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This fall I did my first stint as an ultimate league coordinator, running a weekday evening league here in Longmont. It was awesome. We played under the lights every Tuesday through September and October. The weather was beautiful every week, which was unusual for this time of year but made for a good time.

I was also a team captain (as usual) and joined forces with my favorite co-captain ever, the indomitable Brenda (also as usual). We had won the summer league and picked another strong team at the draft. Brenda’s favorite color is orange, and just like in summer we chose that as our team color. When discussing names, the consensus was the Cuties. So, yep, I was a Cutie this fall.

We ended up 8-3-1 for the season, which was enough to land us in second place. Tonight were the last games of the two-week tournament. We were bumped out of the semi-finals but enjoyed a fun game against another team, then went to watch the latter part of the final game. It was a close, hard-fought game and definitely worth the price of admission.

This evening we took a couple of team photos:

What a great group. We had a lot of fun together.

There’s one more week in the season: next Tuesday we’re having a Halloween hat, which means I’ll shuffle all of the players in the league and we’ll all play some ultimate in costume. That should be fun to see.

Wow, the beautiful fall weather continues. It’s been in the 60’s and 70’s throughout October, which is pretty unusual… but amazing. Today I enjoyed another great game of lunchtime ultimate, basking in the sun and running barefoot on the warm grass. Tonight we have a league tournament and it’ll be fun whether we win or lose (hopefully win!).

I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop and a blizzard to slam into us, but so far it’s been awesome. Global warming isn’t all bad.

After two and a half years, Laralee finally had her braces removed. It was a happy day for her.

Of course there’s still some work to be done. She has titanium posts implanted in her jaw right now, and in a few months she’ll get permanent teeth attached to them. Total time: roughly three years. But it’ll be worth it… we hope.

My new duvet cover arrived, and it looks awesome on the bed!

Laralee isn’t all that excited, but for a guy who loves astrophysics, it’s perfect.

Here’s Thom at Beau Jo’s, posing in front of a big greasy pile of grease. Mmm!

Always a good motto.

I’m working on my Halloween costume, and stumbled across this awesomeness:

This afternoon La, Alex, and I headed down to Colorado School of Mines in Golden. This is the first of a few campus tours we’ll be doing in the next few weeks, as Alex begins the process of choosing and applying to colleges. Wow, time sure flies.

It was a beautiful October day, and we had a 45-minute tour of campus with a student. She’s a sophomore majoring in geological engineering, and she was very nice and answered a lot of random questions we threw at her. I asked about campus life, living in the residence halls, scholarships, why she chose Mines, etc. Afterward we listened to a 30-minute presentation from one of the people in the Admissions office, and she answered a few questions from the group. Finally we went to the Financial Aid office to understand how to apply for scholarships, recommendations for the best things to do, and so on.

I really enjoyed it. Alex seemed moderately interested. For me, it totally took me back to my days at UMR in Rolla. The campus is pretty small– a ten-minute walk gets you across it– and their student body is about 5,000 strong. It’s almost entirely an engineering school, with a couple of majors like applied mathematics and physics to round out the curriculum. UMR was a true university in that it offered majors in, say, history and English, but very few people went to UMR for that reason. Mines had a very similar feel, so it was pretty cool to me.

Laralee contrasted it with her experience at BYU, where 35,000 students attend, you need a bike or car to get anywhere, and their Division I sports teams are really good (UMR games were free to students and seldom had a big crowd, because no one goes to places like UMR or Mines to play football).

I’m hoping today’s experience gets Alex excited about college, and he starts digging into scholarships and applications and all that. It’s sort of scary to contemplate, but I think it’ll be a load of fun for him. The journey begins.

We’ve had kids for almost eighteen years, and none of them have ever broken a bone… until today. Zack took the prize.

In gym class today, the kids were playing soccer and Zack was the goalie. Apparently at the end of the game there was a penalty shot, and one of the guys on the other team kicked a real bullet at Zack. He deflected it with his arm (and saved the goal) but immediately felt a sharp pain. Laralee picked him up from school and he spent some time on the couch while we thought about whether to take him over to an urgent care center. (It wasn’t worth an emergency room visit, since it was hardly life-threatening.)

After a while, and the advice of a neighbor who’s a nurse, we felt it would be best to get it checked. Laralee took him in and sure enough, the x-rays showed a slight fracture in his radius, just above his wrist. The doctor wrapped it in a thick bandage because they can’t put on a cast until the swelling goes down. I guess that’ll be a few days from now.

Now, a little after midnight, the poor kid is having trouble sleeping because his arm is throbbing. He popped some ibuprofin and hopefully it’ll kick in soon so he can get some rest. I’m sure it’ll feel a lot better in the morning, and he can show off his injury to his friends.

Last night was the final server move for my company BitRelay. I’ve been running 100+ servers at a co-location facility managed by Sungard, but after ten years there I decided to move to a smaller facility owned by ViaWest. They were able to give me a substantial break on pricing, which means BitRelay’s co-location costs are going to be about $25,000 less per year. Nice.

I’ve learned that moving servers– especially those that have been in place for ten years and built up gradually over those years– is a huge endeavor. At times it felt sort of like moving from one house to another, where you have to plan where everything will go in the new place, find out something isn’t going to fit like you thought, and of course do all sorts of heavy lifting (servers are bulky) in the process. Oh, and all of it has to be coordinated with several hundred clients who don’t want their web sites to go down during the process.

My clients, as well as my team at Zing, have been very patient as I’ve worked through all of this over the past few months. I gave up many Friday nights in August and September, mostly because those were the nights when it was easiest to stay up until one or two in the morning moving servers between datacenters. Last night was the final one. I started at 5:30 in the evening and thought I might be there until midnight, but it turned out to be nine hours so I wasn’t home until after 2:30 in the morning. But hey, it’s done.

It’s sort of sad to leave Sungard, because in general they’re a really good company, but I couldn’t ignore the cost savings. Hopefully I won’t have to move out of ViaWest any time soon!

One of the funniest moments was when I was shutting down an old Windows 2000 server that I’d been managing for a client. The server was used infrequently, so I didn’t do much to upgrade it. In fact, for the last few years, I don’t know if it was used at all but I kept it running just in case. When I shut it down, out of curiosity I checked the logs to see how long it had been running.

Hmm, that’s a little over eight years, running non-stop 24/7 without a single reboot. I think that’s the record for my longest uptime, although I’m a little disappointed it’s a Windows server instead of a Linux one. Oh, the irony. Maybe Windows 2000 is a champ.

I also took a shot of all of the servers after they’d been installed in their racks. It’s tricky to get a good angle in the walkways between racks, but I think it gives a good idea of what 100+ servers looks like.

So, with all of this behind me, I guess I can take a nap to catch up on all of those long nights…