Jeremy Phillips

I’ve had more than a few people ask if I’m alive over the past few weeks so I figured I would post an update of what I’ve been up to since my last blog post almost two months ago. So, a brief summary of what happened after I got back from New Jersey, in no particular order.

• I worked remotely for a couple weeks providing support for a mining company doing an Exchange migration using Quest Migration Manager for Exchange. The servers were spread out all over the world on poor WAN links, so this was an exercise in patience more than anything else. This was also the first time I used GoToMyPC for any length of time and I can definitely recommend you try it out; It’s incredibly easy to use.
• I took most of the month of June off, which provided a needed sanity break for me – I only logged into a computer three times in three and a half weeks.
• I turned 30 on June 1 and my wife setup a surprise birthday party for me. This was especially difficult for her as she didn’t have contact info for any of my friends and I have a habit of locking my machine when I’m not using it. She was ingenious enough to wait for me to leave my machine unlocked and then search through my Outlook contacts for names she remembered. So don’t feel bad if you didn’t get invited.
• Participated in lots of end of year activities at my children’s school, including field day and my youngest daughter’s kindergarten concert among other things.
• Flew down to beautiful and exciting Vacaville, CA to see my niece’s high school graduation. I still can’t believe she’s actually 18 now. Yes, my sisters are quite a bit older than I am.
• My mother-in-law flew over from North Carolina and stayed with us for a little over a week. As her sister (Holly’s Aunt) lives in Wenatchee, we made a day trip to visit them in Leavenworth.
• I took the family on a hike down to Snoqualmie Falls. I hadn’t been there since I was about my son’s age, it was just as awesome as I remember.
• While Ryan went on a 7 day Rite of Passage Journey (to simplify; that’s kind of like summer camp except it’s backpacking) I took Taylor & Tori camping. We went to Turlo in the Mt. Baker Snoqualmie National Forest.
• My sister-in-law graduated to become a ritual leader. I’m not exactly sure what that means but she’s happy about it so we’re happy for her.
• On July 1st, I started a long term project at Microsoft as a v- consultant supporting Outlook Live and Live@Edu. It’s a VERY large implementation based on Exchange 2010 and it’s pretty damn fun so far.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to. Hope it answered all the questions that everyone keeps asking me but feel free to ask in the comments. I’ll finish up with a quote that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit:

Don’t worry about what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. -Robert Thurman

I walked around Jersey City some more last night and found it to be a very nice city with some spectacular views along the Hudson river. The merchant ship’s propeller was huge, taller than me in fact. I took the picture of the Jersey City Fire Department boat for my son, who is usually pretty interested in that type of thing.

For dinner I found a small deli on a side street, where I had a fantastic steak burrito, macaroni salad and chocolate pudding for dessert.

I’ve put up a new family site at phillfam.com. I’m going to be moving towards more technical content on this blog so you won’t see any more family pictures here. Head on over there if you’re interested.

It occurs to me that my children are very accident prone. About 9pm last night, as the girls were heading downstairs to bed, Taylor tripped on the stairs and fell to the landing. Unfortunately she used to right hand to break her fall and fell on her wrist at an angle. It doesn’t appear to be broken but she is in quite a bit of pain (we almost took her to the ER last night) so Holly is taking her to the doctor today for x-rays and such.

On a lighter note, I actually got to use the sentence “No, this is not the same daughter that pulled the refrigerator over on herself” in an e-mail to my team last night. Parenting gets more interesting every day.

UPDATE:  It appears to be a compound wrist fracture. We’ll know for sure after the radiologists get back to our primary care physician with their opinion.

UPDATE 2:  We have received confirmation that it is a fractured radius in her wrist. Luckily they said she should heal well. Thanks for all the well wishes!

I just finished up five straight weeks of travel – 21,6o8 air miles – to finally have a break at home for two weeks. I’ve got a combination of remote and local work this week but I’m taking next week off to be home with Tori & Ryan during their birthdays. With the amount I travel, I think that it’s very important to be home with them.

I’ve got quite a bit to do around the house the next two weeks as well. I just finished rebuilding my rack and started creating my bat cave on one side of the garage. I’m going to spend some time today and tomorrow to getting everything hooked back up and begin The Running of The Cable. Luckily, my office is a 20ft run directly above the garage, the rec room is about a 35ft run directly beside the garage and the living room is about a 50ft run up and to the left of the garage so The Running of The Cable should not be a huge job. Eventually I’ll have to run drops to all the bedrooms but that’s not an immediate need and can probably be put off until the spring without issues. I’m really not looking forward to rummaging through the attic and meeting all our friendly household spiders for those runs and may just run them outside the house.

After I get the Cat5 drops run I’ll be putting in a trixbox Pro based PBX I will be starting to distribute the Polycom Soundpoint IP 501 phones that I currently have around the house. One in the bat cave, one in the office, one in the rec room and one in the living room will make for a nice start. Once I get the drops run to the bedrooms, I’ll be putting one in our bedroom as well.

I’ve also got to get my DC/Exchange/File Server back up and running. After dropping the domain and getting the files off of it, it’s getting rebuilt with Debian running VMware Server so I can separate out services a little easier. It’s a beefy box with dual Xeon 2.0G, 2GB of RAM, and 4×320GB on a 3ware Escalade RAID controller so it shouldn’t have an issue aside from RAM, but I’ll just drop another 2GB in it eventually.

That’s it for this update to Jeremy In Motion. Thanks for reading!

My son Ryan is selling popcorn for his new scout troop, Pack 551. I’ve sent out an e-mail to the family distro list and if you’re reading this, there is a very good chance you found out about it from there. Ready to order? It’s easy, simply follow these steps;

1.) For those not local to Seattle, I’ve scanned in the popcorn order form to a PDF file. You can view the PDF by clicking here.
2.) Send an e-mail to jwp(at)phillfam.com with the product(s) you want to order, your street address and phone number.
3.) I will reply to you to let you know who to make the check out to and where to send it as soon as possible after that.

Don’t like popcorn? That’s OK! Feel free to donate as little or as much as you want and the money will be used to buy popcorn for the scouts at one of their gatherings. Just send me an e-mail with the amount you want to donate, your full street address and preferred telephone number.

All orders must be submitted by October 18th, 2007. The money doesn’t have to be delivered by then, we just need your order information.

Thanks for supporting Ryan’s scouting!

Jeremy