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OK – I’ve really dropped the ball on these end of month wrap-ups thus why you are now seeing the Q4 wrap-up šĀ I wrote most of this in November and forgot to publish – so I’ll do my best to add anything from the following two months šĀ First up I officially added another year to my lifeĀ in October and am now less than a year to the big 4-0 marker.
October saw the passing of the frontman from one of my favorite bands – The Tragically Hip – Gordon Downie’s passing brought a very somber and sad cloud over Canada – you can read about my thoughts here.
On a more pick me up note my beloved Montreal Canadians finally started to turn things around!Ā After a horrible, insanely bad start to the seasons the habs now have more than a handful of wins under them.Ā I still have my doubts about this year though – the playoffs, be it are far away, still seem a little unreachable with the squad they have on the ice now – I can only hope that MB is able to maybe add something to this team with the 7M cap space he has left, without jeopardizing any more future prospects.
***UPDATE*** – Habs went on another pretty nasty losing spell and while statistically the playoffs are in reach, well, let’s just say it’s not going to happen and I’ll have a little less stressful of a spring this year!
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Working
As I mentioned before the last few months were busy!Ā The onslaught of September start-up processes ended – but man October brought with it twice the amount of work!Ā New projects, new initiatives and new “things to do” rounded out the month!Ā A lot of my month was focussed around getting a syslog environment set up within our organization.Ā This led to endless deployments of Graylog, ELK, Grafana – all sorts of things!Ā In the end, it appears that we will probably stick within using logstash to ingest and transform our data into ElasticSearch.Ā What we will use to visualize is up in the air still.Ā Grafana, Kibana, and Graylog are all great in their own way – I suspect we will probably end up using multipleĀ tools to do visualizations.Ā Either way, expect to see a lot of posts coming up on the subject of ELK – I’ve already started with my newbie guide here.
As for blog work well the new theme says it all.Ā I worked to migrate away from my old theme here at mwpreston.net.Ā I was looking for something where I could get a little more content on the front-page, organized a little better to show more posts around certain categories.Ā In the end, I stuck with what you see now.Ā I’ve also been focussing a lot on trying to generate some more eye-catching featured images.Ā Not sure if this helps, but I think it looks nicer and is kind of fun to do!Ā I’d love to hear any feedback you might have on it – I’m always trying to improve what I have!
Playing
Yeah – sure I was busy with work, writing, and the blog but hey whats a life if you can’t have a little fun while living it right?Ā In my September wrap-up, I mentioned that I was in the beginning stages of picking up equipment and attempting to get a handle on making my own hard cider!Ā Well, as you can see below I’ve developed somewhat of an addiction!
The smaller carboys have been active since about the end of the Canadian ThanksgivingĀ – I made these completely from scratch – meaning I acquired the apples, cut them, mashed them, and pressed them!Ā The larger was mixed around Oct 17th from 6 gallons of fresh cider pressed at an orchard not far from me!Ā I’ve been learning a lot about fermentation and it’s been fun to pick up some new skills!Ā The best thing about this is that there really isn’t any one set way – it’s a matter of trial and error and figuring out what works for your taste preference!Ā One good thingĀ is that homemade cider really tends to be very dry – which is right up my alley!Ā I’ve tried it a few times during the process and it’s “not bad” – you have to say this if you make your own šĀ It’s a little tart but really patience is key when doing this – I’m trying to let these sit until at least Christmas before I touch them again – but some people suggest leaving it even longer, 5 to 6 months!Ā It’s tough looking at it and not drinking it!
***UPDATE*** I couldn’t stand the wait and ended up bottling those three one-gallon carboys around XMAS time!Ā Now I know that you are supposed to let this age even after bottling but let’s just say theres only a couple of litres left š
Writing
With the beginning of October, we saw something spring up called Blogtober – a sort of challenge for bloggers to put out at the very least 5 posts during the month.Ā Seeing as I had a lot of stuff queued up for the beginning of the month I decided to take part.Ā Ā In the end, I published around 9 articles on this blog for the month – not too bad I guess š
Aside from here I also pushed out a couple of blog posts through the StarWind Software blog, a blog which I write for often.
Accessing esxcli through PowerCLI
And as always, below you can find my arsenal for the months of October, November and the dismal December!
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