PeteLumbis(dot)org – Blog

In North Carolina part of the election season is “early voting”. About a month or so before the actual election day North Carolina starts early voting.

There is at least one site in every county (sometimes more) that you can go to and cast an absentee ballot. This site is open roughly 9-5 every day until the election. You don’t even have to go to the site in your district!

This is probably the second best idea I’ve ever heard of for voting behind postal voting in Oregon where all elections are done by mail.

I was dicking around with my camera the other day and realized I had a bunch of photos on there that I never took off. To appease the masses I present a bunch of photos including my trip to Chicago last November.

http://flickr.com/svalbard/sets

I’m still planning on taking pictures of my apartment as soon as I get around to putting up the last three prints on my bedroom wall.

via boing boing

Attention Iowa:

I will be in your state (well, mainly in Omaha) from April 22 – April 26. I am going to be quite busy but I have the same cell number I’ve had for years.

The summer like weather has apparently woken up the reproductive organs of the numerous pine trees in the area. EVERYTHING around here is covered in a layer of thick, yellow tree pollen. It’s disgusting. Everything in my apartment (floors, desks, computers, etc) as well as both the inside and outside of my car are completely covered in pollen.

It only takes a few hours during the day for my windshield to be completely covered in pollen every day.

I can’t wait for it to stop so I can scrub my life of this sinus slaying, shelf dusting, disgustingness.

Here is a picture that doesn’t do justice to the fact that everything is tinted yellow.

It’s apparently summer here in North Carolina. It was a beautiful 70-80 degree weekend and then it’s hit 90 most of this week.

Friday night Lisa and I went on a nice little date. We bike to the near by Whole Foods to grab some supplies before biking over to Duke Gardens for a nice little picnic/dinner.

As the it started getting dark we headed back here to hang out with my roommate and watch a movie that will remain unnamed. (Comments left naming said movie will be deleted…lisa, I’m looking at you.)

Saturday morning it was beautiful again and we went on a bit longer bike ride to Guglhuph for brunch. It was a little too fancy in my opinion but the food was good. I’ll probably go back. We rode back to my house to study for a bit before going to hang out with my buddy Nick who was in town from Atlanta.

After an hour or so at Nick’s we headed to Chapel Hill to go to a dinner party with a bunch of Lisa’s friends.

Finally rounding out our busy Saturday we met up with Lisa’s brother and future sister in-law for a drink.

Sunday was Easter we spent the morning studying before going to Lisa’s parent’s house for a nice little dinner.

So the news I hinted at the other day is finally official and I will be moving from the firewall team here in TAC to the routing protocols team. I’m pretty excited as the technologies supported by the RP team line up much better with my long term interests and plans. Beyond this it will make studying for the CCIE much easier as a lot of the day to day work on the RP team is CCIE related.

The RP team is responsible for supporting technologies related to multicast, IGPs, MPLS, QoS and CEF. I’m excited and it will be a lot of fun, even if I’m starting over back at the bottom.

My roommate Rama and I are spending the weekend painting 6 walls 5 different colors. Here’s our progress so far.

The red is our living room wall and the blue is a wall in my room. I’ll post real pictures when the whole thing is done.

I’m taking the week off to take care of some miscellaneous shit that got neglected in recent studying and to get ready to paint my apartment. Part of that was to finally put together the bike stand I bought like three months ago.

Also say hello to “Oliver” my new 2009 Randonee. I’ll put better pictures of it up soon. Maybe I’ll even make it a MySpace Page

I went to Asheville with Lisa this weekend for a joint bachelor + bachelorette party for two of Lisa’s friends. Their bomb idea was to rent a big house for all their friends and then have a party bus pick us up, drive us all to Asheville and tour a few breweries and drink lots of beer. It was a great time. We toured Highland Brewery and French Broad Brewery. We also checked out the Craggie Brewing Company bar and I also went off and broke veg (sorta) to try the OysterHouse Moonstone Stout which is brewed with five pounds of oysters. It was very smooth and light for a stout, but still creamy and a bit on the chocolaty side.

Anyhow, I put some pictures up on flickr for your enjoyment.

Today I passed the MPLS exam to finish up the tests necessary for me to earn the CCIP certification, my second professional cert after I earned the CCNP in 2006.

So now what? Well, this was all part of reading books I needed to read anyhow. Next up is the CCIE Written exam, which should take me through the month of March and maybe into early April. Then it’s really time to start grinding as I read and study and practice for the CCIE lab. That will take me a number of months I’m no where near ready to estimate. I may also do a few things in my life to help this along but I’ll talk about those when it happens.

Wednesday was Lisa’s birthday so we had a nice dinner at the Italian place in my apartment complex and then went over to Duke to catch their weekly (free) jazz concert. Both of which were excellent. I really love Jazz at the Mary Lou. I’ve been three or four times and it’s always fantastic, especially for free. Totally worth the fact you have to rub elbows with dirty Duke undergrads.

Anyhow, after we were leaving Lisa and I were walking back to my car. On the way we ended up racing back. During the race I took a jump off a four-foot (or so) retaining wall landing square on the ball of my left foot. This gave me the joy of experience some of the most intense pain I have ever felt in my foot. I hobbled the rest of the way to the car and grumbled about how my foot hurt. When we got back to my apartment it was obviously twice as big as my other foot and I couldn’t put any weight on it. It feels like something smashed the area between my toes and ankle with a mallet.

The next day I made an appointment with my doctor and got it X-rayed. The doctor noticed that two of my 4th and 5th metatarsals were super sensitive (that’d be my pinky and ring toe bones to those of you not dating someone in med school). Luckily the x-ray came back negative but now it’s four days later and I still have a limp, but at least I don’t have to use a crutch any more. I guess I just f’ed up a ligament really bad so I just keep taking Advil by the fistful three times a day and gimp around in a very sad fashion.

So the moral of the story is, don’t be an idiot and jump off of retaining walls

Hey World,

Remember when I wrote in this thing, like all the time? Yeah, me neither.

Life has been busy. Mostly routine but busy. I work a lot, but less than when I first moved here. Having a clue (although not a large one) helps keep the time to solve cases under control.
I’ve been studying for the CCIP forever. I just had to check when the last time I updated this was. Wow, it has been a while. So, CCIP. I didn’t get a lot of studying done over the holidays (surprise) and a lot of vacationing in October (a trip to Philly to welcome Tom back to America and my first trip to Chicago to see my dear friend Rachel. Both trips were the bomb.com).
So I finally got around to studying and passing the QoS and BGP exams. I’m finishing up my studies for the MPLS exam, which is the 3rd and final test (in the CCIP) for me. I’m currently planning on taking it sometime during the first week of March. I’ve been feeling a bit shaky but that should be enough time to get things straightened out. Worst case scenario I take it a second time a week later, no big deal. I’m not really that worried about it.

After that it’s moving on to the CCIE Written which is the qualifier for the big gnarly CCIE lab. The Written will probably take me through the month of March to study for then it will be serious cram time for the lab. I’d assume my first lab attempt will be in June at the earliest (Jesus, where does all the time go).

What else is new?

I moved into new digs in Durham. I actually move into even newer digs tomorrow as we relocate across the hall to a different apartment. The place is a little yuppie, but otherwise awesome. They are old tobacco factories and warehouses that have been converted into boss apartments. 10-15 foot ceilings, lots of stone, hardwood floors. Very nice. I’m very happy here. My commute is a bit longer, but not by much. I also have a roommate who I work with so we carpool sometimes and I’m also two blocks from the Durham bus station which takes me right to work (the only challenge being that there are only 3 buses in the morning and 3 buses in the evenings). Also the American Tobacco Trail is in the neighborhood which will take me half way to work when I start bike commuting when there is a bit more sunshine outside.

Speaking of bike commuting I just bought a new bike today! It’s a 2009 Novara Randonee. I’ve been thinking of getting a touring style bike for a while mainly for commuting and I read a lot of great reviews on this bike and REI is having a huge sale so I jumped on it. The downside is that I’ll be selling my road ride of four years. I realized that I never ride it and that I’ve come to find road riding very boring. I’d rather bike to somewhere or for some purpose. Road riding just doesn’t cut it for me anymore. I’m not really that sad about it, to tell you the truth. I look forward to having that bike in a much more loving home.

I recently saw The Shipment at UNC with Lisa. It was mind blowingly awesome.
Not long before this we caught The Soweto Gospel Chior from South Africa. Also a great show.

The near future looks like a lot more of the same: work, study, work study, and occasionally break up this routine by spending time with Lisa.

That’s about all for now. It’s late and I’m tired.

Goodnight.