Some of you may or may not know but for the better part of my late teens and early adult years I was a big minitruck enthusiast. I still am of course but with kids it gets put on the back burner. The best example of this is the truck I spent quite a few years working on. It was my first vehicle and I put a lot of time and money into it, up until a few years ago when I stopped driving it for the most part and eventually it just didn’t run anymore. Not really positive what was wrong with it but I know it needed more time and money than I could provide so the time came to sell it.
I put it up on www.wtvyhometownclassifieds.com (no they aren’t paying me) and within 5 days it was sold and picked up. I really didn’t expect it to go so quickly (and was a little sad I must admit) but was happy with the results I got from the site. So its gone now and I hope to start a new project and get back into mini-trucking come the new year. Wish me luck!

Here is a little thing I made in Photoshop.

Through mistakes and failure comes the ultimate achievement.

Make Mistakes!

Check out the newest cover of Wiregrass Parenting Magazine.

Thats Gianna our Middle one

Were so excited! They had a contest for the cover of a local magazine and Gianna Won! Dont worry this doesnt mean were going to start putting her in beauty contests those are just horrible for little girls in my opinion. I dont think Gianna really understands but Isabella is a little jealouse that she isnt on there with her. Shes not too upset though.

I just wanted to bring to light a major concern of mine that most people probably arent very aware of.

Before the 1960′s most of the worlds coffee was grown in fields shaded by rain forests in an area known as the undergrowth.  But in the 1960′s scientists began developing coffee that could grow in more sunlight and therefore produce more beans per acre. Sounds great right? Well its a great thing for the growers but that’s where it stops.

Today over 40 percent of the shaded coffee fields in Mexico and Central America have been converted to sun filled fields created by clear cutting and burning rain forests. Not only does this destroy the natural habitat of all the animals living in these areas but it contributes to 20 percent of the greenhouse gases put into the atmosphere every year. So in the future to prevent this from continuing you should only buy shade grown coffee. By voting with your pocket books the growers will listen and change there methods.

Me the wife and kids all went out to the annual spring fling car show held by the  Vital Signs car club in Panama City fl. This is the 5th year me and my wife have been and the 6th year I have gone. I’ve seen it go from a medium size show with  under a hundred cars to this year having several  hundred. Many of the cars and trucks that go to this show are top show quality vehicles, some from all over the country. I saw one truck that was in minitrucking magazine just this past month , and I’m sure there were quite a few other vehicles that have made it into magazines.

This years turnout was great and had all sorts of vehicles from old skool street rods to minitrucks and tuners and everything in between. I took some good pics and have put some of my favorites from spring fling 2009 in a slideshow. click here to check it out.

Well it happened again. Our mysql/sql server lost 2 more hard drives Monday night. It is running a raid 5 array and one hard drive goes down no problem you just replace it and it rebuilds, but you lose to and you lose pretty much everything. The odds of losing 2 drives at the same time is so unlikely that its considered a reliable set-up.

The thing is this is the second time in 4 months that we lost 2 hard drives simultaneously in this server. It runs 4 total and in November 08 we lost two at the same time. We replaced them but left the other two in place. Of course on Monday those 2 failed. Luckily this time we had backups and the site were only down for a few hours. The biggest lesson learned? If you have multiple hard drive fail in a machine simultaneously go ahead and replace any that didn’t fail just in case.

Wow did anyone hear about that asteroid that almost hit the earth? Pretty crazy only 48,000 miles away. That may sound far but in the cosmic scheme of things its missing by a hair. Consider that it is only twice the distance of some communications satellites and you can get a perspective on it. Another measure that has been thrown out there is it only 1/5th the distance to the moon. The worst part about the whole thing is that no one spotted it until Saturday and it came by on Monday. I for one thought there were measures in place to spot these things. Just imagine if it had come closer and taken out some com sats. It could of been devastating to our communications.

Its 2:30 on sunday the 1st of March, and its snowing here in Hartford AL. I havent seen snow in over 10 years. Its not sticking to the ground as of yet but if its keeps it up who knows.  Snow! Snow! Snow!

Well its a historic day that’s for sure. I’ll be watching it on cnn.com, not quite as good as on television but close enough for me. I’m one that is an Obama supporter so its a happy day. I just hope he really can make a change. There is so much that needs to be done and no one person can do it all. We will just have to wait it out and see what happens. I know one thing for sure he cant be as bad as the last guy.

That’s enough political talk I’ll let the rest of the internet take care of that. But on to other news. Its a cold day today and not much going on at work. The websites are just about rebuilt and I will probably start doing more wireless stuff pretty soon. I’ll be glad to get back to it that’s what I really enjoy. Don’t get me wrong I like the website design and I’m glad I got the opportunity to learn such a valuable skill. At the same time though being stuck in an office isn’t really enjoyable for me.