I have been struggling with this question: Where should I live? Close to work? Close to Friends? Close to things to do, close to hikes, close to biking trails? All of these go into a decision, if you have children a huge part of that is schools and a younger neighborhood. I don’t have to worry about that. A bunch of those questions are personal issues that you need to decide on how much time is spent on each.

I have been on an email cleanse lately, so going back and deleting old emails that there is no reason to keep. Over the years I have been quite good at labeling anything that is keep-worthy, but a few can slip through the cracks. Here is a simple search you can run inside your gmail box that shows all the emails you can look through and delete. Search for this to find anything that doesn’t have a label, isn’t in trash, your inbox nor drafts.

If your not familiar with tor, check out https://www.torproject.org/ to get more information. Its a secure proxy system that basically anonymizes your ip address. You can install the Tor client and connect or a super easy way is to run your own proxy and just have traffic flow through it. Don’t have to start up anything, its always running if you want to use it. The Beaglebone black is a perfect device to run a Tor proxy on your home network.

I am a super Geek, so having my own ESXi server is a necessity. I have been using Vmware stuff since the company was created back in the day. I had Dell T310 from my old business so its a perfect Vmware server. Has 4 hard disk slots, upgraded it to 16GB RAM, and two Ethernet ports. I have a small Belkin home wifi router which only has 4 gigabit ports, and I wanted to plug one more device in.

There is a image search feature that can be incredibly useful. It is called a reverse image search, and its is scarily accurate. Basically you can upload a photo or give Google the URL (a link) to a photo online and it will search for images that are the same or similar. To use it, goto: https://images.google.com Click the camera icon at the far right of the search box. Your options are Paste the URL (if you can find the picture link directly online) or upload a local picture.

In the I.T. industry we are constantly twisting, opening, screwing, unscrewing things. I have been on the lookout for a nice tool that will fit in my pocket without a giant bulge. Gerber has one that fits the bill, the Crucial. Comes with pliers, very nice blade, can opener, philips and flathead. Just the basics and it has a pocket clip! It fits perfectly into my “lighter” pocket right on the front jean pocket.

I have been on a power reduction kick lately to see how low I can get my monthly bill. Currently it is a perfect time of year in Phoenix, so we don’t need AC nor heat. One tactic I use when traveling is to just turn off all of the circuits when I leave for more than a day. Do this right at the circuit breaker and all those “vampire” devices will go away.

I have always been on the lookout for a nice Bluetooth headset, and a new contender is the LG HBS-730. It is one of the newer style devices that sits on your neck and has ear-buds with wires. It allows you to make phone calls, and is mainly a set of wireless headphones. This means you can listen to music or podcasts all day, and make phone calls with it. So far I have been very impressed, the sound quality is great and phone calls sound just fine (I don’t make all that many these days but the ones I do are great).

! ***** Fill in the parameters within the angle brackets ***** ! ***** Catalyst 6500 Native configuration template ***** !**************************************************************** ! mls rate-limit unicast ip icmp unreachable acl-drop 10 mls rate-limit unicast ip icmp redirect 10 no service pad service timestamps debug datetime localtime service timestamps log datetime localtime logging buffered 11024 service password-encryption enable secret <password> no enable password ip multicast-routing clock timezone GST 0 ! hostname <hostname> ! !

Here is a quick template to setup a Cisco Nexus 56128 or any other switch in the 5600 series. These are solid 40G switches that offer a ton of features. Fabricpath is used in this template for switch to switch communication. These are also setup as a “Leaf” switch in a spine/leaf two tier design. These are running Nexus 7.0.X code. For reference here is the spine configuration: Spine template