Category: Personal

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For our anniversary this year we spent the day down at the Hotel Del Coronado.  If you have never been there I highly recommend it.  We have never stayed there but we have visited many times.  The restaurants are incredible and the beach is amazing.

This time we had my daughter and mother with us, so it was not exactly romantic lol, but we had a wonderful time.  We tried something new for both of us and at the spur of the moment took a painting class on the beach.

Photos

Well this past week was full of ups and downs.  We had decided to finally buy a new car for me.  The last several months I had been driving a 2003 Honda civic which had been my mother in law’s and then Bri’s.  I drive over a hour one way every day to work so it was getting pretty annoying.

After doing some shopping I had decided on a 2016 Accord which has been redone for this year and is beautiful.  Plus it has all the tech I wanted including Android Auto.

The buying was fairly easy.  I decided to try emailing several dealerships to get their best offer.  In some ways it worked, I mean we got the lowest price but they still tried some of the same tactics.

In the end I got exactly what I wanted and could not be happier.

Jenn and I just went on a awesome trip to Las Vegas which had some firsts for me. We did the regular stuff of course, although neither of us gamble, we went to a couple of shows and had some great food.  We stayed at the Aria Hotel.

We went to see Penn and Teller over at the Rio which was good, but I suggest that if you go you sit closer to the front. Our seat were in the balcony which proved to be just a little to far away to really see all of the tricks. They were quite funny and it was a good show.

We also went to see Zarkana which is the cirque du soleil show at the Aria. that was also really cool. They do some amazing stuff.

The real high points however was the Spa at Aria and the steakhouse Jean Georges also at Aria. We decided that Friday would be our Spa and fancy dinner day (although all of our meals we fantastic). I also decided to get a barber shave which was a first for me.  I started shaving with a safety razor last year and love it, but have wanted to try a barber shave for quite a while.

The day started at the spa with our massages. The spa was awesome, probably the best that I have been to in Vegas. The men’s locker room is really nice and has plenty of space to roam around. There are also a few co-ed areas that include a salt room and a heated stone beds (I almost fell asleep), and a common sitting area.

My shave was scheduled after the massage so after resting in the Spa I went down to the Salon. I was not sure what to expect but the experience was really neat, even though my face was pretty sore the next day. I suggest that evey one give it a try.

The last adventure on Friday turned out to be dinner. Originally I had decided to take us to STK at the Cosmopolitan. It was highly rated on Yelp and looked like a great place. Well, as it turned out, we did not eat there. Now I am sure that the food is great, and service is awesome, but the ambiance was not what we were looking for. STK was more like a club that served food as opposed to an actual steakhouse.

We decided to leave and we went to Jean Georges restaurant back at the Aria, and it was incredible.  The service was great and the food was amazing.

Well that is all for now.  I am planning to start posting some of the projects that I am doing at home but have not really started any of them yet.

Ok…  So I gave up on the build your own server rack idea and decided to purchase one off of Craigslist.  I acutally found a really great one and a great price.  It is just a basic 16U rack but it is big enough for my future plans but not so big it take up the whole room.  I had to clean it up and give it a fresh coat of paint but it looks great and keeps everything in one place which is exactly what I was looking for.

Next up is building a Freenas box.  I will post the details later when I start building it.

So I am finally living my dream and building all of my server stuff into a rack. Last night I moved the server into a new rack mount 4u case and it is pretty awesome. A lot quieter then my previous case and so far is keeping things a lot cooler.

The next step is to build the rack. I found a cool link on instructibles to build a rack out of an Ikea end table that looks very cool. Once I get the parts i will post some pictures of the build and the final product.

I thought I would finally post something here about what I have done with the amazing little device the Raspberry PI.  If anyone is unfamiliar with this cool little device, it is a credit card sized computer that runs off a SD card.  I have 9 of them now.  7 are running Raspbmc (http://www.raspbmc.com/) which is a custom OS built off of XBMC (http://xbmc.org/).  XBMC is a great little piece of software for media centers.

There is no end to the projects that you can do with these things.  Some of my future ones involve a custom video phone out of an old pay phone.  A front door camera with a small LCD panel and side cameras.  As I get into those projects I will post some pictures and how I did it.

You can order your own Raspberry PI from here http://www.element14.com/community/community/raspberry-pi?ICID=hp-raspberrypi-topgroups

Have fun!

So it has been a long while since I posted anything.  I do promises to get better at it lol. 

My mom is visiting right now which is really nice.  We are watching Sherlock which is an awesome show.  One of the best out there.  I wish they would make more then 3 in a season.  Any way.  We are having a nice time and I am starting a week long vacation so that is great.