Domestication

Well, since I've been home I've been able to mow, edge, trim and water the grass (when the rain doesn't take care of this), and due to my work back in March fertilizing and feeding, I'm proud to show some pictures I took of the lawn this past Sunday.



I'm damn proud of it and I'm hoping the back yard (shown in the flickr set) will fill in and look just as good

Hello from lovely Pittsburgh. This

Hello from lovely Pittsburgh. This is the first time that I've spent any real time here, and aside from the traffic and the lack of any good south-east-asian food, it's very very nice here. The weather is pleasant whether its sunny or raining. Which is great for the nice surprise at the rental car desk. They were running an upgrade special: $10 more per day for anything they've got. I chose the Mustang convertible, FTW.

It was a gorgeous experience driving along and across the different rivers in downtown Pittsburgh at sundown with the top down.

About the work, despite a day-and-a-half setback involving conflicting versions, system reinstalls and general banging of head against the wall, it's an overall success. (EDIT: I was writing this this morning just before starting a battery of failure tests on the cluster... they didn't go too well for one case and there's no documented occurrence of it anywhere. I'll have to work with the admin from remote).

At the airport now and waiting for my flight out of Pittsburgh. Just found out that I don't have to go to Buffalo next week! One one hand, I'm a little disappointed that two very lucrative opportunities decided to postpone; I'd rather get the work done and billed rather than wait. But on the other hand, and this is so much better, I get to stay home for a bit :-).

It'll be good to be home, the yard hasn't been mowed in 2 weeks and I'm sure the neighbors are complaining :-P.

I live at (the/any) airport

So, I've completed yet another week on the road; Altoona, PA (2 hour drive from the Pittsburgh airport) is a lonely, but hospitable town. Though I doubt any of you would be in the area, as its devoid of anything that would draw people even in the most esoteric of professions, but Marzoni's is an oasis in the desert.

It's a micro-brew and a brick-oven pizza restaurant, and it has a good italian section of the menu as well.

The work however, was not as smooth as I was hoping, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been. I was doing an after-hours cut-over of NFS and CIFS shares from an EMC Celerra to a Sun StorageTek 5320 cluster. One of the challenges was to get the pre-existing permissions both on the UNIX/POSIX side matching up with the CIFS/NT ACL side. This was taken care of (or lack thereof) on the EMC NAS box by a very manual process where the Windows share permissions were considered gold/standard, and NFS/UNIX/POSIX had to be mapped via a file on the NAS box. Since the 5320 is a Sun product, the NFS side was considered the master, and all the NT ACL's were merely mirrors of the UNIX permissions, mapped by name, to the Active Directory equivalents. Well, since NT ACL's allow multiple users and multiple groups per file/folder, the permissions issues when we cut over to the Sun NAS cluster were abound in droves.

Long story short, the data was there, but getting various people in different departments to access it took the better part of the week; time that I needed/planned to work out the array-based snapshots/copies to be used in the backup scheme. Now I'll have to finish up over the next few days by logging in over VPN.

This wouldn't be an issue if I didn't have to come back on Sunday evening to start work at another client in Pittsburgh. Hopefully I can knock this one out in the four days I have this week. The week after that (Monday the 30th), I'm currently slated to be in Buffalo working at a regular customer of the company's doing some Hitachi high-end storage magic. Those who remember, I worked at this client back in Feb-Mar 2005. Interestingly enough, I've also got a prospect at SUNY Buffalo, another client from back in 2004/2005. Here's to cyclical work :-P

Honestly, sitting in the Cincinnati airport waiting for my flight to OKC, I can't wait to just be at home, work on the yard, play some Guitar Hero, and spend time with my Mel before I have to start all over again next week. At least I don't have to drive 2 hours to/from the airport to the client. Small consolation to be sure... I miss home.

Hiatus Ended?

Do you ever get that feeling when you sit down at the computer and you read everyone's blogs and you think you should update yours, but so much has happened, or ironically, not enough has happened that you just don't get around to actually posting? I believe this is a combination of truth in that a lot has happened, and inertia; that it's easier not to post because everyone's stopped expecting one from you because it's been so long.

But I hate that every now and then there's something cool I want to share, but it's not enough to break through the aforementioned obstacles. So, the answer is to ease in with a little banality.

Today, after flying home from yet another travel gig (more on that later of course), I got a call from my friend Dan to ask if we wanted to go out to the country southeast of Norman to a shooting range do some skeet shooting. I agreed and it was much fun, though my right shoulder is bruised pretty badly from the recoil of shooting a 12-gague for 100+ rounds. It was pretty easy to get back into it, I had some training in shooting an M-14 from JROTC in high school; the basics were the same. Just use the strap to keep movement down, press your cheek against the stock, and move the rifle and eyeline as one unit to ease in aiming, follow your target and follow through, squeeze the trigger, don't yank it and fire at the end of an exhale. Ended up shooting as well as the guys I went with and even won a few competition games.

Tomorrow I fly out again for 4 days of work in Pennsylvania; Altoona to be exact.. which is just an hour away from State College, so I might try to meet up with the Triangle Chapter at Penn State. I'll see if I have time.

Until next time...

Cleaned up and updated resume

I've neglected this site a bit, but since it comes up when you google Robert Cantu, I might as well keep things a bit current. Uploaded a newer resume.

Been pretty busy lately, just been working and travelling, like you do. Bought a house in March and have since fought the urge to become completely domesticated. Fun stuff though.

Apathy is both exponential and cumulative

LiveJournal has been my blog lately, so double-posting got old. I added the resume link to the main page and all the old entries that made the site look decent got the two-week cycle off... I should turn that off..