c a s e

This weekend I'm heading over to Seattle. I have a meeting in Auburn on Monday so I'm coming into town on Saturday. Thought I'd try and look some folks up. Anyone going to be around this weekend? Want to get together? Play some games? Eat some food?

Let me know!

So - Hi! Remember me??? For Christmas, Christy let me off the leash and I bought an Xbox 360. Finally. Although, I was going to wait until either Halo3 or Fable2 came out, I'm glad I got it now. It's been fun playing around with it, setting up the media stuff, and playing some games (like Halo2 ;)

Anyways, my 3rd gamer tag, since I keep moving and changing debit cards and losing my accounts, is 'call me case ok' without the quotes obviously. If anyone else is on the Xbox 360, shoot me your gamertag [jclaeson at gmail], let me know what you're playing, and say hi!

I'm sitting in the passenger seat of my new Mada CX-7 (www.MazdaCX-7.com - serious zoom-zoom) cruising at 75mph between Missoula and Kalispell, MT while my counterpart for Service and Parts drives. I'm using my new Dell D620 with EV-DO and sending emails, checking the news, and writing this post. Why this post? I've gotta tell ya, technology is too cool! I don't have cell phone service (Cingular) right now, but I do have internet access - life is good!!!!

Announcing the arrival of...

... of Isabella Mae Claeson.

Born November 6, 2005 at 8:51pm - about 1hr after reaching the hospital. She weighed 7lbs. and 10oz. and was 20 inches long.

Mother and baby are currently resting. She's a little darling and has long dark hair and beautiful dark eyes.

I've uploaded just a few pictures (with many more to follow!) and you can view them at: http://flickr.com/photos/theclaesons/sets/1316227/

I'm finally back on the west coast. After spending a year in Detroit and a year in Atlanta, I really came to miss the Pacific Northwest. Christy, Claire and I moved back to Spokane, WA at the end of August. I can't believe it's been almost two full months!

A few weeks ago, I was able to head over to Seattle for business and I went a few days early to hang with the homies.

On Friday, I called Brian Chang up (who bailed on me!), then Beau, and finally albertprime. I ended up having an awesome dinner at the Purple Dot Cafe with the Alberts and htang. After dinner, we headed back to awong and htang's place and played a few games before albertprime and I headed out to his place in Bellevue.

Saturday, we got the crew together at Mings (I think) in Bellevue for some dimsum. The afternoon was spent playing some more games I brought from our adventure at Gencon over the summer.

The culmination was a most excellent dinner at Yea's Wok in Newcastle. Holy heavenish Batman! I really missed Yea's Wok. It's a testament to my dedication to that restaurant that the owner came over to greet me like an old friend! I couldn't believe he still remembered me, but I guess Christy and I used to eat there a few times a month for about 2.5 yrs.

It was a great time and absolutely awesome to see the Alberts, Brian Chang, Beau, Phil the Newbie, Margaux, Hannah, and Jay.

Thanks to everyone for making me feel so welcome!!! I had a blast and I'm looking forward to Christmas and Battle in Bellevue!!!!!

Wow. That's hilarious. Seconds after my last post, my phone rings, and guess who it is?

Ok, you don't need to guess, it's pretty obvious that it was Alex. He was having email issues. We're gonne hang out tomorrow. He's working at Symantec in Santa Monica. I'm chillin' in Irvine because I just started with Mazda and I'm going through some training.

Oh yeah, that's right... I was kickin' it with Ford the last two years. I spent a year in Detroit and then moved down to Atlanta, GA. Spent a year there and then the opportunity with Mazda came up that let me get out to the west coast.

So, Christy, Claire and I now live in Spokane, WA! I hope to get over to Seattle sometime in the next month or two to hang with my peeps. I'm at jclaeson [AT] gmail [DOT] com.

Anyone seen/heard from my biotch, Alex Chang recently? I've tried emailing him - no response - and his cell phone number that I have doesn't work anymore. I'm in LA and wanted to hang out; I'll be here until Friday morning so if you can get in touch with him, hurry! jclaeson [AT] gmail [DOT] com

Later.

Rice, baaaabeeee!

I've had a great time this weekend in Alaska. Claire and I left Atlanta on Friday morning. The flight was amazing! Claire was soooo good and not fussy at all! I was a little nervous since this was the first long trip that Claire and I have been on together alone, but in the end, it's been fantastic.

Claire really enjoyed seeing all of her cousins and I was able to get some great pictures! The best part was yesterday in the snow! We went up to Flattop Mountain outside of Anchorage where there was still quite a bit of snow. Claire ran around and played and had fun until she fell. Then she wanted me to warm up her hands and walk around with her for a little while then she was off again!

Today, Claire went with her Grandma Claeson from Anchorage down to Spokane. Christy is flying from Atlanta tomorrow to Spokane for a few weeks to spend some time with her family. Claire was pretty good for my mom it sounds like, so I was glad to hear that. Now I just have to make it through the next few weeks until Christy and Claire get home!!! I'm already missing Claire like crazy and had a hard time not crying at the airport when she went through security! I'm amazed at times how much I love that little girl!

My wife is:

Dang, Claire is pretty cute! I caught some great video of her doing another of her performances. You should check out her Itsy Bitsy Spider bit over at ourmedia.org.

This coming weekend, I'm going to Alaska with Claire to visit my brother and his family. It should be fun spending some time alone with Claire and of course the 11 hours in the plane will be interesting!

Ok, so I've used FreeBSD for years now. I think the first version I used was 3.2 or so. I've done custom kernels, Samba, NFS, DNS, email server, apache with PHP, all kinds of fun perl stuff, and more. However, I've never done anything with disks beyond the initial installation of the system. Whenever I installed a new FreeBSD, I had the disks I was gonna use, and that's it.

Last week over my 4 day weekend I thought it was about time to upgrade my old Samba 2.1 server on FreeBSD 4.6 which has been up and running for well over 2 years straight without much intervention. I haven't used any of the FreeBSD 5.x releases yet, so I though this would be a good time for that too. Oh, Samba is now up to 3.x something. Let's through it in! While I'm at it, I have an extra two CPU computer that I can compile an SMP kernel onto. Finally, Circuit City had a special rebate on 250GB Western Digital drives (179.00 and a $100.00 rebate); I bought two for a software raid.

Everything else was a piece of cake until it came time to figure out the whole software raid thingy. After some research, I settled on using a geom mirror. This seems to be the most up to date and reliable system for mirroring two drives. Of course, now I'm mired in bsdlabels, /etc/fstab, geom, gmirror and more. I've found very little help on the web and my cries for help to the freebsd-geom mailing list have gone unanswered.

I'm now at the point where a week later I've got two 250GB drives and am no closer to fixing the problem. I've seen some other software raid solutions out there. Including one that evan's used. What else is out there I wonder. I've kind of given up on the geom thing. Now I'm trying to evaluate some of the other solutions. I'm nervous now, though. I've had my previous fileserver with one drive running flawlessly for 2+ years.

1. I noticed just now as I was checking my email and noticed that I am now using 2% of my 2050MB. That's new! Did anyone know that Gmail upped the storage to 2GB? The last time I remember noticing that, it was only 1GB. Cool!

2. On a more somber note, as I was driving around on Thursday, I heard that Mitch Hedburg had died. If you haven't heard of him, well, neither had I until I bought my Sirius radio last year. Mitch is a comedian and his stuff was on the comedy channel pretty regularly. He's really quite funny, but his humor is kind of different. He'll say something like: "An escalator can never break. It can only turn into stairs. Instead of seeing a 'Sorry for the Invenience' sign, it would have to say 'Sorry for the Convenience, the Escalator is no stairs.'" That, of course, isn't a direct quote, and it's much funnier when he says it, but you get the idea. Anyways, he died recently, but hopefully his legacy will bring a smile to a few folks around the world.

We bought a new camcorder this weekend since the last one has died on us after six years of sporadic use. It's a Canon Elura 80 and after reading tons of reviews on camcorders lately, settled on this one based on price and featureset. After using it for a day or so, I agree with the reviews about the less than optimum low light performance, but didn't want to shell out another $500 for a 3CCD camera.

I'm hoping this one get's a little more use as a result of the cool features. This morning while Christy was still asleep, I videotaped Claire performing her animal sounds and signs. One of the amazing things Christy has done with Claire is to teach her sign language. She knows tons of different animals and how to say please, thank you, more, food, water, etc. Of course she's been starting to talk pretty good too, so her thing now is signing and talking at the same time.

Anyways, this morning, I captured some of her signs on video; transferred it to the computer; and then I uploaded it to Ourmedia.com after reading about the service over at Scoble. Check out how cute she is!

I've decided that spring is by far my favorite season. This morning as I walked to my car, I found the smell outside from the previous nights rainstorm mixed with the sun poking through the soon to be blooming trees marvelous! I can't wait to see how beautiful the ATL looks in the spring. This morning reminded me of how much I missed spring in Seattle because of how green both cities look. It's finally starting to warm up as well! Hello Spring!!!

Not sure if I should be upset about this yet - it seems that Flickr (and Ludicorp as well) has been acqiured by Yahoo! This is the second event in the past few weeks where a service I use regularly has been acquired. The first instance was Six Apart acquiring Livejournal. That's something I happen to really be in favor of and I'm looking forward to some of that great design making its way into LJ and some of LJ's great technology making its way into Movable Type. It's really an excellent partnership.

Yahoo! and Flickr? Hmmm... I guess the first thing that will disappear will be the Google Ads ;) Other than that? I hope they leave it alone. One of the strong draws of the Flickr service and site is the amazing design and ease of use. It's soooo clean. It's soooo uncluttered. And then, there's Yahoo! In my opinion, the antithesis of everything Flickr stands for. Let's just hope that this doesn't prove the saying "all good things must come to an end."

I could not believe my eyes this morning when I woke up to find it snowing like crazy! I mean c'mon people! It's mid-March in North Carolina. You'd think I was living in Boston or Michigan or something. Oh well, at least it makes driving somewhat interesting.

For my birthday yesterday I got to drive this totally sweet Porsche Cayenne! Double dey-amn! Funky SUV look aside, it still drove like a Porsche right down to the rumble of the engine saying "c'mon baby! let's floor it!" Good times.

One of the many things that has impressed me about FoMoCo is the guy at the top - Bill Ford Jr. Here's a guy that didn't have to do anything to be sitting on loads of dough, but felt a sense of duty towards the company his great-grandfather founded over 100 years ago. The last few years, when Bill Ford has received compensation, he's donated it to charity or, more recently, a scholarship he created.

This year, Bill Ford contributed $3 million towards the scholarship. I wanted to say something about how impressed I was last week when he announced his intentions in an email to the company, but in this age of heightened sensitivity about people writing something on the internet and then getting dooced, I figured I better hold off.

Now that the story is out there courtesy of the Detroit News, can I just say that Bill Ford is the kind of leader who makes me personally feel proud to work for Ford? I was fortunate enough to be able to hear him speak to a group of employees in January and I came away from that speech and the two days of meetings feeling very confident about the direction Ford is taking. Sure, our problems aren't going to be solved overnight; I do, however, feel very confident that they will be solved.

Today at Costco I came across Guava juice. Holy cow! Now that brought back some memories. When I was growing up in the Philippines that's about all I used to drink. It came in little green juice boxes. It was soooo good! Drinking that can of guava juice tonight reminded me of riding bikes around the subdivision, taking the jeepney (that's a whole post by itself) to the market, swimming everyday...

Someday I'd really love to travel in the Philippines. See Manila, Angeles City, Baguio, San Miguel... ride a banka boat. Now that's kind of funny. Banka is the Tagalog word for boat. However, all the Americans called the boats "Banka boats" which now, years later, makes me laugh to think that I was always saying "boat boat".

Good times...

It's been quite an eventful few days. All spent at this great resort on the coast of South Carolina on Kiawah Island. Yesterday was getting ready for the event to start and the afternoon was spent at one of their 6 golf courses for a tournament (no, I didn't golf - figured that was not the place to learn). That evening, Atlanta Falcons Coach Jim Mora spoke to the group and afterwards I got a signed football and picture with the Coach! Awww yeah!!!

This morning, up at 4:30 am (that's 1:30 am for all you west coasters) for set up followed by our business meeting and then a wrap up talk by George Will and a signed copy of his new book, "What a Happy Eye, But...".

Anyways... after driving from the coast of South Carolina to Hickory, NC... it's been a long day.

Overall the whole event really reinforced my decision to move from IT into Marketing and Sales.