Nola City Bark Opening Day from Scott Harney on Vimeo.

On a more fun note, we’ve been spending the past year trying to learn to lindy hop.  Maybe someday we’ll get as good as this:

So we started planning to go in the off-season.  We watched for ticket deals on Kayak.com and kept our dates flexible.  We searched for hotels and found the Hotel des Grands Ecoles in the heart of the Latin Quarter.

Doing it this way made it far more reasonable. The flight didn’t cost any more than a flight to a lot of US destinations from New Orleans. After the exchange rate, the hotel didn’t cost us any more than a typical 8 night stay in a US hotel.

We hit Paris and really did get the most out of our week there. We walked the city from end to end. It was cold, of course, but we adjusted. We even got to see snow flurries on the Champs Elysees from the ferris wheel. We climbed all 704 steps to the second level of the Eiffel tower (and took the elevator ride on the final stretch to the top). We climbed the Notre Dame, too and hit the Louvre and the Musee d’Orsay, and explored the Catacombes.

And, of course, we ate. And we didn’t think twice about any of it. Foie Gras, cream, bread, desserts, whatever. In fact, we both managed to lose a couple of pounds.

One question we get asked a lot is if we were treated well. We were treated well and everyone was polite. Neither of us know French, but we learned a little bit — enough to be polite and greet people initially. The effort is appreciated. Because it’s the off-season, things weren’t so crowded and everyone was in a good mood. We were occasionally not recognized as tourists receiving French-only restaurant menus and being asked for directions more than once.

It’s definitely a trip we would recommend checking out. We took a TON of photos of course. I’ve labeled most of them with captions and all of them are geo-tagged so they can be viewed on a map. You can check out the entire set, starting here.

And my work has changed enormously over the years. If you would have talked to me 3 years ago, i would have probably described myself primarily as a Linux/UNIX systems engineer with a networking background. Prior to that, I was knee deep in ISP work — networking stuff like BGP routing, fiber optic SONET links, and particularly cable modem termination systems. Now I’m just about as deep in the SAN engineering world though my particular focus has been backups, recovery, archiving, and disaster recovery.

While I am really deep in these technical realms, I sometimes worry that the resume looks scattered to outside observers. “Does he really have that deep a hands-on familiarity with all that stuff?” umm. Yes. That said, I should probably develop multiple resumes that focus on different facets of what I do so if I ever have to apply for a storage engineering role, I have a resume focused in that direction. Or if I get called up to do some CMTS/WAN work, I can emphasize those bullets.

Despite all this seemingly dull backend infrastructure stuff (though it’s not really dull to me), I do get to do some more “fun” things. When I first got here I stood up an internal Wiki for all our internal documentation and it’s grown far, far beyond the amount of content that had been created here in the previous 10 years. And it’s kept way more up to date. I certainly do more writing on that Wiki than I do publically.

I also stood up a Jabber server for internal Instant Messaging with a coworker. Our team is spread between Little Rock and NOLA so it’s become an invaluable help in keeping everybody in constant communication and try and keep the geographically driven team split/rivalry from happening.

And lately I’ve been able to play around a lot with Virtualization, both Xen and VMWare. I’d stood up some stuff in the lab to help a lot of our Solaris-oriented folks familar with Linux as well as start looking closer at Xen and VMWare. I don’t really get to fool with our ESX clusters since that’s currently all Windows (that’s likely to change). Now I’m looking at ESXi and how that might plug in to our Linux/Solaris X86/X86_64 mix.

Oh, and I get to play with robots. Yeah, they’re tape drive robots, but watching those handbots fly around inside a gigantic tape libary is kinda entertaining.

So I had been guitar-less since the big K. And while I didn’t play much it really was an enjoyable way to relax and I definitely missed it. So when two of my friends hinted they were going to get me a guitar I was ecstatic. My friend Mike Raeder had
a few of his gutars damaged by flooding. Our other friend, Mike Fowler, does guitar repair and setup work. So I figured they were probably just going to sand down a guitar, clean it up, and go with that.

Fowler went a lot further though. He hand-crafted an electric guitar bodyinto a Gibson-SG style shape. he routed it all out by hand and assembledthe entire thing himself using only one of the old necks from Mike Raeder’s collection. It is his very first, from-scratch guitar build. I was shockedbecause I knew the amount of effort and labor that went into it. And it’s wonderfully playable too. It sounds fantastic and looks great. As soon as I can get a link from Fowler, I’ll put it up because he does great work and deserves the business in the future.

Lots of people only think of Bourbon Street and baring body parts for beads. Sure that’s going on but really the entire city — the entire southern half of the state — celebrates in a myriad of ways. There are the lavish parades, not just in New Orleans, but also in the ‘burbs. There’s the music, the impromptu parties, the private marching krewes. There’s even a parade for dogs. I put up my annual onslaught of pictures here. It’s perhaps the central cultural event of New Orleans and a great reminder of how different this place is from anywhere else.

p.s. Now that it’s over, I’ve taken the time to launch NOLUG with the new site.