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Just wanted to post a short note about Financial Planners. We have hired one for us. I had tried unsuccessfully to talk to financial planners in the past from my bank or from my broker that runs my 401k. The first question all of them asked was: “How much money to you have to invest?” This statement always instantly pissed me off. I told all of the people I met with that I was looking to get my finances in order and wanted to come up with a plan. I never once mentioned that I had thousands of dollars to invest and that I was eager to have them earn huge commissions from the money I would invest into their funds. Every time I left feeling annoyed and embarrassed. Obviously I am not rich, or I would have no problem throwing my money at a commission based financial planner, but what I was looking for was a “REAL” financial planner. Someone who could look at everything I do financially and come up with a plan and a budget for how my family can succeed financially. This does not mean that I was looking for a plan that will make me a millionaire when I retire, i just want to be comfortable and stable. Thanks to the internet, I stumbled onto this site:

http://www.hillebrandfinancial.com/index.htm

John Vyge is the planner I am working with and he is great. From the first initial meeting, he took the time to find out what “We” wanted. He is not commission based, he is fee based. I pay him a flat rate and he interviews us, finds out what we want financially and then makes recommendations based on our current and future financial situation. We are still early in the process with him, but I can say that right now, I am very happy working with him. We have not made it to the budget portion of our planning yet, but the interviewing process has opened my mind up to the things we need to be thinking about. He is like having a coach. Trying to do it on our own, we tend to slack off here and there and lose our way. With a coach, especially one that I am paying, I have a much greater incentive to keep up the pace and make it to the finish line. If any of the 2 or 3 people out there that read my blog need some direction with finances, I suggest finding someone like John. He is part of the

http://www.garrettplanningnetwork.com/pages/splash/index.htm

If you are not in the NoVA area and want to find someone like this, I would suggest looking on the Garret Planning Network to see if there is someone like John near you.

That tall building is the Comcast center.  The second is a view from the cafeteria on the 43rd floor. The whole building is full of Comcast employees.

On our way to Bears Den and sitting on the rocks at Bears Den.

Sending a blog post from my iPhone

Here is how I envision the Thumper NFS cluster…. I drew this up real quick, for some reason the visual representations of physical disk layouts make much more sense to me.   This configuration would give 4GB into the NFS cluster and the NFS cluster would have 8GB of connectivity to the Thumpers.  With both Thumpers presenting raidz2 pools with 2 spares and the NFS cluster creating one large raidz2 pool from the 8 iSCSI devices presented from the Thumpers, there should be a great level of redundancy in this configuration.

So, when we goto Port Discovery, they have this exhibit called “WOW - Wonders of Water”. This exhibit has a really neat feature where they have a low pressure water flow and varying lengths of PVC pipe, elbows, tee’s, etc. Its a blast every time we go in there. So I decided to build one for the kids, here it is:

I sketched out a rough diagram of what I wanted and took the kids to Home Depot to pick up the parts. About an hour later we returned with all the supplies needed to build our own “Backyard Splash Park!” I built the frame with 1″ PVC and the connections for the kids to play with are built out of 1/2″ PVC. I purchased a pond pump from Lowes to feed the water and “Tada!” we have a self contained re-circulating “Backyard Splash Park!” The best part about this contraption is that we aren’t wasting tons water in the back yard, the kids can just play with the water from the pool.

We spent 4 days in lovely New Bern, NC, Fairfield Harbour actually. Its a great little secluded time share resort with lots of elderly people. The weather was perfect, about 70 degrees with a slight breeze each day. We ventured to the beach on Sunday, but the wind was blowing at a steady 20mph so it made the day rather chilly and sandy but we still had fun. The highlight of this trip was “Barnacle Bob’s Boat Rental”

We rented a pontoon from this company and had a blast tooling around the Neuse River and Trent River. We tried fishing a bit but had no luck, the houses on the river, more like mansions we neat to look at, we also saw several Osprey’s protecting their nests.

Retrurning the Pontoon.

This was a great trip, the day on the water ended with late lunch and Morgan’s Tavern and Grill, where I had the best Cheese Steak I have ever tasted. If you are ever in New Bern, I suggest you try out this place. The food and service are superb and the prices are very reasonable.

Morgan’s Tavern and Grill

Our yearly vacation to New Bern is always great. Its relaxing and exhausting at the same time. This year we brought our bikes and the trailer so we were able to explore more. I was hoping to actually catch some fish this year, but nothing seemed to like our Night Crawlers this year, so maybe next time.

So, if you are looking for a nice place to vacation with the family that is close to a beach, close to a river with lots of fun and relativly inexpensive things to do, I suggest heading to New Bern, NC. Btw, its also the birth place of Pepsi!

I just installed a Thumper, a Sun x4500 last week. Aside from the hours it took to install from a virtual CD using the iLOM interface, it took about 30 minutes to configure 32TB of usable storage in a RAID2Z configuration with 4 parity groups. In that thirty minutes I was also able to build a filesystem from the pool with 5TB reserved and exported for NFS use and compression enabled.

There are several blogs out there that I referred to when configuring this beast and that helped immensely in planning the deployment of this box. Next week, after my vacation, I plan on installing SAMBA/CIFS and seeing if I can make this 48k$ 48TB Raw ( thats 1$ a GB ) out perform the several NetApps that we use. I have trunked the 4 copper GB interfaces using dladm and LACP so we should be able to see some incredible performance out of this machine.

How do I do it? Well. I blog with my blackberry. Public transportation in DC sucks.