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

Wow, what a beautiful day here in the Washington, DC, area!  It is 70 degrees and beautiful blue sky with a nice 10-15 mph breeze.  It is one of those rare days that you only get a few days a year.  In fact, Karen asked where we could move where the weather is like this all year round.  I reminded her that this is pretty much what it was like in Redondo Beach, CA.  She quickly said that she didn’t want to go back there!  I loved it there, but there were too many people and it was too far from family. 

It has been a while since I have posted an update here.  I have been pre-occupied with work, family and (of course) hockey.  Since my last post, I have also been struggling with migraines.  I went and had an MRI which came back fine…I actually ended up doing an open MRI because I could not handle be stuffed into the “tube”.  I didn’t realize how claustrophobic I was until they tried to stick me in that thing!  At my last neurologist appointment, they put me on a new medicine that I have to take daily in hopes of preventing the migraines.  Within a week of starting the medicine I had another migraine, so I guess I need to be patient.  The new medicine is supposed to help over time, and it is similar to medicine that Karen was put on.  It has generally worked well for her, so I am hoping for a breakthrough soon!

As far as hockey, I won’t bore anyone with it here…..if you are interested, you can check out my Penguins blog.  Suffice it to say that the Pittsburgh Penguins are doing very well and are making a deep drive into the Stanley Cup Playoffs.  They may end up in the finals with Mr Papa’s Detroit Red Wings.  If that happens, I will be sure to start talking some more smack.

Karen has tendered her resignation with the elementary school, and Friday was supposed to be her last day.  Somehow, she is going to be continuing to work this week.  I guess her class is moving into a trailer to make way for some pending construction, so she decided to stay a few extra days and help out.  She is also considering a potential teaching assistant position for next year.  If she is happy doing it, I will be happy for her.  If not, I will be the first to tell her to quit. 

Ben and Delaney are doing very well.  Ben was accepted into a math and science program for next year.  This means that he will be going to a different school than his contemporaries.  The school has a focus on math and science and we had to go through an application process.  Only a couple of kids from Ben’s current school were selected to attend, so we are very happy for him.  Delaney was also recommended by her teacher for the gifted program in her school.  We have completed the applications and are awaiting the results.  I expect she will have no problems getting accepted as she is very sharp.  Ben was in the same program and he really enjoyed it. 

Well, time to go watch the Penguins beat the Rangers.  Game 5 starts now!

Tags: Family Update, Hockey