Field Notes & Engineering
Personal blog and technical archive spanning 20+ years of homelab infrastructure, hardware reverse engineering, smart home automation, systems administration, and DIY builds.
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11 Years, 11 Months Later: Dusting Off the Server & The Great Reboot
My last blog post went live on October 2, 2014. I was writing about Dell EqualLogic enterprise storage arrays, phone system debugging, and IT service quirks. Th...
The Ultimate Spec Change: Becoming a Father
On November 21, 2025, my entire world shifted on its axis. We welcomed our baby into the world. No amount of systems engineering, server disaster recovery plann...
Never assume no one reads the comments in your code
So, a few years back a client of mine was very excited about their recent uptick in web traffic, though it wasn’t very clear why. The client had just finished a...
The Day We Fight Back
Regardless what you think of Edward Snowden, his actions illustrate one thing clearly: The data collected by the NSA is rife with potential for abuse. No matter...
The Bieber Algorithm
So I had to reverse engineer some software we use at the office the other day. It uses a hash to store its current users in a table, and we needed a way to moni...
Equallogic Command Line
Well, we had another failure late last month. The rebuild went fine… and quickly since I had another disk on hand. That disk was supposed to be replace the othe...
EqualLogic with a questionable drive
Well… last month we had one drive completely fail, which is what these arrays are supposed to protect against. However, when this happened, there were enough ba...
PS6100 semi-catastrophic failure
A drive failed, at 4:00 on a Friday (2 weeks ago)… Then at about 11 that night, the rebuild failed. I thought it was the end of the world; especially since we’r...
Arduino
If anyone was wondering where I disappeared to for the last few days… I got an Arduino for christmas. This web based thermometer was an easy start, but I need s...
Phone System Error
I honestly dont know what this error message is trying to tell me. Maybe it makes sense if you translate it to chinese.
Craigslist… 1 hour later
So I got my first response from CraigsList less than an hour after I listed it… Hey, is your car still for sale? Yes, the car I listed at midnight on Saturday i...
Lambo tires…
Whats wrong with this picture? For some reason, Walmart is out of stock on 335/30R18 tires. Isn’t that where all Lamborghini owners get their tires?
GCM Computers
MeetNWA interviews my old boss, Gary McLendon. I think GCM Computers is the best computer service center in Northwest Arkansas, but I may be biased since I work...
Protection Fail
I’ve recommended that my client replace this on several occasions over the last few years. But it hasn’t quite sunk in. It says it’s still “protected”, right? I...
MS nixes the Windows Installer CleanUp Utility
If you’ve ever seen the error: “The feature you are trying to use is on a network resource that is unavailable”, you’ve probably had to use the Windows Installe...
iOS 4.0 is here… well almost.
I managed to get the iOS 4 update going right after noon today. However, I had to go to lunch an hour later, and it hadn’t shown any progress whatsoever… ...
Antivirus “False Positive” Problems
My biggest gripe for all Anti-Virus solutions is the amount of false positives. One recent incident I posted about prompted me to completely change AV products....
I dont want to jailbreak my iPhone
I’m catching a lot of flack from my iPhone enabled coworkers for not jailbreaking my phone. I’ve had my 3G for almost a year now, and I’ve been tempted many tim...
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