a> utilizing
either <a class="reference external" href="http://www.latex-project.org/">LaTeX</a> or <a class="reference external" href="http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html">reStructuredText</a>. And I maintain my resume in <a class="reference external" href="http://www.latex-project.org/">LaTeX</a>.
Through reading Greg's examples of using <a class="reference external" href="http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/">Markdown</a>, I easily saw how I could
correlate that to utilizing <a class="reference external" href="http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html">reStructuredText</a> which would be a better fit for
me.</p>
<p>My last post I partially wrote out in <a class="reference external" href="http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html">reStructuredText</a> before publishing just
to ensure that I could start building my new workflow. I knew that I wanted to
have my posts and such stored in <a class="reference external" href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a> as I have gotten quite used to it being
part of many of my other workflows. With also being a <a class="reference external" href="http://www.python.org">Python</a> user for my
programming I completed a few quick Google searches and found <a class="reference external" href="http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.3.0/">Pelican</a>.</p>
<p><a class="reference external" href="http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.3.0/">Pelican</a> is a static site generator written in <a class="reference external" href="http://www.python.org">Python</a>. It will take a source
file in <a class="reference external" href="http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html">reStructuredText</a> or <a class="reference external" href="http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/">Markdown</a> and generate a static site that you can
literally host anywhere. It also utilizes <a class="reference external" href="http://jinja.pocoo.org/">Jinja2</a> for the templating language,
which I've been utilizing frequently with <a class="reference external" href="http://saltstack.com">Salt</a>. So with some background you
are probably wondering what my actual workflow is.</p>
<p>Quite simply I have a directory on any number of computers that I can simply
pull the latest repository contents to and go. I have a basic structure of how
the content is laid out so that I can keep track of items as well, which I have
outlined here.</p>
<div class="highlight"><pre><span></span>repository|
|_____drafts
|_____pages
|_____<categories>
</pre></div>
<p>In this layout I start all writing in the drafts folder, I keep a file there
for quick notes and each draft is separated out by slug as I start writing it.
As I am also utilizing <a class="reference external" href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a> I also ensure that I commit any changes upon saving
a file. The pages directory contains all static pages for the site, also in
<a class="reference external" href="http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html">reStructuredText</a>. The <categories> folder is actually more of a variable, I
have a corresponding folder for each category. As I promote a post from draft
to published, I simply relocate it from the drafts folder to the appropriate
category.</p>
<p>So with the authoring of articles no longer requiring me to utilize a platform
I can better focus on the task at hand. I no longer need to have my browser
open to be able to be working on articles. This also has the advantage that I
can work completely offline, which can be extremely beneficial when working
without Internet access. Now that I have some generated content I just need to
publish.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="publishing">
<h2>Publishing</h2>
<p>Utilizing a static site generator like <a class="reference external" href="http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.3.0/">Pelican</a> opens up where you can host
your site to being nearly infinite. One of the things that I wanted to
accomplish with the publishing workflow was that I would not have to generate
the site pages locally and push them to the server. With utilizing <a class="reference external" href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a> this
is fairly easy because I can have a post-update hook deploy on the server. But
where to host? Well being a proponent of PaaS solutions and already leveraging
<a class="reference external" href="http://appengine.google.com">Google AppEngine</a> I decided I'd look down that route.</p>
<p>I could have simply deployed it to <a class="reference external" href="http://appengine.google.com">Google AppEngine</a> as they have <a class="reference external" href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a>
support now, but there has been something I have been recommending lately that
I thought would be better to deploy to. I decided that I'd utilize <a class="reference external" href="http://www.redhat.com/">Red
Hat's</a> <a class="reference external" href="http://openshift.com/">OpenShift Online</a> service as I have been extolling its enterprise
version for Private PaaS deployments. Going through to build out the initial
deployment was far easier then building out on <a class="reference external" href="http://appengine.google.com">Google AppEngine</a>. <a class="reference external" href="http://openshift.com/">OpenShift
Online</a> utilizes <a class="reference external" href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a> as the base means of deploying the application. This
means that as soon as I push the repository back up it will build out the site,
or at least the new pages.</p>
<p>You are likely thinking that if I'm auto deploying that my drafts would be
published every time I push the repository. Thankfully <a class="reference external" href="http://docs.getpelican.com/en/3.3.0/">Pelican</a> has a
configuration option where I can exclude directories from generation. This is
quite beneficial for being able to maintain a single repository.</p>
<p>Since I am using <a class="reference external" href="http://openshift.com/">OpenShift Online</a> it is fair to clarify that the directory
layout above is actually a subset of the actual <a class="reference external" href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a> repository. A minor
detail but worth having clarified.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="why-static">
<h2>Why Static?</h2>
<p>So with a static site, many people think that I'd loose the ability to have
dynamic content on my site, such as comments. As many of you know services
such as <a class="reference external" href="http://disqus.com">Disqus</a> provide a means to host comments for you, it simply gets loaded
through your call of some JavaScript code they provide. It wouldn't be too
much of a stretch for most other dynamic content you may want on your site to
be provided in this manner.</p>
<p>A static site is easier to maintain as you don't have to worry about your
platform changing on upgrades. Using a hosted service like <a class="reference external" href="http://www.blogger.com">Blogger</a> or
upgrading your own install base of your favorite platform can unexpectedly
change how your site behaves, or a lack of doing so causes your site to become
defaced. Additionally a static site will scale far better then a dynamically
generated site. If you need something dynamic, utilize a service or have a
specialized application that provides that functionality through JavaScript.
It is far easier to scale out a subset of functionality that is dynamic as
opposed to making the entire site dynamic.</p>
<p>My site only has a single author, but that doesn't mean that this setup would
not work for a site with more then one. <a class="reference external" href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a> is a version control system,
designed to be distributed. By utilizing <a class="reference external" href="http://git-scm.com/">Git</a> you can either provide everyone
necessary with write access to the repository, or you can have them submit pull
requests to the editors. People tend to be a bit put off by version control
systems before or just as they are starting to utilize them. But don't let
that hold you back from trying it out, it helps with tracking changes and
differences, and correcting mistakes when they arise.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="closing-thoughts">
<h2>Closing Thoughts</h2>
<p>Change is a good thing at times. I decided that as part of changing my
workflow for article creation I would also refresh my site. I have already
noticed an increase in productivity with the new workflow, and now that the
site is published in its new format things should hopefully be simplified. In
an industry that is constantly changing it is good for you to induce changes
upon yourself at times instead of having them forced upon you by external
factors. Take some time and think about the last time that you made a change
for your sake, it may be time to make changes for yourself.</p>
</div>
Becoming a Producer in a Consumers World2013-12-14T15:03:00-05:002013-12-14T15:03:00-05:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2013-12-14:/2013/12/becoming-producer-in-consumers-world/We live in a society that is predominantly composed of consumers, not only of
products but also content. Everyone fills the role of a consumer at some
point, but most never fill the role of a producer. In this modern age content
is being produced at rates which have not been seen before in history. What
does this mean for us that also want to be producers, and not merely consumers?
Let's take a look at this from my perspective, and hopefully allow you to draw
from my example.<p>We live in a society that is predominantly composed of consumers, not only of
products but also content. Everyone fills the role of a consumer at some
point, but most never fill the role of a producer. In this modern age content
is being produced at rates which have not been seen before in history. What
does this mean for us that also want to be producers, and not merely consumers?
Let's take a look at this from my perspective, and hopefully allow you to draw
from my example.</p>
<div class="section" id="current-state">
<h2>Current State</h2>
<p>I read <a class="reference external" href="http://etherealmind.com">Greg Ferro's</a> book on technical blogging,
<a class="reference external" href="https://leanpub.com/Technical-Blogging-Writing-Arse-First">Arse First Method of Technical Blogging</a>, a couple of
times now to get some inspiration on getting posts created. Although I have a
few drafts that I've started, I still haven't gotten into the rhythm that I
want to be with creating content. So, what is holding me back?</p>
<p>First issue has been time, more precisely lack of focused time. When you are
trying to write in your free time, having limited free time is hardly
conducive.</p>
<p>Second when I have had free time I've been spending most of it consuming
content. This post on <a class="reference external" href="http://devopsu.com/blog/productivity-tip-let-it-cool/">DevOpsU</a> got me to thinking on
this subject for more than just writing. I've spent time consuming, attempting
to gain inspiration, when in reality it is hampering my creativity. This makes
sense to me as I have a number of automation projects I haven't gotten much
past writing high level ideas down for, and more drafts than posts on this
site.</p>
<p>Third has been my workflow. Really this has been a lack of a workflow, or at
minimum a consistent method.</p>
<p>These really are the biggest issues that have plagued me. What can be done to
overcome these obstacles?</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="moving-forward">
<h2>Moving Forward</h2>
<p>For the first item, limited focused time? This one there really isn't anything
that I can alter, other than making the time. This will likely end up meaning
that I will be getting up earlier or staying up later to provide myself the
time that I need to pursue writing, for this blog along with some programming
activities I really want to pursue. This also means that I will focus on
producing quality over a specific quantity, contrary to my previously stated
goals.</p>
<p>For the second item, consumption versus production? This is where I will
likely have the most difficulty. By nature I yearn to learn as much as I can.
Additionally I have always strived to have a multidisciplinary approach to my
career. This means that articles on multiple topics easily catch my attention,
and can be applicable to my career. So how am I going to move past being a
consumer first to being a producer? I haven't exactly figured that out yet, in
precise detail anyway. I will likely divert some of my consumption time to
production time. Additionally I will likely prune back my RSS reader, removing
high volume feeds that I derive limited benefit from. Same goes for my social
media activities, although will likely be implemented in a different fashion.</p>
<p>For the third item, workflow? Taking some inspiration from Greg's book I've
been working on a workflow that will fit me. Instead of learning yet another
markup language, my workflow will involve <a class="reference external" href="http://http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html">reStructuredText</a> as I use it with my Python
programming, and am fairly versed with it already. Additionally, I will not
continue to utilize <a class="reference external" href="http://www.blogger.com/">Blogger</a>, this will be the last
post through the platform. I'll be writing a separate article on the creation
workflow once I've migrated the site.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="closing-thoughts">
<h2>Closing Thoughts</h2>
<p>We live in a world inundated with content the vast majority of which is subpar
at best. We need more producers of content that is of high quality instead of
run of the mill. With the great amount of static produced finding quality
through the noise can be difficult but should not be a deterrent to producing
quality content. If you are like me and in the technology field, have a good
grasp on a topic, and are a decent writer, please help with producing quality
content. That is my goal. Remember quality will always mean more over
quantity, so focus on quality first. After you get in a rhythm of reliably
producing quality then increasing the quantity will come naturally.</p>
</div>
Post CiscoLive Update2013-07-17T01:09:00-04:002013-07-17T01:09:00-04:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2013-07-17:/2013/07/post-ciscolive-update/It has now been a couple of weeks since the wrap of CiscoLive, just a
short update. I am still working on developing my plans regarding how I
am going to be tackling regaining my expired certifications and the
training process around that. The Packet Pushers have published <a class="reference external" href="http://www.packetpushers.net/show-153-cisco-live-2013-roundtable-discussion-with-tech-field-day/">Show
153</a> which I had the privilege of participating in along with many
other prominent technologists from the Social Media and Blogging realms,
have a listen if you haven't already.<p>It has now been a couple of weeks since the wrap of CiscoLive, just a
short update. I am still working on developing my plans regarding how I
am going to be tackling regaining my expired certifications and the
training process around that. The Packet Pushers have published <a class="reference external" href="http://www.packetpushers.net/show-153-cisco-live-2013-roundtable-discussion-with-tech-field-day/">Show
153</a> which I had the privilege of participating in along with many
other prominent technologists from the Social Media and Blogging realms,
have a listen if you haven't already.</p>
<p>I have a few new blog posts in draft at the moment that I am hoping to
get out later this week. Also I am working on some updates to my site
and blog design and some backend application work to be able to better
integrate the two, that may take a bit longer to get out although I have
some of that work completed.</p>
Revitalizing Passions2013-06-28T03:18:00-04:002013-06-28T03:18:00-04:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2013-06-28:/2013/06/revitalizing-passions/So today marked the end of Cisco Live 2013. It was great to again be
in person for this event which provides so much for those in the
computer networking industry. I attended last year as well and had the
privilege to be able to meet and speak with many great people I interact
with on Twitter. I was also greatly privileged to participate in a
<a class="reference external" href="http://packetpushers.net/show-110-live-from-the-clus-2012-social-media-lounge/">Packet Pushers Podcast</a>. It was a great experience just as attending
Cisco Networkers was in 2004. This year was great again, with even more
invigorating conversations with many that I interact with on Twitter,
and even some new people that I was able to meet at the event for the
first time. I additionally was privileged to be able to record with the
Packet Pushers again this morning in conjunction with the crew from Tech
Field Day. This time it was a more intimate setting with fewer people
but the same basic flow as the last episode I was on.<p>So today marked the end of Cisco Live 2013. It was great to again be
in person for this event which provides so much for those in the
computer networking industry. I attended last year as well and had the
privilege to be able to meet and speak with many great people I interact
with on Twitter. I was also greatly privileged to participate in a
<a class="reference external" href="http://packetpushers.net/show-110-live-from-the-clus-2012-social-media-lounge/">Packet Pushers Podcast</a>. It was a great experience just as attending
Cisco Networkers was in 2004. This year was great again, with even more
invigorating conversations with many that I interact with on Twitter,
and even some new people that I was able to meet at the event for the
first time. I additionally was privileged to be able to record with the
Packet Pushers again this morning in conjunction with the crew from Tech
Field Day. This time it was a more intimate setting with fewer people
but the same basic flow as the last episode I was on.</p>
<p>At this point you are probably wondering why I titled my blog in the
way that I did. Well my last post was back in 2010. I haven't had the
ability to post additional content here as I intend, in fact I have
roughly 15 posts in draft state some of which are just a title. There
are numerous reasons for this although I won't get into that here as the
why is not necessarily germane to the intentions of this post. But what
is germane is what is going to be revitalized.</p>
<p>First of all will be this blog. I am going to be restructuring some
things so that this blog is where my technical and industry related
posts will land. I will be migrating the personal posts that I have
made to this site to a personal blog. I will attempt to post to this
particular blog at least once a month, with the goal of working up to at
least once a week over the next three to six months. As far as the
content on this site, it will hopefully be mostly technical in nature
although I do intend to speak about industry related topics which may
not be as technically in depth. It won't all be networking, as I am
heavily involved in Linux system administration and engineering as well,
and working on getting back into programming. I will also likely be
posting on study progress and many of the technical posts will likely
directly stem from my studies.</p>
<p>That brings me to the second thing that I will be working on, and that
is certification and more focused study. Most of my certifications have
lapsed due to varying circumstances around the times that they were
expiring. I will be working on rectifying that but haven't worked out
what the plan for that will be yet. I am working on determining what
that will be and I am hoping that one of the next two posts will be
regarding what the plan is going to be.</p>
<p>The final thing that I am going to be revitalizing, I kind of have
been for the past several months. Although I have never been heavily
passionate about this particular subject in general, I have always been
as it pertains to making my job easier. With the upcoming general
availability release of <a class="reference external" href="http://www.cisco.com/go/onepk/">Cisco's OnePK SDK</a> and the eventual release
of<a class="reference external" href="https://www.opennetworking.org/working-groups/configuration-management">Open Network Foundations Configuration Management Working Group</a> I
have a completely new enthusiasm for programming than I have in the
past. I have been doing some development at work with regard to some
automations pertaining to our disaster recovery plans, but with the
upcoming changes that will be provided by Cisco ONE APIs there are many
improvements that can be made operationally not only for our
organization but all network organizations that are willing to embrace
where the future is leading. I suspect that there will be numerous
posts regarding this coming in the near future.</p>
<p>That is it for now. Participating in the community of network engineers
on Twitter and spending time talking with these individuals in person
the past two years at Cisco Live has not only rekindled my desire to
work on these things outlined here but also now the impetus to move
forward and begin developing plans to actually make it happen. I will
be doing my best to remain loyal to the plan that I have at a high level
outlined here to make a greater contribution to the community which I
interact with and consume many great things from. As soon as the Packet
Pushers episode we recorded this morning is posted I'll link to it from
this site as well.</p>
Our Newest Arrival (A year later)2010-10-26T17:38:00-04:002010-10-26T17:38:00-04:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2010-10-26:/2010/10/our-newest-arrival-a-year-later/Our second child, Levi Alexander, made his grand entry into the world on
the morning of September 16th, 2009. His arrival was quite the
experience. This post is dedicated to the telling of Levi's birth story.
I apologize for this being a year later then I had originally planned.<p>Our second child, Levi Alexander, made his grand entry into the world on
the morning of September 16th, 2009. His arrival was quite the
experience. This post is dedicated to the telling of Levi's birth story.
I apologize for this being a year later then I had originally planned.</p>
<p>It was Tuesday the 15th of September and we were still about a month out
from the expected due date for our second son. We were pretty sure that
Levi was breach and Rachel had been visiting a chiropractor for a short
period of time to attempt to realign her pelvis so Levi could rectify
his position. Rachel had a last minute appointment at the Greenhouse
Birth Center to see if any progress had been made as well as to discuss
our options. Levi appeared to still be breach so they were going to
attempt to get Rachel in to have an ultrasound done to confirm once they
opened from lunch.</p>
<p>We left the birth center and were going to grab lunch before Rachel
brought me back to work. We got to the restaurant and shortly afterward
received a call stating that the only available appointment was about 30
minutes later. We left the restaurant and headed over to have the
ultrasound done. We confirmed that Levi was breach and the tech stated
that it appeared that Levi was butt first. Rachel brought me back to
work and I finished up my day there.</p>
<p>That evening after arriving home I did some quick research online
regarding breach delivery, the geek in me wanting to be prepared for any
eventuality. We then headed out and went to the store for some items we
needed. Rachel started to make mention of not feeling exactly right, but
didn't think that she was in labor. We had decided earlier that we were
going to go to dinner that evening as we weren't able to go to lunch
because of the ultrasound. During dinner Rachel was getting a bit more
uncomfortable but still didn't think that she was in labor yet. After
enjoying our dinner at Ukai we headed home and got Ayden ready for bed.</p>
<p>Once home Rachel was having difficulty getting comfortable in bed so
decided that she would spend some time in the tub. Around one in the
morning on the 16th, Rachel was still in the tub and was starting to
think that she was in labor. We contacted the midwives, and were
intending to meet them at the birth center. We also contacted our
neighbor and Rachel's parents so that someone could be with Ayden while
we were gone. I started packing things into the van and Rachel was
transitioning out of the tub. By ten to two we were no longer going to
make it to the birth center, Rachel was too far along to feel
comfortable moving.</p>
<p>I called the midwives back and spoke with them. While on the call,
between giving them directions, Rachel noticed that the amniotic sac
began to present, and I conveyed this to them. Near the end of the call
the amniotic sac burst, which I also conveyed to the midwives. I hung up
with the midwives so that they could focus on getting to the house, and
I could focus on helping Rachel.</p>
<p>On a side note, once the amniotic sac began to present and balloon out,
I had a feeling that we would be in for a footling breach delivery. In
the research I had completed prior to leaving the house for the evening
I came across a few articles of midwives delivering breach. A couple of
the articles discussed footling breach, in which the amniotic sac
presented first and ballooned instead of breaking and presenting a body
part. Had I not completed this research prior I may not have been as
prepared for what happened next, but we would have likely been able to
still deliver Levi fine.</p>
<p>At this point our neighbor had been here for some time to watch Ayden
until Rachel's dad arrived from nearly an hour away. Ayden had been up
for at least five or so minutes because of the commotion. At about 2:05
Rachel's dad arrived and hunkered in with Ayden. Over the next several
minutes Rachel was attempting to get into the most comfortable position
that she could find, that her body was telling her that she would need
to be in for the delivery. Around 2:13 Levi's left leg was out, as noted
before, this didn't entirely surprise me, but it did Rachel. We worked
to make sure his right leg was out, and Rachel was ready to keep moving.
I had to talk her down some to slow down progression just long enough
for me to get his cord from between his legs, which could have proved to
be a critical issue if not resolved. After freeing his cord, Levi was
completely out just a minute or so later, born at 2:15 AM Wednesday
September 16th, 2009. The midwives showed up five to ten minutes later
and took care of the business that they normally do, making sure mom and
baby were okay.</p>
<p>After things started to settle down, we took Levi to see our
pediatrician, as there were some symptoms which the midwives thought
that we should get checked out. He had some concerns over his blood
counts and we spent a good portion of that day in the hospital
attempting to get everything "regulated". We had a follow up appointment
the next day with the pediatrician. It was at this appointment that his
concern for the Down Syndrome was mentioned. We took Levi back to the
hospital for additional blood draws. It would be an additional week
before we received a confirmed diagnosis of Down Syndrome.</p>
<p>After the first few weeks everything seemed to go fine, except for some
minor lung issues which meant that we had to keep Levi on fairly regular
breathing treatments. Ayden slowly got used to his brother being there,
and truly enjoys him now, even though he can be a bit rough at times.
Things continued to go well until February.</p>
<p>February brought us to the hospital with Levi. They put Levi on oxygen
and an IV at that time. We were in the hospital for about a week with
Levi. For the period of time that he was in the hospital he was being
treated for RSV and pneumonia. During that time, Rachel never left the
hospital, and I only did for short periods of time. Thankfully we had
family and friends that were able to help out with and take care of
Ayden while we were in the hospital with Levi.</p>
<p>The rest of Levi's first year was fairly uneventful, although we enjoyed
it greatly. Now Levi is over thirteen months old and is starting to
really move around on his own. Sorry it took so long to get this posted
buddy.</p>
<div class="line-block">
<div class="line"><br /></div>
</div>
<div class="line-block">
<div class="line">Love,</div>
<div class="line">Daddy</div>
</div>
<div class="line-block">
<div class="line"><br /></div>
</div>
<p>P.S. To my loving wife Rachel, happy fourth anniversary!</p>
If More People Would Realize...2010-09-23T00:00:00-04:002010-09-23T00:00:00-04:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2010-09-23:/2010/09/if-more-people-would-realize/So I read this article when it was first published but didn't get a
chance to blog about, been really busy, just read it again to refresh my
memory. The article highlights <a class="reference external" href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137708/Opinion_The_unspoken_truth_about_managing_geeks">management of Geeks, err, IT Staff, nope
Geeks, definitely Geeks</a>. No matter how you look at it, nor how much
you don't believe yourself to be, there is a fairly high likelihood that
if you are in IT you are a Geek, and just because you are not in IT does
not mean that you are not a Geek.<p>So I read this article when it was first published but didn't get a
chance to blog about, been really busy, just read it again to refresh my
memory. The article highlights <a class="reference external" href="http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137708/Opinion_The_unspoken_truth_about_managing_geeks">management of Geeks, err, IT Staff, nope
Geeks, definitely Geeks</a>. No matter how you look at it, nor how much
you don't believe yourself to be, there is a fairly high likelihood that
if you are in IT you are a Geek, and just because you are not in IT does
not mean that you are not a Geek.</p>
<p>Managing a Geek can be complicated, because they don't see, nor do they
exactly interact with, the world in the same way that non-Geeks do. Also
there are many types of Geek, and while there are some broad
generalizations which can be made between the types there are some
subtle differences that can make a big difference in how to manage the
type. The article really highlights the management of one type of Geek,
the logical.</p>
<p>It is logical that the logical Geek would be attracted to IT. What other
job function in virtually any vertical market that you may possibly have
an interest in working in is guaranteed to be both logical and mentally
challenging? There are logical Geeks that do decide to take a path other
than IT, which is great because who else would make the toys that the
rest of us logical Geeks want to play with at work and at home? IT
benefits the logical Geek that is not satisfied with doing just one
thing, it gives them the ability to pursue their hobby to make a living,
and the opportunity to learn about any and all professions that they
desire.</p>
<p>All the points in the article apply to all ranges of logical Geek. Any
manager, or aspiring manager, over IT should definitely evaluate to
ensure that they keep these points in mind. And don't be afraid to
convey them up the chain so that everyone in the management path is
aware how to best manage their IT staff. The list is not exhaustive, but
should be used as your base. You may find that managing your team does
not require anything beyond this, but involve your staff to see if there
is anything which you are currently doing which is rubbing the team the
wrong way, or which the team believes to be a good idea to do. Your
management style needs to be adaptive, just as your team must with the
rapid pace of change in our industry.</p>
<p>Most managers in IT organizations also tend to be logical Geeks. This
means that the manager should also be a member of the team, actively
assisting with the workload. Not only does this help the manager gain
and retain respect from those whom he is managing, but it helps him to
lead by example which is truly the best way to manage logical Geeks.
Additionally this will assist the manager in staying up to date with the
technology currently in use as well as in the pipeline. When managing
logical Geeks you and your team will be better off if you are seen more
as a team lead instead of a manager by your staff.</p>
<p>What type of Geek are you?</p>
<div class="line-block">
<div class="line"><br /></div>
</div>
<div class="line-block">
<div class="line">------BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----</div>
</div>
<div class="line-block">
<div class="line">Version: 3.12</div>
</div>
<div class="line-block">
<div class="line">GIT/B d+@ s+: a- C++++$ UBLS++++$ P+> L+++ E--- W++ N+ o+ K-</div>
</div>
<div class="line-block">
<div class="line">w--- O-- M V-- PS+ PE Y+ PGP+++ t+ 5+ X+ R tv+ b+ DI+ !D G+</div>
</div>
<div class="line-block">
<div class="line">e h---- r+++ y+++</div>
</div>
<div class="line-block">
<div class="line">-------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------</div>
</div>
<div class="line-block">
<div class="line"><br /></div>
</div>
<div class="line-block">
<div class="line">To Decipher Code - <a class="reference external" href="http://www.ebb.org/ungeek/">http://www.ebb.org/ungeek/</a></div>
</div>
<div class="line-block">
<div class="line"><br /></div>
</div>
<p>To Learn About Code - <a class="reference external" href="http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html">http://www.geekcode.com/geek.html</a></p>
Long time between posts...again2010-09-23T00:00:00-04:002010-09-23T00:00:00-04:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2010-09-23:/2010/09/long-time-between-postsagain/Sorry to everyone, has been well over a year since I made my last post.
Having kids, and traveling for work as I did in my last job, makes it
difficult to keep up with writing something worthy of a blog post. So
what's happened?<p>Sorry to everyone, has been well over a year since I made my last post.
Having kids, and traveling for work as I did in my last job, makes it
difficult to keep up with writing something worthy of a blog post. So
what's happened?</p>
<p>In my personal life, our second son was born on September 16th 2009, at
home delivered by yours truly. His birth was quite a story, and one of
the many draft posts which I've started in the past year. He was
confirmed to have Downs Syndrome within a week of being born. He was
healthy through February, at which time he was hospitalized for around a
week with RSV. Everything seemed to go fairly well for us through the
end of August, when one of the window air conditioners caught on fire.
Everyone is alright, and nearly a month after the fire the house is
completely back to normal without any construction. Thankfully there
was not much in the way of fire damage, pretty much just smoke. I put
the fire out with an extinguisher pretty early. The carpet in the front
room and through the hall had to be replaced, which we put wood laminate
in. The same area got a new paint color, as did the bathroom and
kitchen, do to damage from the soot. That covers most of the remodels
we were planning to complete ourselves, which is really the only good
thing to come from it. Hopefully we'll have a less eventful upcoming
year.</p>
<p>Professionally much has changed as well. In August of last year,
Analysts International sold the VAR business unit to Netarx LLC. Moved
with the sale and enjoyed working there through the beginning of July
this year. I enjoyed doing what I was doing for Netarx, but left for
personal reasons and won't go into any detail as to why. Currently I'm
working for Consumers Energy, the largest electric and gas utility in
the state of Michigan. I am on a project assessing vendor technologies
for enabling the migration from the traditional grid to a Smart Grid
platform. Really enjoy the individuals I'm working with as well as the
technologies. What I am doing is not exactly as it was described or
outlined to me, but I am still really enjoying my job at the moment.</p>
<p>Well, that kinda wraps up this post, just wanted to provide a quick
update on things before posting anything else. Will try to get out a
couple of other posts within the next few days and try to get into a
fairly good rhythm.</p>
Random Updates2009-05-05T00:00:00-04:002009-05-05T00:00:00-04:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2009-05-05:/2009/05/random-updates/I've been busy and haven't had much time to update my blog until now. My
wife and I purchased a house and moved into it. I've searched for a new
job, done a lot of interviewing, and took a new job with a company that
found me, instead of me searching them out. And a number of other small
excursions which have taken up much of my time. This will hopefully be
the first post of many regular posts yet to come, so let me start by
catching everyone up.<p>I've been busy and haven't had much time to update my blog until now. My
wife and I purchased a house and moved into it. I've searched for a new
job, done a lot of interviewing, and took a new job with a company that
found me, instead of me searching them out. And a number of other small
excursions which have taken up much of my time. This will hopefully be
the first post of many regular posts yet to come, so let me start by
catching everyone up.</p>
<p>As you could probably ascertain from my previous posts Rachel and I have
bought a house in Lansing and are now living there instead of renting.
This is nice for us as our family grows as we will not have to worry
about attached neighbors either bothering us or us them. We've been
happily moved into the house since the beginning to middle of September
2008. We really enjoy the house as it does have a completely finished
basement. In further personal news Rachel and I found out in
January/February that we are expecting our second child. We found out at
the ultrasound that we should be expecting our second son any time
between the end of August to the beginning of October. We aren't 100%
sure of when the actual due date will be. We'll keep everyone updated as
things get closer and when he arrives.</p>
<p>You may notice that my blog is now under a new URL. This is due to the
fact that after leaving <a class="reference external" href="http://www.liquidweb.com/">Liquid Web</a> for my current job my hosting with
them is no longer free. I've relocated my site to a server running at my
house. As this is the case I've relocated the blog from being an
application within my website to a hosted blog on <a class="reference external" href="http://www.blogger.com/">Google's Blogger</a>
service. I've done this for a couple of reasons but primarily to ensure
that I'd have adequate uptime and bandwidth in the event of increased
readership. This will also allow me more time to post to the blog,
hopefully, as I won't have to maintain code for that section of my site.</p>
<p>The last of my updates for now has to do with my employment. Starting in
the last couple of years of employment with <a class="reference external" href="http://www.liquidweb.com/">Liquid Web</a>, especially in
the last 8 months that I was employed there, I began looking for and
applying for other jobs. Had a few interviews with potential employers
but the one that I ended up being offered and took was not one that I
applied for. No instead of applying for an opening a recruiter at
<a class="reference external" href="http://www.analysts.com/">Analysts International Corporation</a> contacted me about the middle of
December and setup an interview with the technical manager out of the
Lansing office. After the first interview I had a subsequent interview
with the director out of the Auburn Hills office. By the end of January
I had an offer which I accepted and began work for <a class="reference external" href="http://www.analysts.com/">Analysts
International Corporation</a> February 16th. So far I've enjoyed this job
tremendously and look forward to the further learning opportunities that
this job will provide to me.</p>
<p>That is it for now. Hopefully I'll be keeping the posts more up to date
as time goes and I'll work on getting some more technical oriented
postings up as well.</p>
My Loving Wife2008-10-24T00:00:00-04:002008-10-24T00:00:00-04:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2008-10-24:/2008/10/my-loving-wife/Today is the two year anniversary for my wife and myself. In the time
that we've been married we've enjoyed many things together. We've moved
together to 3 different locations after being wed, had a son and bought
a house. It has definitely been a great two years which we've spent
together thus far.<p>Today is the two year anniversary for my wife and myself. In the time
that we've been married we've enjoyed many things together. We've moved
together to 3 different locations after being wed, had a son and bought
a house. It has definitely been a great two years which we've spent
together thus far.</p>
<p>For as long as either my wife or I can remember we've known each other.
We grew up together in the same congregation and knew each others
families moderately well. Rachel is five years younger then myself but
does not act like it. We were wed on October 25th, 2006. For those of
you that pulled up a calendar you'll see that that was a Wednesday. We
were wed at the Calhoun County Court House by a magistrate. I won't go
into detail as to why that was outside of stating that there was some
adverse pressure being applied by some of our parents.</p>
<p>On our first anniversary Rachel was pregnant and we had just finished
moving from Albion to Lansing. Now on our second anniversary we've been
living in Lansing for just over a year, and have been in the house which
we purchased for just over a month. We were unable to go out for our
anniversary last year but this year we will be dining at <a class="reference external" href="http://www.claddaghirishpubs.com/">The Claddagh
Irish Pub in Lansing</a>. We will be dining alone thanks to some of our
friends offering to watch Ayden for us that evening.</p>
<p>What the future holds for my wife and I, we cannot state. I hope that it
is joyful and well spent. I hope that Rachel and I are able to enjoy
everything we want to together. There will be bad times that come but
together we will get through it.</p>
<p>To my beautiful loving wife, I love you.</p>
Django Live2008-09-30T00:00:00-04:002008-09-30T00:00:00-04:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2008-09-30:/2008/09/django-live/I've got my site moved over to using <a class="reference external" href="http://www.djangoproject.com/">Django</a> now. I haven't written my
application yet so the site isn't complete as of yet. As of right now
only the blog is truly dynamic, although everything is stored in the
database but not as dynamic as the blog pages. Right now the site is
powered by <a class="reference external" href="http://www.djangoproject.com/">Django</a> and a few of the pre-built applications included
with it as well as from <a class="reference external" href="http://code.google.com/">Google Code</a>.<p>I've got my site moved over to using <a class="reference external" href="http://www.djangoproject.com/">Django</a> now. I haven't written my
application yet so the site isn't complete as of yet. As of right now
only the blog is truly dynamic, although everything is stored in the
database but not as dynamic as the blog pages. Right now the site is
powered by <a class="reference external" href="http://www.djangoproject.com/">Django</a> and a few of the pre-built applications included
with it as well as from <a class="reference external" href="http://code.google.com/">Google Code</a>.</p>
<p>I am going to build my application around the components that are
already powering the site and include them in the views of my
application so that content from more then just the one application will
be included on the page and better utilize the space. What definitely
will be done is under the navigation to the left will be a section
listing out the most recent blog post titles, probably 5 or less, and
possibly a random image from the gallery once its up and working. I'm
also working on correcting an issue with the blog app that I'm running
into when comments are enabled, so once I get that corrected you'll be
able to comment to my blog posts and probably to the gallery.</p>
<p>I've not done much in the way of layout design therefore what you see
presently may not be the final representation of my site. What I've done
thus far is fairly good for my first attempt at designing a page layout.
The site layout is pure CSS without tables or javascript. The only
javascript present on the site is the <a class="reference external" href="http://adwords.google.com/">Google Ads</a> generator. My thanks
to both <a class="reference external" href="http://www.w3schools.com/">W3 Schools</a> and <a class="reference external" href="http://www.dynamicdrives.com/">Dynamic Drives</a> for their tutorials and
examples which helped me to build out this sites design. I'm still
working on completing the navigation bar, I'm planning on having it
cascade out for the submenus but I'm still working on getting everything
right so that it will be completed with CSS alone. This layout is fully
XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1 compliant and will validate as such.</p>
<p>This is the first blog post on my <a class="reference external" href="http://www.djangoproject.com/">Django</a> based site. I like the admin
section a lot better then that of <a class="reference external" href="http://drupal.org/">Drupal</a>. Look for future posts to
this site.</p>
AT&T Drops the Ball2008-09-22T00:00:00-04:002008-09-22T00:00:00-04:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2008-09-22:/2008/09/att-drops-the-ball/Rachel and I are in the process of finishing moving to our new house. In
this process we completed a move order online for our phone and Internet
service through <a class="reference external" href="http://www.att.com/">AT&T</a> whom we've been using for our local phone
service and DSL Internet access for some time now. When we placed the
order on the second of September we received notification that the
completion date for the phone service would be on the sixth and the
eighth for the DSL service. In my previous moves I've not run into any
issues with moving service, well not this time.<p>Rachel and I are in the process of finishing moving to our new house. In
this process we completed a move order online for our phone and Internet
service through <a class="reference external" href="http://www.att.com/">AT&T</a> whom we've been using for our local phone
service and DSL Internet access for some time now. When we placed the
order on the second of September we received notification that the
completion date for the phone service would be on the sixth and the
eighth for the DSL service. In my previous moves I've not run into any
issues with moving service, well not this time.</p>
<p>When we brought the phones over on the sixth and connected them we were
not receiving a dial tone. I didn't have time that day but over the next
couple of days checked this from multiple jacks in the house and from
the NID. I called <a class="reference external" href="http://www.att.com/">AT&T</a> and filed a trouble ticket on that issue. The
technician came out the next day and told Rachel that he had to do a few
things that normally aren't necessary to correct the issue. At this
point it was past the eighth and the DSL wouldn't sync up. I gave this a
couple of days and still nothing. I took the modem to the NID and tested
it there, same result. This is when the ball really starts getting
dropped by <a class="reference external" href="http://www.att.com/">AT&T</a>.</p>
<p>I called <a class="reference external" href="http://www.att.com/">AT&T</a> in the evening on the eleventh and got to the DSL
Internet support group. The first technician I spoke with was working
from a script and was pissing me off. He was asking for me to do things
that I know would not work, like restarting my computer, especially
since I was not getting sync from the NID. I had explicitly told him
this a number of times yet he kept asking me to do these unrelated tasks
and I continued to tell him to stop working from a script because the
issue wasn't local. I finally got fed up with dealing with this idiot,
who was just doing his job as he was explicitly told to do, and asked to
speak to someone that wasn't going to work from a script or a manager.
This is something that I have major issues with and will comment on
later. I ended up speaking with a manager and he said that he was going
to file the trouble ticket on the DSL service since I wasn't getting
sync at the NID. About 45 minutes to an hour later I received an
automated message stating that they found trouble on the line and were
going to dispatch to correct the issue.</p>
<p>In the afternoon on the twelfth I received another automated message
stating that they corrected the issue. I got home and checked the modem
and it still was not able to sync. I wasn't able to test at the NID
again due to the fact that that weekend as it was raining constantly. I
checked at the NID on Monday evening and there still was no sync. Now
the original confirmation stated that the order was going to be
completed by the eighth but it was now the fifteenth. So I called back
into the support and referenced the ticket that I had. I spoke with a
gentleman who stated that there was no order. No order? When I spoke
with the technicians the week prior they saw the order and acknowledged
that it was a move order. He transfered me over to provisioning and they
said that there was never a move order in the system. I knew this was
not the case because I could still see it from the account manager on
<a class="reference external" href="http://www.att.com/">AT&T's</a> site. I got transfered over to another department, this time a
warm transfer instead of a cold transfer so I wouldn't have to explain
everything again. They stated that there was a cancel order on the DSL
and that a move order for the service was never issued. They stated that
they couldn't place the order for service until that had cleared, which
it wasn't going to clear until later that night. I was given a months
credit at that time for the DSL service and then instructed to call back
the next day.</p>
<p>When I called the next day the first person that I got after explaining
everything was going to cold transfer me to another department. I
complained loudly and stated that I wanted a warm transfer, that I was
on hold over an hour and a half the previous day and didn't want to have
to explain myself again to someone else. They got me over to someone
that was able to take the order for me. This was the sixteenth and the
person was hoping to get an install date of the eighteenth. Well that
didn't happen, she got a date of the twenty-second. I used to work for a
CLEC and asked for an expedited order. She put me on hold and talked
with someone from the escalations department. She came back on the phone
said that she was going to connect me and that if they weren't able to
expedite that the install would still be prior to 2000 (8:00 PM EDT) on
the twenty-second. I spoke with the person from escalations and she said
that they were all sent an email from upper management stating
explicitly that they were under no circumstances to even ask about
expedited orders. I asked if this applied to CLECs as well and she said
she wasn't aware of the details.</p>
<p>Now there are a few things through this where AT&T could have done
better. There are also some things that should have never happened.</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li>When I stated that I tested at the NID and was not receiving sync the
technician should have immediately started a trouble ticket and not
bothered with trying to walk me through unrelated troubleshooting
steps. This is a result of not hiring qualified technicians and/or
not allowing technicians to work away from scripts. This not only
wastes the customers time but also that of <a class="reference external" href="http://www.att.com/">AT&T</a> due to having to
spend hours on pointless troubleshooting. This is something that I
massively hate to see having worked for a CLEC DSL provider and a web
host, but I won't dwell on this further in this article and will
leave it for a later post.</li>
<li>The order just disappeared from their view, although I could still
see it from my account access. How this is possible I have no clue,
obviously they have too many disconnected systems that not everything
gets updated. The order did update in my account access from having a
due date of the eighth to no specified due date at some point after
talking to technical support the first time.</li>
<li>I should have never been cold transfered and have to provide account
information, verify myself or to completely explain everything over
again. Only twice through this whole thing did I not have to do this,
being transfered about 6-10 times. <a class="reference external" href="http://www.att.com/">AT&T</a> needs to revise their
internal procedures to better serve their customers and to reduce
costs. If a customer has to speak to individuals in a different
department and must provide in detail the reason that they are
calling to each person they get transfered to, and not just the
first, then the company no longer cares about their customers. This
is detrimental to the long term viability of a company. Unfortunately
companies such as <a class="reference external" href="http://www.att.com/">AT&T</a> that more or less have customer loyalty due
being the only option in many markets will likely never change due to
the mentality of we know what the customer wants better then the
customer does. This is seen in other areas and companies as well but
I won't comment on them here.</li>
<li>At one point I was told that my DSL service was canceled and that
there was no transfer order. I was never notified prior to this
conversation on the fifteenth that my DSL service was canceled. Never
should a service that I'm paying for be canceled without first
notifying me, whether it be due to suspected contract violations or
inability to properly update your own systems. The customer should
always be notified and confirm that termination is going to occur
before it actually takes place.</li>
</ul>
<p>As of my posting this article the DSL service is up and I'm no longer
having issues with getting the modem to sync. I'm still not very happy
with <a class="reference external" href="http://www.att.com/">AT&T</a> and their handling of this situation, or rather lack
thereof. I will continue to utilize <a class="reference external" href="http://www.att.com/">AT&T's</a> DSL service for the
moment, but if anything like this occurs again I will be looking for a
new service provider unless they offer me free service for a couple of
years at least, which is unlikely to happen.</p>
Server Reloaded2008-09-16T00:00:00-04:002008-09-16T00:00:00-04:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2008-09-16:/2008/09/server-reloaded/If you noticed for a little over a week this site was offline. The
reason being that my colo would not boot into the kernel any longer,
even after much troubleshooting. This colo has been running <a class="reference external" href="http://www.gentoo.org/">Gentoo</a>
and <a class="reference external" href="http://www.xen.org/">Xen</a> since it was put online. Now I know what the technically
inclined out there are going to say, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.gentoo.org/">Gentoo</a> is not a server OS, and
I'd agree. So why was I running <a class="reference external" href="http://www.gentoo.org/">Gentoo</a> on a server then?<p>If you noticed for a little over a week this site was offline. The
reason being that my colo would not boot into the kernel any longer,
even after much troubleshooting. This colo has been running <a class="reference external" href="http://www.gentoo.org/">Gentoo</a>
and <a class="reference external" href="http://www.xen.org/">Xen</a> since it was put online. Now I know what the technically
inclined out there are going to say, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.gentoo.org/">Gentoo</a> is not a server OS, and
I'd agree. So why was I running <a class="reference external" href="http://www.gentoo.org/">Gentoo</a> on a server then?</p>
<p>Over the past several years I've used a number of different
distributions of <a class="reference external" href="http://www.kernel.org/">Linux</a>. I started out with <a class="reference external" href="http://www.mandriva.com/">Mandrake (now
Mandriva)</a>, and have worked with <a class="reference external" href="http://www.redhat.com/">Red Hat</a>, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a>, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.suse.com/">SuSe</a>, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/">Linux
from Scratch</a>, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.gentoo.org/">Gentoo</a> and <a class="reference external" href="http://www.centos.org/">CentOS</a>. I've also used a number of
commercial <a class="reference external" href="http://www.unix.org/">UNIX</a> operating systems and <a class="reference external" href="http://www.bsd.org/">BSD</a> variants. My varied
experiences, especially with binary distributions, have generally left
me wanting or requiring me to build the software I want to utilize
myself to get the functionality I was looking for. I had used the <a class="reference external" href="http://www.bsd.org/">BSD</a>
variants prior to trying <a class="reference external" href="http://www.gentoo.org/">Gentoo</a> and liked the ports system and its
flexibility. What really attracted me to <a class="reference external" href="http://www.gentoo.org/">Gentoo</a> was that it was build
from source like <a class="reference external" href="http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/">Linux from Scratch</a> and utilized portage, which is
similar to ports from the <a class="reference external" href="http://www.bsd.org/">BSD</a> variants, as a package manager. I've
used <a class="reference external" href="http://www.gentoo.org/">Gentoo</a> on my workstations and server since beginning work at
<a class="reference external" href="http://www.liquidweb.com/">Liquid Web</a> and have become very comfortable with it.</p>
<p>The primary reason that I put <a class="reference external" href="http://www.gentoo.org/">Gentoo</a> on this server initially was to
test out <a class="reference external" href="http://www.xen.org/">Xen</a> to see if it was something that I would want to utilize
moving forward. At the time <a class="reference external" href="http://www.xen.org/">Xen</a> was still a fledgling technology and
the best tutorials were for <a class="reference external" href="http://www.gentoo.org/">Gentoo</a> therefore that was the OS I chose
to get things online as well as test. Recently I began running into
issues with the server install and began looking at reloading the OS on
the server. I had been working on replacing the child instance with
<a class="reference external" href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> because over the past couple of years they've gotten better
and keeping up with more recent releases of software and their compile
options were nearly the same as those that I was looking for but not in
most other distributions. <a class="reference external" href="http://www.gentoo.org/">Gentoo</a> served its purpose and allowed me to
test out <a class="reference external" href="http://www.xen.org/">Xen</a> and become familiar with it. I decided to reload the
server using <a class="reference external" href="http://www.debian.org/">Debian</a> with <a class="reference external" href="http://www.xen.org/">Xen</a>. The install was fairly quick, after
getting the data backed up, and I had the server up and running in
little time.</p>
<p>I reallocated space compared to how it was initially. Instead of running
<a class="reference external" href="http://www.apache.org/">Apache</a> as the web server I'm now utilizing <a class="reference external" href="http://www.lighttpd.net/">LigHTTPD</a> as the web
server. The memory foot print is lower and it is faster. In the
reallocation I made sure that I designed things a little better, <a class="reference external" href="http://www.php.net/">PHP</a>
is now run as a <a class="reference external" href="http://www.fastcgi.com/">FastCGI</a> process on an instance separate from the web
server. I also have an instance setup specifically for running <a class="reference external" href="http://www.djangoproject.com/">Django</a>
as a <a class="reference external" href="http://www.fastcgi.com/">FastCGI</a> as well. Each instance is stripped down minimal installs
with just the software necessary and running as few processes as
possible.</p>
<p>Everything is back up and running at the moment and hopefully will be
more stable. Now that I've gotten things squared away with this server
itself and version 1.0 is released I can start working on my <a class="reference external" href="http://www.djangoproject.com/">Django</a>
application to replace <a class="reference external" href="http://www.drupal.org/">Drupal</a>.</p>
Overdue Updates2008-08-20T00:00:00-04:002008-08-20T00:00:00-04:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2008-08-20:/2008/08/overdue-updates/Haven't updated the site in some time, primarily due to the fact that
<a class="reference external" href="http://drupal.org/">Drupal</a> sucks and I haven't had time to fix it. I'm working on
rewriting the entire site utilizing <a class="reference external" href="http://www.djangoproject.com/">Django</a> primarily because I
understand and prefer <a class="reference external" href="http://www.python.org/">Python</a> over <a class="reference external" href="http://www.php.net/">PHP</a>, and the <a class="reference external" href="http://www.djangoproject.com/">Django</a> framework
is amongst the cleanest I've personally looked into. The transition to
<a class="reference external" href="http://www.djangoproject.com/">Django</a> will take some time for me to complete it so don't look for an
immediate change, and the gallery appears as if it is not going to
function right now so sorry for the lack of pictures. Now on to the
updates......<p>Haven't updated the site in some time, primarily due to the fact that
<a class="reference external" href="http://drupal.org/">Drupal</a> sucks and I haven't had time to fix it. I'm working on
rewriting the entire site utilizing <a class="reference external" href="http://www.djangoproject.com/">Django</a> primarily because I
understand and prefer <a class="reference external" href="http://www.python.org/">Python</a> over <a class="reference external" href="http://www.php.net/">PHP</a>, and the <a class="reference external" href="http://www.djangoproject.com/">Django</a> framework
is amongst the cleanest I've personally looked into. The transition to
<a class="reference external" href="http://www.djangoproject.com/">Django</a> will take some time for me to complete it so don't look for an
immediate change, and the gallery appears as if it is not going to
function right now so sorry for the lack of pictures. Now on to the
updates......</p>
<p>First and foremost Rachel and I had our first child on the 3rd of April.
Ayden is a healthy growing little boy. Nearing 5 months old now he is
starting to move around on his own now. He's been teething since just
before he was 3 months old. He is growing up so quick. I'll have more
updates regarding Ayden in the future.</p>
<p>Second on the big news update is that we are buying a house. We found a
nice 3 bedroom ranch in the southwest part of Lansing. The house was
built in the 1970's but has a virtually brand new exterior. The roof is
about 3 years old and the siding and windows are about 2 years. We are
scheduled to close on the 27th of August. We won't be moving into the
house right away as our lease at the town house isn't up until October
15th and we aren't done packing yet. There will likely be updates to
follow with regard to the house.</p>
<p>Thats it for major news. Work has been sucking it up lately. Upper
management decided it was best to move me back to general support from
working on the networking team which I established and built virtually
every networking service offered around, simply because I need to have a
fixed schedule and they arbitrarily wanted to change it to something
that wouldn't work for me. So needless to say I now hate my job as I'm
extremely over qualified for 99% of the issues I deal with in support
and am bored as I don't have anything challenging to work on. I'm
looking for a new job now, submitted my resume to a few companies and
hoping to hear back from them soon. Once we're into the house and
settled I am going to be working harder on obtaining the <a class="reference external" href="http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/le3/ccie/index.html">CCIE, Cisco
Certified Internetwork Expert,</a> specifically the routing and switching,
and saving up some money so that I can take the written and lab. I'm
also considering obtaining the recently announced <a class="reference external" href="http://www.cisco.com/web/learning/le3/ccde/index.html">CCDE, Cisco Certified
Design Expert.</a></p>
<p>Thats all I have in the way of updates at this time. I'm going to try to
keep the site more up-to-date from here on out, as long as <a class="reference external" href="http://drupal.org/">Drupal</a>
doesn't crap out again.</p>
Moving Again/Suprise2007-08-15T00:00:00-04:002007-08-15T00:00:00-04:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2007-08-15:/2007/08/moving-againsuprise/Well, we are going to be moving again. This time instead of again moving
within Albion we are moving closer to my work. We'll be moving to a town
house in BriarCliffe on Jolly, just east of Aurelius, in Lansing during
the beginning of October. Its a two bedroom one and a half bath two
story town home with a full half-finished basement. For the two of us
this will be adequate but in eight to nine months that may no longer be
the case. We just found out this past weekend that Rachel is pregnant.
The next several months will likely prove to be quite busy in light of
moving as well as having a baby on the way.<p>Well, we are going to be moving again. This time instead of again moving
within Albion we are moving closer to my work. We'll be moving to a town
house in BriarCliffe on Jolly, just east of Aurelius, in Lansing during
the beginning of October. Its a two bedroom one and a half bath two
story town home with a full half-finished basement. For the two of us
this will be adequate but in eight to nine months that may no longer be
the case. We just found out this past weekend that Rachel is pregnant.
The next several months will likely prove to be quite busy in light of
moving as well as having a baby on the way.</p>
Updates2007-07-31T00:00:00-04:002007-07-31T00:00:00-04:00Darrel Clutetag:www.darrelclute.net,2007-07-31:/2007/07/updates/I haven't been updating this site very often and a lot has changed.
Rachel and I moved out of the apartment that we were in originally when
we got married and have been living in a house since April. We've taken
a lot of pictures over the past several months as well, including from
our trip to Louisiana, and we'll get them posted soon as well. I am
starting to build out my portfolio on this site, it is no where near
complete so check back soon to view its updates.<p>I haven't been updating this site very often and a lot has changed.
Rachel and I moved out of the apartment that we were in originally when
we got married and have been living in a house since April. We've taken
a lot of pictures over the past several months as well, including from
our trip to Louisiana, and we'll get them posted soon as well. I am
starting to build out my portfolio on this site, it is no where near
complete so check back soon to view its updates.</p>