The UltraTech Zone

So, we’ve made it through the first quarter of 2010.  What, exactly, do we have to show for it?  Lots – depending on your point of view, of course.   Automobile Adventures… It’s been an interesting year for sure!  Just this month, my car spent several days stranded at a Park & Ride in Wayne, NJ because of flooding.  Thankfully, the flood ...

Today, I came across a very interesting tool for generating a word cloud – basically, a visual representation of the frequency of words in a block of text, just as you might find in the tag cloud of a blog.  I was first made aware of this tool from this LinkedIn Answers question, which then led me to the following blog post. It looked cool ...

May 2009 has been a rather eventful month for me.  Lots of activities and responsibilities at work, home and church.  For the most part, everything has gone very well. On the 24th, I celebrated my birthday, and the day began with a conference call for a data/application migration that was in progress.  Yes, that’s the best way to ...

It’s only the second of April, and already I’m dealing with chaos.   And not the kind I expected, either. We’ve all been waiting for Conflicker to do something this month, but so far, nothing has occurred.  This is not a bad thing, mind you, as long as we realize that we need to be equally vigilant about all subsequent ...

Yesterday, my wife embarked on a bold new experiment:  She’s going to be hosting a monthly vegetarian cooking class called “Taste and See” which we will record to video and making available online.  The first episode was filmed at our church last night, and it went rather well. Granted, the video for the first episode is cheesy (yeah, ...

As I watched yesterday’s inauguration of the 44th President of the United States of America, I was struck by so many thoughts, especially during President Obama’s address.  To me, it was not as powerful as the address he made upon winning the election.   That is not to say that it lacked power, because it most certainly did ...

For the past week or so, I’ve been reading all about the financial fallout stemming from Bernard Madoff’s arrest. The estimated $50 billion in losses that his massive Ponzi scheme generated, is by far the largest financial loss ever attributed to a single individual. The saddest part of this saga is the indirect effect: all the businesses that ...

There were many interesting things for me about this presidential election.  I was surprised by how quickly the contest was conceded.  I was surprised, but very much impressed by the concession speech that Senator McCain made.  To me, that was the real John McCain, and I was glad that he found a way to be true to himself if only at ...

On Friday morning, July 18th, my wife was rear-ended by a Snapple truck while she was sitting at a traffic light.  As you can see, the minivan took quite a beating from the hit. Thank God, she does not appear to be seriously injured, and none of our children accompanied her for this trip. She's still a little sore from the incident, so ...

Ah, November...  The month where we (at least in the good ol' US of A) remember to be thankful. I have a great deal to be thankful for -- so much so, that I haven't had a moment to breathe this month until this past weekend.  I've had several of these busy spurts throughout the year, but I really can't complain about them. I have a lot ...

When I wrote part 1 of the home network virtualization project, I didn't realize that I actually had an updated network diagram available. I created it last October, but never posted it -- for reasons which completely escape me right now. I suppose that I was waiting until I actually performed the upgrades at the end year before I would post ...

Although I really need to upgrade my network diagram to reflect some major changes since 2006, it is effective enough to indicate the need for server virtualization even on a small network.  I currently have 4 servers which are operational, and another which I want to bring online shortly, but I would be far better served if I put in a couple ...

So much for Autumn... Today was an amazing day for October, and we saw a mostly clear day, with temperatures up to 80 degrees.  As a result, my family and I finally got a great opportunity to put our new Sea Eagle 330 inflatable kayak to good use.  It was a bit overcast at home, but at Shepherd Lake, it was outstanding.  In fact, ...

No, not me...  My wife.  She was able to obtain some tickets, since Oprah is going to be taping a couple of shows in New York this week, and now she's planning to go with my mother, sister and a friend.  Thank goodness she didn't have to pay what these folks did! So, now, she's all giddy about going to the show.  This should ...

This summer, in addition to a vacation at Cape May with my extended family, we also went to Shepherd Lake twice (in June and August), and we had our annual church camp-out at Stokes State Forest.  All in all, we had ourselves some good times this summer. The past few times we've gone to Shepherd Lake, I've rented row boats, which has proved ...