My usual fall “hell week” it seems has turned into a “hell month.” It sounds worse than it is, but this is probably the busiest I’ve been in a long time. The blog has unfortunately been at the short end of the stick as I haven’t posted anything in almost a month. The one project that’s caused a lot of this has been the integration of our virtual servers and our computational cluster within the same blade infrastructure. We had 4 separate networks including an iSCSI SAN that needed to stay separate, but needed to be served by a common set of switches in the blade infrastructure. Eventually, with the help one of our network engineers, I got it all sorted out and I have to say, it’s a thing of beauty. Virtual servers, virtual LANs, where does it end? Why virtual disks of course! That’s my next project. I’m hoping that we’ll have the budget to purchase a new storage device that will support storage virtualization. That really is the next step in combining our resources and making them work more efficiently.

Enough about work. This past week has been great as far as the weather is concerned. Nan and I were finally able to go on a few afternoon walks again with the cooler temperatures. Lela really enjoyed riding in the snugli. (a front-pack) I love watching her as she looks up in amazement at the low hanging trees we walk under. The cool weather also brought some clear skies for a few days at least. I hadn’t done much astronomy lately and when I saw that Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn are all visible currently (though obviously not all at the same time) I couldn’t resist. I ran out at 6 in the morning, still in my PJs and set up the telescope to get an early morning view of Venus. That planet is amazingly bright. Even the waning crescent of Venus was so bright that after dawn when even the brightest stars had been obscured, Venus was still clearly visible. I’m hoping we get a little more of that cool weather and clear skies so I can take a peek at the other planets.