I have a work blog now...

For those of you that are IT people I have a new work blog for my System Center products I work on. You can find the blog here http://blogs.technet.com/jasonlewis. It is pretty technical, but very informational. Enjoy!

Summer trip visiting family and friends

Kirsten and I are taking next week off and visiting family. We are leaving shortly after the Huskies game (vs Ohio State) and heading down to Tri-Cities to visit Kirsten's Grandparents. We will be down there for 3-4 nights before heading over to my Dad's place in Hillsboro, OR. I'm hoping the weather is nice during the week so I can get a few rounds of golf in. I haven't played a whole lot this past month due to all the baseball and volleyball.

While at Dad's we will be playing The Reserve on Thursday. I'm really looking forward to playing golf with my Dad. Even though both of us are terrible golfers we still enjoy and compete against each other every time we play. And it's always a entertaining listing to my dad swear up a storm after each miss hit :-).

After visiting Dad for a couple of days we are heading back up to Ellensburg to go camping with Adam, Michell and Lilly. We went camping with them a few weeks ago and it was a blast. Specially with having Lilly (a puppy) there who is a riot. And the best part of taking the entire week off is finally spending some time with Kirsten. This summer has been hectic for both of us and we haven't had much time to just do things together. It will be a great to spend some time with her!

Now using GoDaddy.com web hosting

For the past 5 years I've been hosting my own websites on my very old (built 1999) machine. This machine has a Pentium III 400 Mhz processor with 1 GB of RAM. It is still running but it could really go down at any second. So on Friday I finally made the switch to use GoDaddy.com's web hosting. I've been planning for almost a year to move my PlayballStats.com website over to a production web server. The main reason was I wanted more bandwidth since running a web server on a cable modem doesn't scream performance. But a few things were holding me back. First was that GoDaddy Windows hosting only included 1 SQL Server Database (at a 100MB max size). Secondly, I could only host one website on the account. Meaning I would need to buy several accounts if I wanted to move all my websites. Needless to say that would be expensive. Luckily over the past year GoDaddy has raised the number of SQL Server databases plus they now allow you to host multiple websites from the same account. This was exactly what I needed to hear.

On Friday I opened the account and played around with all the settings and figured out how to upload files and create databases. Then Saturday I moved my SwapStudio.com and CheckInTheDark.com websites over to GoDaddy. I will wait until after the baseball season to move over PlayballStats since I don't want to screw up the data while the season is still in progress. And the best news... I will pay less than $200 for the 4 years of webhosting on GoDaddy.com. This is a very small fraction of the cost if I was to rebuild a new web server. And now I will be able to post more pictures since there is no need to worry about space and bandwidth.

Nine Baseball made the playoffs!

This week I found out my Redmond Nine team will be the #7 seed in the Redmond Wood Bat League postseason (link). This is the first time the Nine have made the playoffs. We also had the most wins we've ever had in a season (4). We impoved our team hitting to .300 (.181 last year) as well as our team ERA to 5.12 (7.94 last year). The best part about the improvement was that it was a complete team effort. We added some great guys to the team which really helped, but all of our returning player played great this year and improved greatly over last year as well. I'm really looking for to the postseason to get a few more games in before the rain starts. Even though we are a low seed, we still have a good chance to surprise a team or two! Good Luck Redmond Nine!

My Product is famous!

As you all know I work on the Systems Management Team at Microsoft. Well a company called Citrix has released a video talking about a product that I worked on about year ago. You can view it here. The product mentioned is Systems Management Server 2003 R2 along with the Inventory Tool for Custom Updates (ITCU) and Custom Updates Publishing Tool (CUPT). Also note in the video they actually show a person using Custom Updates Publishing Tool.