The likelihood of obtaining a lot of things life can be reduced to one simple question. How badly do you want it? I realized how true this is for body building. Pushing yourself everyday, ignoring the pain, and most importantly, ignoring the success you've already obtained (the amount of fat you've lost or amount of muscle you've gained) is not an easy task. Many people simply don't want a fit body bad enough. Doing the things you need to do, eating right and exercising regularly, are not difficult. It's keeping them consistent that is difficult. Basically this means if you want to be in shape your whole life, you need to make those things apart of your life. They need to become as common as brushing your teeth or eating everyday.

I registered a domain, howbad.org, which I plan to use to promote this idea. After watching the movie V for Vendetta, I have become a lot more aware of the power of an idea. If you haven't already, I highly recommend watching the movie. It relates a lot to what's going on in the world right now.

There are some things you can only see in New England, or at least see all the time. Here are some dark storm clouds and a clear sky in the same picture, taken from my truck, while driving.

I received an email yesterday from Aerva offering me the Junior Engineer position that I interviewed for on Friday. It will start as part-time and the pay rate is a lot lower than I expected. But because this is a start-up company, and because the position is an incredible opportunity for me to grow and gain experience in the Linux field, I happily accepted the position. Hopefully in a few months time, they will pull me on full-time and increase my pay rate!

I can't wait to start tackling real world Linux problems while at the same time helping to make Aerva successful. I see myself becoming an integral part of this company and becoming even more fluent with Linux than I am now with Windows operating systems. In the past 10 years of troubleshooting Windows issues, I have learned that the best and only way to really learn a system inside out is to constantly be exposed to both new and reoccurring problems. I don't know if it's the ancient history of Unix that excites me, or if it's the philosophy of creating small individual programs each designed to do a specific task very well.

By the way, if you're wondering, as I did, how to pronounce Aerva, it's between "air-va" and "er-va". Try to combine the both of those.

Well the interview went great. I found Aerva to be a very interesting company and I really hope I get the position. It seems like the perfect opportunity to grow my Linux knowledge. They are even using my favorite distro, Debian! The ride to and from Cambridge went smooth, about 40 minutes on the train and 20 minutes in the subways. It really beats spending time in the car driving there! I'll let you know when I hear anything else.

A few days ago I submitted my resume to several companies for network / system admin positions. One of those companies is called Aerva and is based in Cambridge, MA. I emailed them my resume, along with the following cover letter:

Dear Employer,

I am responding to your job listing on CraigsList regarding the Junior Engineer
position. Please find attached my resume detailing my experience and background.

I have been around computers my entire life and I have over 8 years experience
troubleshooting and administering networked systems in the real world. My strongest
area's are in troubleshooting and resolving hardware and software issues and assembling
systems. However, the area's that I am most interested in growing and learning in are
Linux/Unix and dynamic web programming.

I am an extremely fast learner, and enjoy reading O'Reilly and other computer books in
my spare time. I maintain a Debian Linux server at home, as well as Windows XP and
Mac OSX computers. I also remotely manage a CentOS Linux web hosting server with
18 domains. I have a strong understanding of Internet technologies and prefer to hand
code HTML over using a WYSIWYG editor. I am however experienced in using Macromedia’s
Dreamweaver.

I am very interested in learning more about your company and would appreciate the
opportunity to further discuss my qualifications. I am available for an interview at a
time that is mutually convenient.

Thank you very much for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
Raam Dev

They emailed me back and requested to setup an interview, so I set one up for this Friday. I'm excited at the thought of working in Cambridge, only a few blocks from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I'm really looking forward to working in an environment where I can increase my working knowledge of Linux and web programming. Hopefully this position would allow both.

The other nice thing about working in Cambridge, is that I'll be able to take the train into work every morning. That really beats spending hours in traffic. It would also give me an opportunity to spend time reading. I'll let you know how the interview goes on Friday.

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a total mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit any porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

I saw this today while driving to work.

Ideas anyone?

It always feel's good to finally finish things that have been on the back burner for awhile. That's not to say there is nothing left to be done, it's just the feeling of crossing things off from my mental to-do list is gratifying. Before I had bought my second investment property, and started to be serious about my consulting business, I managed to keep mental notes of the things I needed to do. I glanced at calendar and tasks applications on PDAs and watched people carry around their date book as if it was their lifeline. I doubted the day would ever come when I needed a date book or calendar application to keep track of things.

Well not long after wondering that very thought, I found myself forgetting important dates and appointments. I started jotting things down on a piece of paper so I wouldn't forget about them later. It was then I realized just how useful a date book would really be. I started trying different PDAs to see which one I was comfortable with, as I hate buying something and then not using it. I quickly found it very cumbersome to carry around with me my wallet, keys, cell phone, and a PDA. So I decided a Blackberry would make the most sense.

I have found my Blackberry to be the best thing I could ever own. I setup my email so that all four of my email accounts forward a copy of any incoming email to my Blackberry. Important notifications from E*TRADE, consulting clients requesting support, stock alerts, OnForce work order notifications, everything, right there at my fingertips. I installed a password application called CryptMagic that allows me to store all of my clients admin accounts/passwords, WEP keys, account numbers, network information, and anything else I need to keep track of. As soon as an appointment is scheduled, I unconsciously reach for my Blackberry and add the appointment to the calendar, setting it to remind me ahead of time when the appointment is due.

Back to what I was saying about finishing things that have been lingering on my mental to-do list: I'm finally catching up with work at WFCorp, I found a buyer for the property I'm selling, I have a livable basement area in which to live, my workout's are on schedule (more or less), and this site is finally becoming what I'd always hoped it would be: a comfortable place I can write about things. In the meantime, I would appreciate any feedback, corrections, recommendations, anything at all. You can freely post a comment on any of my posts, anonymously if you like, and I will read and possibly respond to them.

As promised, here is a picture I took on the lift up to the summit. It's an amazing view. You can see a huge portion of lake Winnipesaukee. It was very windy the whole time, and the cold was so extreme that without goggles, my eyeballs felt as if they were freezing over while I was snowboarding.

I also wanted to mention that I made a few noticable changes to the sidebar. I removed the archives list and added an archive page, with a much better listing of the archived posts. I also added a changelog page, and found an awesome WordPress plugin written by Jeffrey Friedl called File-based Posts that allows inclusion of static pages in a WordPress page. This allows me to work on a page outside of WordPress, and then include it later.

I worked on putting together the basement project pages while I was at the hotel last night (waiting for Thea to return from partying, since everyone else was sound asleep and he didn't have a key to get back into the room!), however I only finished half of the pages. So it's going to be a bit longer before I have the pages up. I also downloaded and installed PHP Markdown. What it does is allow me to write entire articles using a standard text editor without adding any HTML. I just add very simple tags. For example, to make text bold in my article, I would just surround the text with astrisks. So, * this is bold * (without the spaces) would become < b>this is bold< /b> (again, without the spaces) when I insert the text into a WordPress page or post. Pretty nifty!

I'm headed up to Gunstock to snowboard for the day. I'll stay overnight and maybe snowboard tomorrow. I was planning on leaving at 6 or 7am, but that didn't happen. I woke up at 9:00 and now I'm waiting for Photoshop to finish copying to my USB disk. I'm bringing my new Nikon P1 digital camera, so I'll take some pictures and post them when I get back. I might be able to post some while I'm up there if I can get the dialup connection working on my laptop.

Here is a picture of what I worked on for the past few days.

I took pictures as I progressed on the basement project. When I downloaded all the images from my digital camera last night, I was astounded... a whooping 300 pictures. I stuck them on a 1GB USB disk so I could work on putting together a page detailing the entire project. Look for that soon. I might have it up by tomorrow night!

Well, for the past few weeks, all of the sites on my server have been running very slow. There were times when I was unable to even access the control panel's for my domain! I sent several emails to my host's tech support, however they insisted that there was nothing wrong and the server was running normal. It's not normal for a server to have 90% memory used and 80% CPU usage throughout the day. Finally I received this response:

Hello,

There was an account on this server abusing system resources which we have
stopped. Let us know if you have any more problems.

Sincerely,
Michael Watters

I just checked several domains I'm hosting under akmai.net and they all seem to be working fine. If you're hosting a domain with me, I apologize for this temporary inconvenience. Everything should be working smoothly now. I was trying to devise a way of testing the sites loading speed to see if it was correct, and the only thing I could think of was to access www.liquidweb.com since they are my server's host. I assume they are hosting their website on their own servers, so your site's load time should be similar to theirs.

Well, it's almost 6 weeks into the new year and I'd like to give you a quick update on how my new years resolutions are going.

My first resolution, limit coffee consumption to two days per week, has already failed. I always have a problem with not drinking coffee. I really hate feeling dependent or addicted to anything, which is the number one reason why I wanted to control it. However, I end up drinking too much coffee on the weekends and then have caffeine withdrawals during the week. So I've decided to change the rule to having coffee every other day and to make sure I don't consume very much. I cannot drink it two days in a row. So far, so good.

I am on track to be doing 100 pushups by May 1st. January started with 60 pushups. January 15th I started doing 65 every day. Currently I'm doing 70 pushups, and will be moving to 75 next Wednesday. Keep in mind, these are 75 pushups all at once; in under 1 minute.

As you can see, raamdev.com has been updated. I really like this new blogging software (WordPress) and I plan to learn how to create plugin's for it once I get some time. MyFMO.com hasn't been worked on at all, but I'm saving that for a little later, when I've finished more work on my basement and caught up on things I need to finish at work.

My workouts have stalled. I started to have really bad back pains during my second week of my workout plan. I wasn't even able to run! I have concluded that the cause is a weak core. This is the biggest my body has ever been and I'm pushing my body harder than ever before. My core (the midsection, abdominals, and lower back) needs to be strengthened before I can build anymore mass, which is why I am going to concentrate on working my core for the next 4 - 8 weeks. The adding of two inches to my calves I now realize is an unrealistic goal. That would require more time and work than I am willing to dedicate to that one muscle. I no longer expect to complete that by the end of the year.