Mark Turner Dot Net

This year had an interesting number of job changes. I spent ten days in China for Raritan, during which I had a day that I recently wrote was the highlight of my career. Yet, I was getting a little tired of repeating the same spiel every day for four years when I did product demos. I decided to explore other opportunities and so talked to Zenoss on a friend’s suggestion. I was fortunate to receive an offer, one that I strongly considered for over a week.
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This year was the twenty-year reunion of the Herndon High School Class of 1987. It was held at a Reston hotel fairly close to the high school.
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When this album came out I was still in junior high school and just starting to appreciate Led Zeppelin and Robert Plant. This song always takes me back to that time. The lyrics are simple but even so Plant knows how to craft a song. I love the bridge in this one.

Check out the breakdancers in the video (and Plant dancing with them). That’s pretty much the last thing I would’ve associated with this song.
In The Mood
Robert Plant

I’m in the mood for a melody
I’m in the mood for a melody
I’m in the mood
I’m in the mood for a melody
I’m in the mood for a melody
I’m in the mood
I’m in the mood for a melody
I’m in the mood for a melody
I’m in the mood
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I got a cool LED book light for Christmas. It’s small, lightweight, and very bright: pretty much the way a booklight is supposed to be. The only real problem is the packaging it came in: it’s a huge, empty plastic box.
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What a way to finish the year. I’m aching today after spending hours working in the attic during the last few days. Now that the Christmas/Halloween decorations are ready to return to storage I thought now is the time to finally double the flooring space in the attic. Its turned out to be more work than I remembered.
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I really love hobbies or projects that tie together many of my interests. One project that does this is the field of panoramic photography. It touches on astronomy, photography, mapping, math, orbital mechanics, image manipulation, spycraft, open source, and good old-fashioned duct-tape engineering. Maybe even a bit of fame, too!
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I’m working from the in-laws’ house today, so I need to access the same networking stuff I do from home. I have Tunnelblick running OpenVPN on my OS X laptop to provide access to my home and office servers from here. All that works fine for my OS X apps but it doesn’t carry over into my VMware Fusion sessions. Those sessions treat themselves as independent devices and therefore don’t route through my VPN.
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Looks like we got a total of 1.06 of rain yesterday (midnight to midnight). Unlike other rains, I wasn’t able to capture any of it in Lake Turner as I’m in Virginia now.

There is a person in Garner selling 300-gallon plastic tanks, though, and I’m considering picking up another one. Can’t have enough rainwater, y’know.

The “next generation” of Turner family reunions took place in Pine Mountain, Georgia in June. This was the first family reunion organized largely by my generation of Turners. We had a great time visiting with all the other Turners, though it ended way too soon they way these things tend to do.

Our kids have it good in that they’ve got so many cousins nearby. Its good to get them acquainted with their larger family, too, so reunions are important. From all accounts, they had a ball playing with all of their extended cousins.

We’ve decided to do these things every two years. They’ll get more valuable as we go, I’m sure.

This list naturally draws most of its material from the blog. Thus, it makes sense to recognize the posts and changes that are significant here at MT.Net.

From the propeller-head side, I migrated my blog’s software from its old Drupal beginnings to Wordpress. With this change came the addition to the archives of my very first blog posts, originally posted in some of the first primitive blogging software, bplog. I think its fun to read how my blogging has progressed over the years.
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