Web Design

Our home network

by Neil on March 27, 2013

in Featured, Jessica, Neil, Technology, Web Design, Work

You might say we’re technies. A lot of our lives are spent online, definitely not helped by the fact that both Jessica and my professions are in information technology in one way or the other. By day I am a Network Administrator and by night I try my best to be a programmer, however my real passion lies with the hardware side of IT. Jessica is an instructional designer as well as a great graphic designer, having done her undergrad in graphic design and illustration and her masters in Learning Systems Development. She’s also trying on the programming hat for size.

WARNING: NOSTALGIA AHEAD

I have been enthralled by computers since I was 13 and our family got our first home computer. It was an ACER Pentium 1, 75mhz with MMX! It was…. awesome. I immediately got every game I could find for it through garage sales and the library. Our family was fairly poor, so almost every game was nearly free or paid for with allowance money. We also did a lot of pirating. It was too easy to “copy that floppy”. Remember when they tried to combat piracy on 3.5 inch floppy disks by not allowing you to flip the read/write slider on the back? A simple piece of tape and you were golden! Yup, all you had to do was tape over it.

Then I got my own first PC after taking a IT grunt job at 15. It was a home built PC Intel 486 100mhz with 16 (!!) MB of RAM and a great 4 meg graphics card. Awesome. That really started it all. I convinced my parents to get me a second phone line for the internet and I was off. In 1995 the internet was quite young, and if you were diligent enough you could have a field day doing anything you wanted. I hacked, I war dialed, I did everything I could and learned a lot.

LAN party anyone?

lanparty

END NOSTALGIA

Anyhow I am kind of getting away from the main point here. What I want to talk about is our home tech setup. Sometimes we get asked what kind of devices we use and why, and I wanted to have a post to point people to without boring or confusing them to death.

I want to preface this by saying that we build our own computers. Why? Because they are above and beyond better than any retail PC or MAC you can buy. People often assume that because of our backgrounds, especially Jessica’s that we are a Mac shop, or that only macs will work for what she does. That is simply not the case. The computers I have built for us are far more powerful and of better quality than any Mac she could buy for the price.

Our PC’s

Jessica’s Setup (almost 3 years old!):

My goal with Jessica’s computer build was to give her a very stable setup. Fast Intel processor that does not need overclocking in addition to plenty of speed with the solid state drive that I believe is a must in any build these days. To complete the build, I selected an IPS monitor for the color accuracy she needs for graphics and multimeda. The graphics are overkill for her profession but we are gamers as well, so game on!

Neil’s Setup (also almost 2 years old):

With my PC setup I went a bit more budget-friendly, but above all I wanted it to be stable, cool running, and quiet. I decided on an AMD build for cost savings, however I went with a very nice case that allowed for really good cable management, and a very nice water cooling system. By water cooling the CPU you really eliminate a lot of the big CPU fan noise. I built this in 2011 and it is still very quick.

To complete my build, I opted for a 120hz monitor because I do game a lot on this PC. The 120hz refresh rate makes things smooth, not only in gaming, but also in windows. The cursor and input movements are just amazingly fluid. If you have never experienced a true 120hz monitor, I highly recommend them… they are worth the extra $$$.

I expect our rigs to last us well over 5 years, and beyond that because they do allow for small upgrades along the way. Typically after 5 years a commercial PC will be excruciatingly slow and require complete replacement. Not so much with the right custom built devices.

Our home network LAN setup:

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Four our home network I decided to get a bit geeky and focus on an enterprise setup. Because by day I am an Network Systems Analyst, I tend to desire a bit more control and network analysis than an average Linksys or Netgear all-in-one consumer product will give me.

During our home electrical update to replace old aluminum wiring with new romex stuff, I had the electricians pull cat6 cabling to a few rooms so that we could house all of our network and server devices down in the basement. Storing everything in the basement not only keeps the equipment nice and cool, but it also eliminates the presence of bunch of devices sitting on shelves with cords running crazy. All of our IT is now centralized on a wall mounted rack where it stays exceptionally well organized.

The dedicated wireless access point allows us to place it in the middle of the house because it does not to be directly connected to the modem or router. Since it’s only function is to provide wireless access it really is a night and day difference when it comes to signal strength and quality. It really blows the all-in-one devices out of the water. The system also allows us if needed to place more than one access point in the house to expand our wireless network while using the same SSID and network security. It is quite slick for the price.

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We recently got our act together and purchased a NAS storage and backup system. Before we had kind of a pieced together storage and backup solution. Considering how much invaluable data we have for both ourselves and our clients the new NAS was long overdue.

Synology offers a great product with a TON of features. The Synology not only functions as a NAS but it can also be a syslog server, web server, PHP server, cloud server, music streaming server, and so much more. You can even develop your own “apps” for it. It has been well worth the money so far.

For our setup I have the system running RAID 1 with a nightly backup to an external USB drive hooked to the back of it. That gives us 1 drive failure redundancy as well as a secondary data backup. I also have our Cisco ASA sending its syslogs to the Synology so that I can analyze if necessary.

asa5505

I decided to get a Cisco ASA 5505 Firewall/Router/DHCP appliance because not only am I working on some Cisco certifications currently, but I use these in my day job almost daily. These appliances can be very powerful and rock stable if you know what you are doing, however they tend to have a fairly big learning curve. They are certainly not your plug and play home router. You should probably know a decent amount of Cisco CLI as well as Cisco ASDM and have a pretty decent knowledge of networking in general in order to have much success with the ASA. Fortunately I do, so this thing is a blast to mess around with and is very secure and stable.

In the end I feel our setup really combines some enterprise level technology and reliability with affordability. We also maximized the performance in our work rigs by building them ourselves and will incur much lower upgrade costs in the years to come since we will be able to upgrade components easily by ourselves.

I felt this post was important to write not only as a reference for what we’re doing, but because so often bloggers focus on software, apps and what computers they are using, but I wonder if they’ve given serious thought to their storage and backup needs. All data, even if its just pictures or old school papers, is worth securing for the long haul.

If you have any questions or comments on anything feel free to give us a shout below!

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Paleo Beef and Winter Veggie Stew on a working weekend

by Jessica on January 8, 2013

in Food, Freelance, Main Courses, Paleo, Recipes, Soups, Web Design, Weekend

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This weekend was all about work — tons of coding, lots of drawing, and endless ideas being tossed around. We are working with our first international client, and she is such a sweet lady. I can’t wait to hand her the keys to her new site. I think she’ll love working in WordPress, and will find it so much more effective to blog with. I love that part of our job. Unfortunately, our progress cost us most of our weekend — from Saturday morning to late Sunday night — and we literally collapsed into bed both nights. It’s never good to start Monday totally exhausted, even when you work at home.

To free up some time, Neil put together a huge pot of stew on Saturday while I went and saw Les Miserables with a friend (loved it!). It was quintessential stew weather, very grey, misty, dark and cold. He chose brightly-colored veggies and seared the beef and stirred it all together with the homemade stock we made a few weeks ago. It was ready by the time I came home, and the house smelled amazing. We scooped that last of it out Sunday night, and since we have enough veggies leftover, and he’s putting together another batch tonight to get us through the next two days.

Ingredients:

1.5 pounds chuck roast or “stew meat”, cut into 1-inch cubes
2 shallots
3-4 medium carrots, peeled and sliced into bite-sized pieces
2-3 medium celery stalks, sliced into bite-sized pieces
3 parsnips, peeled and sliced into bite-sized pieces
1 leek, sliced thinly (white part only)
4 cloves garlic, peeled and whole (I smash a bit with the end of my knife for flavor)
1 medium sweet potato, peeled and sliced into bite-sized pieces
1 14.5-oz can organic diced tomatoes
3-4 cups stock of preference (we used chicken stock)
1 bay leaf
2 sprigs fresh thyme
4 tablespoons cooking fat (we used a combo of coconut oil and almond oil)
1-2 tablespoons coarse salt (to taste)
1 tbsp ground pepper

Directions:

  1. Preheat oven to 300 degrees.
  2. Salt cubed beef and set aside.
  3. Saute celery leek and shallots with 1 tablespoon cooking fat (lightly salt) in a medium saute pan over medium-high heat for 3-4 minutes. Remove and add to empty dutch oven off to side.
  4. Add carrots and parsnips to pan. Saute 3-4 minutes with 1 tablespoon cooking fat (lightly salt). Remove and add to dutch oven.
  5. Add sweet potato to pan. Saute 5 minutes with 1 tablespoon cooking fat (lightly salt). Remove and add to dutch oven
  6. Add beef to the pan (in batches if necessary) and saute/sear on all sides (get some good color on them). It should only take a few minutes. Remove and add to dutch oven.
  7. Pour 1 cup of stock into saute pan to deglaze, then mix back in with the rest of the broth (we held ours in a large glass measuring cup) and add to the dutch oven.
  8. Add can of tomatoes, bay leaf, thyme, pepper and salt to taste to dutch oven.
  9. Stir contents of dutch oven until combined. Place in oven and bake for 2-3 hours, removing and stirring 1-2 times if desired./li>
  10. Serve alone or with bismati rice.

Makes 4-6 servings.

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We’ve had parsnips before, but for some reason, Neil really loved them in this stew. I loved the way the sweet potatoes softened and kind of melted into the broth and attached themselves to the other veggies and meat. All in all, it was the perfect way to brighten a cold, dark winter day.

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A few observations from the newly working-from-home

by Jessica on August 16, 2012

in Web Design, Work

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Sorry for kind of disappearing this week. I was out-of-town for my first work retreat, staying in a beautiful lake house. Pinch me right? Once or twice a year, they rent a house and spend 4-5 days meeting, working through new ideas and spending time together. I didn’t know what to expect, but it was wonderful. We completely filled the 6-room house, and even though this was the first time I’ve met a lot of my coworkers in person, in a weird way it felt like home. There were kids running, strategy sessions brewing, hundreds of post-its stuck to just about every surface and plenty of good food and drinks shared and consumed.

Team development art from the day

I’ve now been working from home for two months and some change. It’s been a whirlwind of change and adjustment, but with this trip under my belt, I’m finally feeling a little closer to being settled in. I’m finding my place within my team and a unique contribution to offer. I still have plenty to learn, but I think I’m getting there.

A few people have asked me about my experiences working from home, and although I’m still fairly new to it, I have made a few somewhat amusing observations:

My blow dryer is dusty

Because I don’t see my coworkers outside of a rare Skype video chat, I’ve almost completely broken up with my hair dryer. I just let it dry on its own time, and then style it at some point in the day.

I’m more practical, or possibly just a cheapskate

While many people mused that I’d have to fight the urge to stay in my pajamas all day, I’ve actually had to fight the urge not to wear my gym clothes all day. Since we go to the gym around 5:00 every evening during the week, I’ve fallen into the habit of just pulling on my (clean) gym clothes in the morning in an effort to save laundry. I guess that might be considered lazy, but I see it as overly practical. Maybe once it cools down and i feel like going out more during the day…

I sleep less, but I sometimes sleep when you’re probably at work

Neil jokes that I probably take naps throughout the day, but so far, I’ve actually slept less. I wake up every morning with Neil so our hours somewhat align, but I typically end up working later, because in my mind, even though we work the same hours, I feel like I don’t have anywhere to “be” and if I get on a roll, I can knock back an extra 30 minutes or hour in bed. I’ve been good about not doing it more than once or twice though, and that’s because I stayed up til 3 AM.

I’ve probably stayed a little too close to home

Although I have the flexibility to make my own schedule and kind of set my own rules, I find that I really don’t leave my house that often throughout the day. I think part of the reason has been the summer heat, but the other is that it still feels like I’m playing hookey and doing something wrong.

I work more hours, are you surprised?

On the heels of working later into the night, I find that overall, I’m putting in a lot more hours — but stressing a lot less. I don’t know if it’s dogs in the office, or plenty of snacks and sunshine, but it just doesn’t bother me. In fact, I feel as if I’m working less than I did before.

While some of those might not sound so good, there by far have been more positives:

  • I feel like I have more energy and zone out a lot less.
  • I don’t spend my day rehashing or putting out other people’s fires, leaving more time for the new and experimental.
  • I have more “me” time, and my breaks no longer feel like escape attempts.
  • I actually get to talk to more people every day.

We ran out of room in the house...

During the retreat, our team developed a mantra and a guiding statement. While the process was difficult and frustrating at times, the moment it all clicked was amazing. Here we were, standing around a mini-van COVERED in Post-it Easel strips, and we were almost screaming. It was such an energizing moment.

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So, I find myself in a somewhat unique niche. While I have a full-time employer, I feel like I live the day to day life of a freelancer. I love the freedom and versatility to work in the way which best suits me best, but I love still having a team to learn and share a journey with. Now if only I could keep my house clean too…

Ever notice any quirks about your job? What is your favorite part?

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A few observations from the newly working-from-home

June 27, 2012

Sorry for kind of disappearing this week. I was out-of-town for my first work retreat, staying in a beautiful lake house. Pinch me right? Once or twice a year, they rent a house and spend 4-5 days meeting, working through new ideas and spending time together. I didn’t know what to expect, but it was [...]

Read the full article →

Ch-ch-ch-changes

May 23, 2012
Thumbnail image for Ch-ch-ch-changes

I took a stroll around campus today as groundskeepers were filling every pot, planter and bed with the most beautiful summer flowers I’ve ever seen. So many colors, life bursting forth everywhere. Our campus is a botanical garden, so every change in season brings a new scene of new and changing life. On Monday, I turned [...]

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Friday Link-Up

February 24, 2012

I keep wanting to make this a regular feature of our blog. We come across so many awesome things on the web throughout the week that we think it’s a disservice not to share them. For instance: Memes I’ve been laughing at this video (above) all week. “Is that Jason Khalipa?” Hate peeling garlic as [...]

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Busy First Week in the Office

June 16, 2011
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First off, thank you so much for sticking with us this week even though we’ve been completely absent online. It was not our intention but between me starting a new job and then us jetting out of town in the middle of the week for an awesome soccer game (that had us driving home at [...]

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