Weekend at the Beach

This past weekend, I got down to the beach for a couple days. I took some longer walks up and down the blocks to see what work had been done and what still needs to be down in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy. There are still, even a year and a half later, ample signs of the costly damage the storm caused, and how capricious and seemingly at random the "hits" from Mother Nature were.

Down on the bayside, I saw this Great Black-backed Gull is the largest gull in the world, with a powerful build and a domineering attitude. They harry other birds to steal their food and even hunt adult birds such as grebes and puffins. It likely was resting before heading further north.

During the off-season, dogs are permitted on the beach and my dad likes to take his German Shepard, Zoey, down there to let her run. She does love the beach! She tears back and forth like a maniac and attacks the incoming waves.

Saturday night, there was a magnificent sunset. The pink sky glowed for hours. Some of the light show might have been caused by smoke in the air from a number of wildfires burning in the central New Jersey pine barrens.

Whatever the source, I admired the show for nearly an hour.

It's been awhile since I...

...photographed my foot. Is this a "selfie"?

I was on my way to the Hundred Acre Woods to see what spring has brought back to life. Obviously, this old car has seen better days (I took a few photos of it a few years back here and here). I wonder if it ever took someone to the local drive-in, an expectant mother to the hospital or a nervious teenager to a high school prom?

The Virginia Bluebells are just coming out now. I'll have to go back soon and take their picture... maybe the flood waters will recede and I'll even have new shoes by then.

The Great Computer Shuffle

With the (sort of) demise of Windows XP, my brother and I decided it was time to "recycle" some of the computers at the office. Much to my surprise, I found one Windows 98 machine still in operation (as a totally obsolete FTP site), three Windows 2000 Workstations (one used daily as a "Fax Machine"), a Windows Server 2000, and five Windows XP computers (not to mention the two Windows XP computers used in home offices or the four computers running various forms of Unix!)

It was long past time for a good "house cleaning".

When we acquired our third rack-mounted Dell Server, I took a deep breath and stepped off the deep end of the high-technology pool and set up some "hyper-visor-based" virtual computers on the machine pictured below. That done, many of the "specialized" desktops (with customized software installed) were shut off and never used again.

On a normal day, this Windows 2012 Datacenter Server (having two processors with four cores each, 64 gigabytes of memory and six (yes, 6!) one (1) tetra-byte hard drives) plays host to 6 virtual machines. A virtual machine is a software-based emulation of a computer, be it a desktop, workstation, or server. Virtual machines operate based on the computer architecture and functions of a real or hypothetical computer. So in short, this one "box" takes the place of seven (7!) individual computers.

One of those seven computers is "my" computer running Windows 8.1 and you know something? IE11 still kind of sucks even when you have 2 CPU's and 10 Gigabytes of memory) so I loaded FireFox on it. I'm not too sold on Windows 8 either...

The "big" server "talks" to the other two Dell Servers (one Windows Server 2008 R2 with the corporate files and one Windows Server 2012 that is home to a number of large databases) via a dedicated gigabit network.

Being that my home-office computer was Windows XP (and more than satisfactory for what I used it for), it was replaced with one of the retired Windows 7 Professional workstations from the office. Such a sacrifice in the name of security! I was off-line for a couple days or so while I played musical computers (and files there on) but the new computer is much, much faster - I'll need to learn how to type much, much faster! And I cna alreedy ytpe 300 wrods pre mniuet!!!

Now to take about a dozen old, dusty computers to the electronics recycle center.

I might just keep the Windows 98 computer though, in case the local historical society wants it.

Wordless Wednesday (A Day Late)