Tobin Family Website

Happy belated 4th of July! I hope everyone had fun! Earlier in the week, we had company as our neighbors from Florida stopped in on their way back from Michigan and Philadelphia. They came on Wednesday afternoon and left on Friday afternoon so that they could get back and get some rest before the work week starts. I took Wednesday off after working most of the night Tuesday at one of our sites in the DC area that we were upgrading. I was ready to leave at midnight, but got stuck there until 3:30AM as an intruder had gotten onto the compound and they locked us all in until the guards cleared the area! On Wednesday, I was anticipating a trip to Palmyra that never materialized. Instead, we met up with our friends and got caught up a bit.

On Friday night, we drove about a mile and a half to a local hillside where we could see the fireworks. It was all going well until the rain started to fall. Fortunately, we brought umbrellas. The show was quite nice, but became obstructed by the heavy smoke that hung in the air because of the rain. We ultimately came back to the house and when the rain subsided shot off $80 of fireworks in the driveway. Not as impressive as the city’s show, but the kids enjoyed it nonetheless!

While I was at the site on Tuesday night, I was talking to one of the site administrators about the benefits of RAID storage (RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Drives, and it is a storage mechanism where multiple hard drives are connected together to make one large storage area). Our large systems are made up of a LOT of hard drives latched together in RAID arrays. One of the benefits of a RAID array (depending upon how you configure it), is that it provides redundancy such that if one of the drives fails, you don’t lose any data (because it is replicated across multiple drives). You simply remove and replace the broken drive without losing any data, and therefore have greater data reliability. It can also offer improved performance by working around performance-limiting issues that plague individual hard drives (i.e., the mechanical limits of read/write speeds). It does this by striping data across multiple drives, enabling parallel read/write across multiple drives simultaneously.

Knowing that my high-end home PC supports RAID, and that hard drives have come way down in price, I decided to take the plunge this weekend and upgrade my PC to a RAID configuration. It is not as simple of a task as you might imagine, as you have to reformat the drives and reinstall all of your software. Couple this with the fact that I am running an upgrade version of Windows Vista, and you have a lengthy upgrade.

First I went out and bought 4-500GB SATA drives. Then before starting the upgrade, I moved all of the critical data on my existing hard drives to a netwrk storage device that I have. I then replaced the hardware, removing my two 250GB hard drives, and installing my four 500GB drives. Then I had to re-image the first of the 4 drives to Windows XP (using the system recovery disk that came with the PC). Once that was complete, I initiated the RAID configuration (which is currently 97% complete after 4.5 hours)! Next, I will make sure everything is running good in XP on the RAID, and then I will initiate the Vista upgrade. Assuming that goes well, I will install the 23 key applications that I want back on the PC.

Needless to say, this is an exercise in geekiness, but I love doing it. I am strange that way! When all is said and done, I think I will be happy with the new configuration. I chose to install a RAID 10 configuration, which combines both data striping and disk mirroring capabilities to optimize both reliability and performance (at the expense of disk space). RAID 10 uses a lot of overhead to get the best of performance and reliability. As a result, I will have ~1TB of actual storage from 2TB of disk space. Had I chosen RAID 5, I would have gotten almost 1.5TB of storage, but with less performance. Oh well…I assume that Mr Papa will be the only one who will appreciate this discussion, so I will end it here!

In other news, my brother Andy announced that he will be getting married at the beginning of August, so we will plan a quick trip up to Vermont to celebrate that event with him. It will be the first time that all of the boys will be back in Vermont since my parents 50th wedding anniversary in Feb 07.

Other than that, everyone here is having fun enjoying summer vacation. The kids are getting tall, and they are both so smart…..too smart sometimes! Our friends who were here for a few days have a one-year old, and after they left Ben and Delaney were mentioning that they would like a little brother or sister. I reminded Ben that I have “been fixed” and can’t have any more kids. He promptly asked if it was too late for Viagra…I am thinking about sending that one in to Reader’s Digest!

Tags: Family Update, Technology

I hope everyone had a nice Memorial Day weekend last week.  In the DC area, we had absolutely beautiful weather!  We spent quite a bit of time outdoors enjoying it.  Unfortunately, on Sunday and Monday Ben was ill with a fever.  We were concerned it might be strep based on his history, but he was better by Monday night.  As it turned out, I was next in line to get it and ended up staying home Tuesday and Wednesday with a fever and a stomach virus.  Thursday night it was Karen’s turn, although hers only lasted about a day.  Delaney seems to be the only one who avoided it altogether.

Despite the Monday holiday and being ill on Tuesday and Wednesday, I still managed to get 26-hours in at work on Thursday and Friday.  After working all day at the office on Thursday, I came home and changed clothes and then traveled to one of our operational sites in the DC area to oversee a software upgrade.  The upgrade was supposed to complete by 2AM, but ran into some database problems and didn’t finish until 6AM.  I then had to hang around to brief out the results of the upgrade to various offices that were reporting back to work on Friday morning.  After the briefings were over, I traveled back to my office for a meeting at 11AM and to finish up some other work that I needed to get done.  I finally got back to the house at 2PM on Friday afternoon and laid down for a much needed power nap!   

Last weekend, we went and saw the movie Pince Caspian, the latest movie in C.S. Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia series.  It was a very good movie, although not quite as good as the first in my opinion.  I had read the series a long time ago as a kid, and had always liked Prince Caspian, although I had forgotten the storyline.  As before, the movie was visually rich with some amazing graphics.  All in all, the family really enjoyed it.  We would also like to go see the new Indiana Jones movie.  Perhaps we will get that in during the next month.

Tomorrow, Karen and I will celebrate our 18th wedding anniversary.  It is amazing how time flies!  We have been together now for 20-years, which is almost half of our lives!  It has been quite a journey so far and we are looking forward to the next 20 years.  We have covered a lot of ground in those years, starting out dating while I was at school in Vermont and Karen was at school in Virginia.  After we married, we spent almost 5-years in Dayton, Ohio, before moving to Los Angeles and living in Redondo Beach and San Pedro.  During the 3-years we were living in California, Ben was born.  Then we moved back to the east coast and lived in Satellite Beach, Florida, for 3-years where Delaney was born.  Then it was north to Springfield, Virginia, for 3-years while I worked at the Pentagon.  After going through the surreal events of 9/11, we moved back to Florida.  This time we found ourselves in Fort Walton Beach up in the Panhandle along the gulf coast.  After 3-more years of soaking up the sun and perspiring in the heat and humidity, it was back to northern Virginia and the greater DC area.  Now we are trying to decide where to go next and what to do as I plan to retire from the Air Force next year.  We are looking forward to settling in a little longer than 3-years at one location, although it has kept things fresh and exciting.  We don’t have any grand plans on what to do on our anniversary, but we will be happy to just be together as a family!

Speaking of how time flies, Ben and Delaney both returned home with their latest school photos yesterday.  It is hard to believe that Delaney will soon be 9 years old and Ben is approaching 12!  They are both such good kids (most of the time), and they have really enriched our lives.  We are enjoying our time with them now, as we know that time is a fleeting thing and it won’t be too long before they head off to college! 

In the hockey world, I am looking forward to Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals tonight on NBC as the Penguins will be looking to even up the series 2-2.  I am hoping they can do so and send the series back to Detroit tied at 2-games a piece.  If they lose tonight, it will put them in a very precarious position going back to Detroit losing 3-1 in a best of 7 series!  For full coverage, you can check out my hockey blog at http://nhlpens.com.

Tags: Hockey, Photos, Tobin Family Update