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Barger Contracting returned as promised and on time!  Reliability is a lost virtue and when it comes around we are so grateful.

Recently Barger and a team member had a concrete saw and chalk line ready to do some decorating.  I don’t know if I can articulate what a difference was made just by a few clean cuts.  So far, they are worth every penny.  In a few days, we’ll post phase III which is the staining.

…just sneak into the walk-in cooler.  This week, I took my baking practical test at Ivy Tech towards an AAS in Hospitality, Baking and Pastries.  It’s been a 8-year passion of mine. 

I had 2.5 hours to make and bake from scratch a genoise (sponge cake), Bavarian cream and two cookies by different methods.  I chose lady fingers (what a brown noser!) and a wonderfully delicious lime zest shortbread cookie sandwich.  I love this cookie and it showed.  Chef Paul Vida, the pastry and baking advisor, really like this one which helps because my Bavarian cream was barely passing. 

I’ll never forget the lesson or the critcism.  Makes me want to try one again right now.  I received a passing grade and 85%.  Yeah, there is an end in sight!

A family friend, Micah Frank (employed at R Bistro in Indianapolis) and I are starting a personal chef/catering experience available in Indianapolis. 

Our job is to collaborate with the client and develop a menu that will stand out and be terrifically yummy.  Our tagline is “a delicious catered experience for your full plate schedule”.  We seem to be getting bridal showers, family events, themed parties and even a baptism.  We are mostly for people who love to entertain, but don’t want to have to worry about the food at all.  We are averaging one catering gig a month and that seems to work out great for now.  
More details will be available soon, as we are developing our website. 

Our urban backyard is 15 ft x 15 ft, not large enough to own a mower.  So, we pulled the grass out as soon as we moved in 2000.  We tried a rock landscape, which turned into ankle breakers when we became parents nearly 5 years ago.  I think we’ve settled on something that will reflect our modern style but be inviting for family and friends too. 

Phase I we used bidclerk.com to receive quotes on our small job.  We didn’t know what we wanted.  I thought paving stones, but concrete kept coming up.  We ended up using Barger Contracting, Jim Barger (317) 738-4564.  He was the most professional of them all.  There was authenticity to our initial appointment.  We are really pleased so far.

Four hours and 5 crew members later, we have what looks like an enlarged sidewalk.  It will get cut into “tiles” in phase II and lastly will get stained any color we choose.

Even in today’s economy…the glass is half full at the abbott home.  Look at our new “membership”.  Farm Fresh Delivery is really farm fresh…and delivered.  $35 every two weeks and this what we’ll receive.  Organic, beautiful, vibrant colors and flavors and best of all, did I say delivered?  Maddie learned today that carrots don’t come in blue and clear cello bags from the grocery.

Alright, I’m going to try to start posting at least weekly again.  Flu, ear infections, pinkeye, yada, yada…it all seems to take precedence over blogging.  Today, I head to Compellent’s C-Drive conference in Minneapolis, MN.  I’m excited to see what is in store for them and to attend some of the breakouts.  I’m especially interested in the breakout for VMware best practices.  I’ll let you all know how it turns out.

I like to see folks passionate about things. It seems as if the one topic that brings out the most passion in us geeks is the Mac v. PC debate. Today, I noticed a blogpost over at Burbia that has whipped both sides of the debate into a frenzy. If you’re interested in reading the specific article that started it all, it can be found here and the author’s response to the furor can be found here. I’ve touched a Mac maybe three times in my life and that’s only because my brother has an old Macbook. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve got nothing against Mac’s, but I’ve never really had an opportunity to get down and dirty with one. This is what has led me to this idea…why doesn’t someone (Apple or some entrepreneur who is more motivated than I am) start some kind of rental programs for Macs? I mean, I don’t really want to walk into a Apple store and plunk down $2,000 for a computer that I’m not even sure I’ll enjoy using. I’m sure Apple would end up with many more converts at the end of the lease.  If there is such a program that I just don’t know about, please leave me a comment.

After cleaning up the few infected computers, I wanted to be sure that there no other rogue PCs on the network which were sending out any email messages, so I needed a way to monitor the type and content of traffic that was outbound via our internet connection. This was a great chance for me to try out Ubuntu with ntop installed on it. I’ve done numerous Ubuntu installations in the past just to play around with Linux and become familiar with some of the more common commands. I grabbed an old desktop PC we had in the office and installed an extra network card into it. Ntop will require two different network cards. One will be put into promiscuous mode and be used to monitor all the traffic on the switch port into which it is plugged. The other network card in the PC will be used to access the ntop web interface and view the statistics reporting. The installation of Ubuntu is very straight forward. A great step by step tutorial can be found here. The quick and dirty version is to download the Ubuntu iso, burn it to a CD and boot the computer off of the CD and click Install and just keep clicking until it’s installed. Once Ubuntu is installed, you’ll need to install ntop next. The easiest way to do so, is to open up an terminal and type:

1. sudo apt-get install ntop
2. cd /usr/sbin/
3. ./ntop
4. cd /etc/init.d/
5. ./ntop restart

Step 1 downloads and installs the ntop package, step 2 moves you to the binary folder in the Linux file system structure where the ntop executable file is located, step 3 starts ntop (you’ll be prompted to create the admin user and password), step 4 moves you to the folder that contains scripts that launch when you start the PC, and step 5 restarts the ntop program. In part 3, I’ll talk about setting up the switch port and configuration of ntop to begin monitoring the network traffic.