The chief cause of failure and unhappiness is trading what you want most for what you want now. I will leave out my thoughts on Ironman Texas 2018, the race, both the positive and negative. Instead I want to talk about my relationship with triathlon over the last couple years. Aside from my relationship with my wife …

Read More

A couple of weeks ago I sat the VMware VCAP 6.5 DCV – Design exam as part of the process of completing the prerequisites for submitting for VCDX. I don’t have a lot of insight to add beyond the excellent post by vHersey. I did want to jot a few notes to help relieve the dearth of information out there on this exam. The …

Read More

Sorry for the delay in getting part two published, life had been busy the past week or so.  Today we are going to build upon what we covered in part one, namely the pieces of the code and/or things you need to adapt about the packer template file for it to be functional for your environment.

This is the second post of …

Read More

As I was working on part two of this planned four part series about packer, I realized I forgot a crucial step in setting up Jenkins!  Due to part of our pipeline including deployment to an artifact repository and a vSphere environment, we need to create some credentials within Jenkins.  I have also created a friendly …

Read More

Imagine a world where the next meltdown level vulnerability is announced and you have to patch your image 5 minutes ago. You  calmly run a script to force approve patches in your patch manager  and 45 minutes later the base template you deploy from in vSphere is updated and all new machines are based on the new image, …

Read More

I have always been one to pick stupid goals and then make it happen, fortunately for me as I’ve progressed in life from childhood to adulthood I actually learned that when you set an outlandish goal, you probably need to do things bordering on outlandish to accomplish them.

After gaining my MCSE 2003 certification, I …

Read More

A log time ago, in a place not very far a way, I had an irregularly updated blog dedicated to tech stuff that I encountered at work and in my lab, which I unfortunately abandoned (the blog). Recently work has gotten exciting and at the same time I’ve been “forced” to rebuild my home lab, resulting in me deciding to …

Read More

An important aspect about the SAFe framework, which I talked about a little last time, is accountability. Namely, holding yourself accountable for accomplishing the things you have committed to. This is done by defining clear acceptance criteria around that commitment. The acceptance criteria describes why you are …

Read More

“Fuckity fuck fuck.” “This is such a disappointment.” “I need to get off this bike.” “I need a hug.” These are all words that have come out of my mouth in the last 36 hours or so. All of them the result of Ironman Hawaii and my poor performance. I don’t want to dwell more than a paragraph or two on Kona; If it isn’t …

Read More

Despite having been an athlete for 25 plus years, having experienced upwards of 35 maybe 40 tapers (and their associated prep), I have yet to encounter one that fits a mold. Some I feel awesome all the way through. Others have left me in tear filled despair part way through, only to be redeemed with an unexpectedly …

Read More