I recently purchased some new Dell Optiplex 755’s and ran into an issue with one of my most tried and true tools, Ghost. I have used Ghost for a very long time but there is a growing issue with SATA drivers that rendered using ghost useless since it wouldn’t recognize the DVD-R drive. In a quick rush I started to research alternatives and ran into Windows Deployment Services (WDS).

I used it’s predecessor (RIS) a couple times in the past and really didn’t like it, so I was walking into this project with the notion that I could dislike it. I can say that ended up being farthest from the truth. Since most of my machines are PXE enabled I can boot off the network, and with a couple tweaks to my boot image (I needed to seed some network drivers into it) I have a great WinPE booter to work with.

I’ve been transitioning my images to WDS now which was a great starting point since I needed to start creating images with XP SP3 and Vista SP1. I can honestly say I am not looking back at Ghost.

So it’s that time again that Xaia and Kian stepped into the studio and got some photos done.

I had to fly out to the Salinas/Monterey CA area to do some upgrades to our network at Mazda Raceway Laugna Seca track and of course I had to take some photos of the scenery out there. The days I were out there were a bit foggy and hazy but still mother nature produced some great things to look at.

We went to a friend’s birthday party yesterday and had to get some new shots of Xaia and Kian.

It’s been quite a while since I posted anything political on my blog, hell the last post I had Hillary was still in the race. Since then Obama became the presumptive nominee, Tim Russert suddenly passed, and some people have been getting mad that Obama has been turning a bit more “towards the middle” for the upcoming general election.

First some are up in arms that Obama is now wearing a flag pin. For the record he has never said he won’t wear one, but that for some people wearing one “became a substitute for, I think, true patriotism.” With him wearing one now he gives the GOP a little less ammunition to try to use against him.

Now FISA is in the spotlight once again, and Obama’s reluctant support for the new bill has been criticized by many as a complete reversal of his earlier stance, so much so that Obama wrote a blog post stating his position. If he is elected only time will tell if he ensures that the executive does not follow the same path that the Bush admin has done over the past 7+ years.

The latest bit is on Iraq. His recent comments that “original position” on withdrawal has always been that “we’ve got to make sure that our troops are safe and that Iraq is stable.” And that “when I go to Iraq . . . I’ll have more information and will continue to refine my policies” has been taken by some as a complete reversal. On the contrary he has always said that he wants an stable Iraq but not at the cost of American lives and that we have to have a safe withdrawal of one to two brigades a month.

So we shall see what the future holds. There are plenty of Obama followers that are watching closely, including myself, that will hold his feet to the fire when necessary.

Been a while since we had time to take some photos. I have been in the middle of a major work migration and I just got back from a 3 day stint in Road Atlanta, Ga.

See what we have to deal with?

I am still following the Democratic nomination race and didn’t have much to post up since it has seemed for a while that despite Hillary’s desperate attempts to get the nomination are futile, her rhetoric had calmed down some and with the win in Oregon Obama’s path to clinch it is pretty inevitable. But Hillary has outdone herself once again and it dives into the more personal truths about her.

On May 22, she had repeated some comments that went largely unnoticed in March of 2008 about one of the reasons she is staying in the race. Nearly verbatim this is her most recent comments:

“My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. I don’t understand it,”

Yep, she has invoked (again) the spectre of an assassination against Obama. She since says that her comments are merely saying that since her Husband won the 92 nomination in June and Bobby’s assassination in June, both being in California, are just a milestone that “campaigns last this long” is just a poorly worded smoke screen. This is all similar to the repeated attempts to discredit Obama on numerous grounds, but this one is a particularly epic blunder. Superdelegates will not look kindly to these comments as someone who is ready to lead a nation, but a person desperate to win.

I have said it before and I will say it again. Hillary Clinton has really poisoned this year’s Democratic nomination. She had this smug sense of entitlement to win the nomination, packed her election team with cronies that mimics Bushs’ cronyism, and just rode the “wave in inevitability”. But she did not anticipate the surge of Obama support and neither did her team. After Super Tuesday, and a winning streak that any professional sports team should be envious of, her chances to win by the delegate count became almost non-existent and signs of desperation began to surface. The goal posts continue to move, pledged delegates became segregated into “primary delegates” and “caucus delegates”, and we kept on getting reminded that all delegates did not have to adhere to the public will.

Now, some real reasoning has surfaced on why she is still in, a reasoning that disgusting to bring up, and even more disgusting that she has not outright apologized about it. Our sick state of politics has bread this “everything to win” mentality that Hillary has thoroughly embraced, while Obama has stayed above the fray time and time again when the mud wrestling commenced.

Hillary has proven to the world she is not fit to lead, she cannot inspire a nation to rise out of the mess that eight years of Bush, and 30+ years of dogmatic rule has brought to us. And now with the continued desperation of her comments to attempt to convince people that she is entitled to the Democratic nomination, she has essentially sealed her fate as a person ruined by politics and unable to transform herself beyond that dogma that has spoiled our political landscape.

Been a while since I’ve updated some photos of Kian and Xaia but it’s been a busy few weeks.

I haven’t been able to post much of late thanks to a lack of time. The daily grind of work has been insane the last couple weeks thanks to us switching over to a new pipe (from 1.5MB to 4.5MB) to our CT office and switching over to a hosted VoIP solution with a company called Smoothstone. The transition went pretty smooth considering and as of Thursday night the majority of things had finally completed. Over the next couple months I will keep an eye on the system and give a real work view of what they offer.