Sigil.org Blogging about technology, beer, and whatever the hell I want

New year, new problems, new toys

I was recently in Dallas to assist in an IT weekend. My company is in the process of making ourselves as agile as possible. This process involves liquidating everything possible - including the office. We're getting rid of our primary data center (and moving our customers to their own hosting) and making our secondary data center our only - and utilizing it for corporate IT.

This past weekend, we trekked to the data center and proceeded to give our rack a cleaning it so desperately needed. Now, everything is organized quite nicely. Part of this restructure was to be the movement of personal servers to virtual machines. I had started building my VM, but we were not planning on migrating just yet. When I hooked my server back in, it did not boot. I also did not have a CT/2 cable with me, so I took the server out. I got the VM (and my server) up and running the next day. Lesson learned: NEVER buy a server with a proprietary KVM cable.

Tuesday night, I decided to reboot my desktop to remove the region lock on my DVD drive. Some friends of mine had a British DVD they could not view, so I wanted to get at it. My desktop decided it did not want to power back on. I had seen this issue a few times before, but it has passed quickly in the past. This time I was not so fortunate.

Wednesday morning, my machine is still not booting. I do a bit more research on the issue and discover a Supermicro FAQ describing this issue. Supermicro's response? They only support Supermicro power supplies powering their motherboards. Wonderful. I had been talking about an upgrade anyway, so I have fresh parts from Newegg arriving tomorrow...

Today I read a post on Joel on Software regarding goals. I've felt the need for setting some goals recently. Moving to a home office has been great, but I have felt like I am wasting a lot of time. I've really been missing goals. I, therefore, plan on setting some goals for myself for the year and beyond. I've scribbled down a few things which have come to mind, but I want to put a decent amount of effort into it.

I look forward to building my new box tomorrow - unboxing photos should be up this weekend - and orienting myself toward a better me this year. Stick around; it should be fun.