Today is Pi Day, assuming we follow month-day dating. Better yet, if we happen to use American style dating, March 3, 2015 becomes 3-14-15. That is as close to 3.1415 as we get for another hundred years.

To celebrate all things geeky, Bruce, Andrea and I met up for a slice of pi(e). There should have been a few more, but the freezing rain may have put the others off. In order to be fair, we may have to celebrate tau day next.

We had a rather small attendance this month, so rather than have the puppet talk, I decided to put it off until March and we had a free-form meeting instead. Some discussion of Wordpress, which linux distros are appropriate for what settings, etc.

We need to have another idea session, so part of the time at the next meeting will reserved to put together a topic list for the rest of the year and see if anyone has a pet project or new technology they wish to give a talk on.

This seems to happen every couple of years.

I keep trying to find a Canadian hosting provider that offers capabilities similar to the one I use in the US and at a similar price point. Every time I find one, it ends up getting bought out. The last one was adequate, but had a number of issues (no shell access for starters) that I had problems with. This time I’m using a VPS from a Montreal provider to see how well it works. The initial tests were quite good, so I have migrated over. As it is a full virtual server as opposed to a chrooted area, I have more control and I’m happy with that.

Due to some unexpected interruptions and the visiting season that has just passed, I didn’t get enough prep time to get this talk ready, so I’m punting it to February.

Instead, I’m going to go over building a lab environment on a server with the free version of VMWare ESXi 5.5 and the joy of getting things installed. This has a few challenges, which I will be covering in the talk, not the least of which is the method of managing the box, as the system has been “improved.”

Met up with a few sysadmins for SysAdmin Appreciation Day at Pasticceria Gelatteria Italiana in Ottawa’s Little Italy. Not everyone was in the picture, I only managed one due to conversation.

Good times… lots of stories, work talk, tech discussion, good natured insults, vocabulary expansion, coffee, paninnis, gelato, pastries, etc.

Looking forward to next year.