I had a when I was looking for an Attic Light, and was seeing a winch.
That's pretty awesome.

 

Nice job on the install of the lift. What is the capacity of that?

 

Yeah, lift.

The max capacity of it is 700lbs.

 

It made cleaning up from the project nice and easy. Didn't have to carry anything back down the steps.

 

Was this a kit or something? Looks awesome, wonder if they have ones I can put in my garage that are basic storage racks and not an elevator.

 

This was a kit yes. I am sure you could build it by piecing it together yourself for less but when I was looking at the garage project it was easy just to have the kit and tell them what size the framing hole needed to be.

https://www.liftspecialties.com/prod...st-style-lifts

 

A little bit of progress on the garage yesterday. The glass company came and got the glass track installed for the loft walls. Another group from the company though has to come out later this week to measure for the glass panels.















Here is roughly what it will look like once the counters are in.

 

This whole ordeal reminds me of a phrase from the Locost forum.

90% of the work takes 10% of the time.
The last 10% takes 90% of the time.

 

With the glass track in and the guy to take measurements for the actual panels coming tomorrow, I am really hoping that worst case by the end of September, I can have the loft wrapped up. Then likely a weekend for me to get TVs installed and hopefully can watch most of the football season up there then. It wouldn't make the outside problem go away but it would let me feel like a chunk of it was done. Depending on how long it takes them to cut and install the granite after they template for it is the only other variable. They are coming to template on Sept 2nd.

 

Spent last week in Vegas at VMWare Explore for work. Vegas is definitely not my scene. That said it was informative and useful.







Spent most of the weekend relaxing and watching the first full weekend of college football and the resumption of the F1 season. The weather has been absolutely perfect lately so did all of this out at the firepit TV.









After I has used the TV so much I thought I should finally get around to installing the house wrap on the inside that I had put off since I had built it. The panel I had made decided that the fact I had only glue 3 of the 17 slats in place, to make it easier to fix if I ever needed to, decided the glue was finally not enough when I went back to install it over the house wrap. Impromptu glue up had to take place then.









Not much to report on the garage front but I did at least open the railing finally and inpsect it for any obvious shipping damage, which thankfully there was none. Excited to get this installed but will have to wait till after the glass and the countertop go in. They did at least come to template for the countertop.

 

VMWare is making IT life a pain for us. They're pricing the middle market out & we're trying to find a solution/alternative to the heavy investment we currently have.
Thanks Broadcom

 

Yeah, there is a lot of pain going around for everyone, even us as a bigger entity. I am excited about what VCF9.0 brings but at the same time I know those above me making those bigger decisions might change things once our current contract runs out. They have certainly made it pretty clear they are not interested in pricing it to be competive in the smaller spaces.

 

We're on a Dell VXRail system, which is designed around VMWare.
Glad I'm not on the hook for making the decision to eat the massively increased cost for a renewal or moving to a new solution.

 

I am sorry for you on multiple reasons with that. I know it is not yet supported yet in VCF9.0 but should be by 9.1, supposedly.

The bigger reason though, is when hyper converged was the new buzzword, we were tried to be forced into the VXRail in upper management. We even bought a 5 node system and everything to POC. Then it was learned about the patching cycle or lack there of speedy patching when a major vulnerability was released and it never made it even into Dev. At least in our case I never understood that desire for it other that to say we were as we are smaller with only about 1800VMs and had completely standarized on a single config of the R7XX series. We could swap in a new host in a hour of receiving it if need because of this consistency. Manage about 70 of that identical host config across 6 locations. Two primary and minor sub locations. I still don't know how Dell gets away with their long patch cycles for the VXRail unless it has gotten better in today's Cyber threat world we live in. I truly despise the VXRail.

 

1800 VMs
Yeah, we're nowhere near that size, small O&G service company with about 500 employees. 4 node HCI with maybe 30 VMs
Works great for our use, but that's more the other side of the dept [I'm application/software, primarily].

 

That is really small for sure.

I feel like we are small. We are like a company inside of a company. Our main corporate group is around 18-20k VMs.

 

We're even looking at downsizing our VM count, moving some 3rd party apps into a single software. Would drop 4 at minimum.
I'm IT adopted [Accountant by degree], so I get a bit over my head with some of it, since I never went through the basics & the majority has been OTJ training.

 

You have been adopted then

With so few VMs, how large is your cluster even? Have to imagine maybe the bare minimum of 4 nodes I think you need for a VXRail?

I can definitely understand though at your size, how their new pricing is even more awful. At least it wouldn't be as hard to move such a hard setup.

 

Yeah, we're 4 nodes, we had the original thought to cycle 1 out & a new one in on an annual rotation. I think we had them leased, so the rotating stock made some sense then. Either that, or they were on the asset life cycle so we'd retire 1 at depreciable life end and cycle in a new host.
Much past that & that gets into the other side of my office [shared with our infrastructure/networking guy] & our boss.

 

It is supported but running mixed hardware clusters can become a mess at the same time, which is why we always do 5 year cycle and replace net new full.

 

Outside my scope at that point. We use a really good partner for it, so I assume we're getting compatible new nodes when we've cycled out.
I'm actually not sure if we ever got to the initial first swap before all this VMWare stuff blew up.

 

Updates, we demand them!

 

I am slacking. I do have a few small updates but not a ton. More car related updates these days over in Car Talk though, than garage related updates.

 

Random knowledge share. I decided I wanted a second lift jack stand. The first one I bought was from Sunex for almost $150.





Well when I wanted a second one I decided to try this one from Arcana which was half the price. They ended up coming in identical packaging except the printing down to the exact foam in the box as I had not thrown out the last one. Likley made in the same factory. So if you need any of these I might just get the Arcana one.





On Friday two weeks ago, they came to start the glass install.

 

On Tuesday, they came and finished the glass install walls install. I am really happy with how it came out. They still have to come back tomorrow to put in the door.

 

 

Looks awesome! What are those cutouts in the floor for?

 

Three are outlets and two are for potential rear surround speaker wiring. With the glass walls, there was no other way to meet code requirements for interior living space outlet spacing.

 

Oh shit, does your building code assume that a glass wall is a wall and require outlets along it???

 

I'm surprised you let them get away with that much of a gap between the glass panes

 

That is what the electrician said they do. I did not call the county to verify.

 

You can never have too many outlets.

 

I'm sure they know what they're doing, still a stupid rule...as is the case with lots of building codes.

 

All of the glasswork is finally complete now. They came on Tuesday and installed the door. Very happy with how everything turned out with this part of the project.






I am also getting started on my fall yard projects. It is a little bit behind but it hopefully we will have a mild start to the winter and I will still get 2 growing months for sure. Over the last few years, I have had a huge infestation of bermuda in my yard. It has gotten even worse during the garage project as my yard work has dropped off a bit. I decided it was time to tackle the two largest areas right now even if construction is not finished.

Two weeks ago I started with killing a large section on either side of the driveway. I have also been slowly mowing lower and lower. Yesterday was the lowest down to 3in, and then on Sunday, before I start, I will mow and bag down to 2in after I use my dethatcher so I can pickup that as well. I forget if my hand mower goes lower than that but if it does I will then mow the dead bermuda areas down to whatever the lowest it will go is.





The other side of the front yard has more bermuda in it as well but it is more splotchy inside of the fescue and will need to be more focused on spot treatment. I will deal with it next year.

 

Channeling a tiny bit of @rockstar143 & putting just a bit of the V in the grass

 

That whole space looks awesome. That said, I would run into that door SO MANY TIMES because I couldn't see it hahaha.

 

It took me a minute to see the door in the photos. Once I saw the grab handle it fit into my mind.

 

My work moved to a new renovated office and has clear glass doors, similar to these. We hosted an open house to all the employees before the move in date and on that day there had to be at least 5 people that walked straight into the door panel. Since then they have now added some decals to the glass to help see the glass pane.

I would do the same until you get used to it.

 

That would totally be me.

 

I am sure it will have dog nose and tongue marks on it in no time. I am seriously considering ceramic coating the glass on the inside of the room to aid in cleaning all of that.