The conversation with Fran made me think later about the summers my mom made me write a “journal”.  She use to make me sit down everyday for 30 min to write down what happened the day before or just a short story.  I use to kick and scream that I didn’t want to do this…it took away from my fun time, but in the long run it did make me a better writer and I did come up with some real good short stories and it helped created my “voice” and writing style.

What has kept me from writing as much as I had planed back at the beginning of this website?  Has it been lack of time, lack of topics, or just being to lazy to do it?  I am not sure what the issue is but I need to get back to it and write more, because it makes me relax and feel better.  So I hope this is the beginning of a change and I can take my 10 minutes a day to sit down and write something whether it’s about my day, an article about some topic or just the opening paragraph of a story I might write some day.  So wish me luck and I hope you enjoy it.

On Saturday November 5, 2011 I went to my first WordCamp in Philly. It was a good conference and the price was right.  The conference cost was $20 and the parking was $14 so a full day conference for $34 is a good deal.  So for my $20 I got an ok t-shirt and a full day of talks on how to make WordPress better as well as how to make my blogging better.

<rant>
Now for the down side of the conference….the WIRELESS Network! WordCamp was held at Temple University and you would think the wireless network of Temple could take the load of about 450 people.  The network kept dropping throughout the day.  This is the sort of thing that is a BIG pet peeve for me.  I know that I am supposed to be there to learn new things but I also like to be able to put what I am learning right into effect on a test site and if the wireless is down I can’t do that.  The other thing about the network that got me a little upset was that the network ports weren’t “open”.  I don’t use standard ports for my SSH services on any of my servers and because the network had only port 80 open I couldn’t get to my servers. 
</rant>

Other then the Wireless Network the conference was great.  I was able to hang out with my buddy John Lemasney for the day and catch up and hear what he is doing with WordPress and what’s going on in his life.  I am already putting some of what I learned from the 2011 Philly WordCamp into effect on my clients sites. 

So if you work with WordPress you need to go to a WordCamp.  To see if you have a WordCamp in your area check out WordCamp Central.

I really don’t how to get a mentorship relationship set up or how to find a person that wants to be my mentor.  I know that LOPSA has a great mentorship program going, but it’s mostly on project by project basis, but I don’t need that at this point.  I am looking for a mentor to guide and point me in the right direction on improving my work life.

So if you have any ideas on how I can find a mentor or are interested in becoming my mentor please get in touch.

I am hoping to make more time to write more posts and keeping things documented on what’s been going on and what I have been working on. 

So till the next post happy summer days to you.

My uncle and I are meeting on Monday for a quick breakfast and picnic planning.  We have some new ideas for this year for the kids that should make things fun and exciting.  I am looking forward to this years picnic more than usual since we have a few more people helping with the planning and work this year.  I am still going to run the 50/50 and the seed spitting contest. I love seeing my family and hanging out and just taking it easy.

In the last few weeks I have been made the committee chair of the LOPSA Education Committee.  We are in the middle of getting the training schedule and trainers together for OLF and OLFu.  I also stepped up and volunteered for one of the empty board seats on the LOPSA board.  Last night I had my first board meeting.  I have gotten the feel of how things work on the call and got some ideas that I need to flesh out to help fix some of the issues that are plaguing LOPSA.  It also looks like I will be going to a face to face board meeting in August.

As well as the picnic and LOPSA, work, LUG/IP, LOPSA-NJ and PICC I have been working on a new web site with my friend John LeMasney.  It’s going to be a food based web site that will explore the making, buying, cooking and eating of the food of Central New Jersey. We want to be the premier destination for those interested in Central New Jersey food.  I hope to go live in the next few weeks.  We are looking for writers who have a passion for food in Central New Jersey. So if you want to write for us send me an example of your writing and a little bit about yourself to wbilancio@centraljerseygoodfood.com. 

So some family news Avery is now a senior in high school and has her drivers license. This is great I don’t have to drive her all over the place to her friends and dance or back to school, the down side is I don’t get to spend as much time with my daughter.  Otherwise every thing is going great and I am looking forward to a hot humid summer.

When Gmail came out of beta, we embroidered the Gmail logo onto sweatshirts for the team. Any given day in the office, a couple of people are wearing them. When other people asked us where they too could get their very own Gmail sweatshirt, we didn’t like replying with "Oh…they’re not really available, it was just something we did for the team," so we made them available in the Google Store.

Back at LISA ‘09 in Baltimore, I had a sit down with one of the other NJ System Administrators and we discussed what was the problem with the system administrators group that we belonged to an how to help fix it.  The problem we saw that the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA) had was getting there name out and getting new members.  So out of this conversation over a few beers as well as pulling in another fellow NJ SA we came up with the LOPSA-NJ Professional IT Community Conference 2010 (PICC ‘10) to be held in New Brunswick, NJ on May 7th and 8th. 

We came back from Baltimore and jumped right in by finding a location and picking a date and forming the committee to work on getting the conference off the ground.  We have gotten 2 sponsors so far, 10 trainers and training classes, 3 keynote speakers and are now working on getting the Invited Talks and submitted papers together.

The training classes range from how to write better documentation, how to better manage your time, disk virtualization, automation with Perl as well as a class on automation with Powershell, as well as IT Policy writing and the tools to move from being a junior system administer to a senior administrator and more. 

The 3 keynotes we have scheduled are David N. Blank-Edelman on Friday night giving his "Through the Lens Geekly: How SysAdmins are Portrayed in Pop Culture?", Tom Limoncelli on Saturday morning and Eden Haber closing out the conference on Saturday afternoon with his “System Administrators in the Wild, What We’ve Learned from Watching You!” talk. 

The conference schedule is made up of 8 Training class on Friday and 2 on Saturday.  On Friday night will be the Conference Dinner and then the opening keynote followed by a movie. We haven’t gotten the movie figured out yet.  Saturday will also have the invited talks and submitted papers as well as a room set up for unconference topics.

Saturday will start with another keynote and then followed by the papers, invited talks and unconference tracks.  It’s shaping up to be a great conference.  We are hoping to get at least 150 local system administrators to attend.  If you are a NJ/PA/NY System Administrator and are interested then check out the website http://www.picconf.org and save the dates May 7th – 8th 2010.  Oh yea registration for PICC ‘10 opened up yesterday so to register go here.

Thanksgiving started for me at around 8:30 in the morning while I got the smoker ready for the big bird cook.  I actually used The Minion Method for the Charcoal burn.  Using this method kept the temp at a constant of 250 degrees for the whole 5 hour cook.  The turkey had been marinating in a red wine marinade sine Monday.  It came out of the marinade a nice dark purple color.  After the smoker had leveled out to a steady temp the Turkey was put on the grate at 9:00am.  I then moved back inside to start work on the Rye Bread Stuffing.  This turned out to be a great stuffing.  After getting that in the oven, it was time to start on another new recipe for Smoked Sausage Jambalaya another recipe that was a hit for dinner.  While working on all of these new recipes I had a pot of Cranberry BBQ Sauce cooking up, which was talked about a lot last year and was requested to be made again.  Other then making gravy and un canning the canned jelled cranberry sauce onto a plate I was really done cooking by 1:30.  My cousin Tim and family showed up around 1:45 and then it was a constant flow of family arriving till about 2:15.  I took the turkey off the smoker at about 2:15 and let it rest till about 2:45 and handed it over to my dad to carve while I got the rest of the food on to the table.   We finally sat down by 3:00 and the food was passed till about 4:30 as well as the great conversation.  The turkey was perfect and moist and had a great smoke ring around it.  The last person left around 8:00 and I was finally able to sit down and relax and to start thinking about Christmas dinner.

Friday was a day of working at some side jobs and going into work for a bit……but dinner was a treat, we did another pizza off at my Aunt Bea’s house, but with a twist…we did white pies only.  We got pies from Top Road Tavern & Pizza, Fedelos Family Pizzeria, Abruzzi Pizza & Cafe, Kings Pizzarama, Palermo’s III(Ewing), Limoncello’s Pizza.  The winner for the second year in a row for the Bilancio Pizza Off was Palermo’s, it now holds the title in both the Tomato Pie division and now the White Pie Division.  It was a fun night just hanging out talking to everyone. Dean brought some beer he had just bottled that day.  It had a great taste but it will be better after it sits for a few weeks in the bottles.  It was an early night because I ate so much pizza that it just made me tired.

Saturday morning started with me heading to my Aunt Bea’s to hang out with my Uncle Fran for a bit, so since I go there early enough I got a home cooked breakfast which was nice.  We all headed our separate ways for a bit to meet back at the house for dinner.  Which consisted of leftovers brought over from my house from Thanksgiving as well ham from Bath Packing.  Dinner was great and of course the conversation was good to.

It was great seeing my uncle Fran and family since it’s rare that we see them much since they are up in Michigan..tried to talk them into coming back for Christmas but since the snow will be flying by then I doubt we will see them till the La Vigna Picnic in July.

Well time to go and see about Christmas dinner now….

To see all the photos from the weekend head over to here.

The end of July always has the La Vigna Family picnic and that always means a lot of work for most of my family, getting the games together for the kids and getting the property cleaned up and ready. This year was no different…well yea it was…it rained most of the week before the picnic so most of the work was compressed into Friday. Thursday was the worst of the rain and of course that was the night most of my cousins and I went to see a concert at the Blueclaws Stadium in Lakewood, NJ.

The bill consisted of Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Bob Dylan. It was an interesting show. My cousins Tim & his wife Meghan, Henry and Ira all enjoyed the show in the rain. Henry, Ira and I spent all of the night down on the field just talking through Willie Nelsons set and then rocked through John Mellencamp. Bob Dylan came out and totally confused me. The band he has is great and sounded tight, but then Bob starts singing and I couldn’t understand a word he said, but that is the mystery that is Bob Dylan. We enjoyed the whole night rain and all. It was good to be at a concert with my cousin Ira who we don’t see enough of and when we do it’s not long enough.

The day of the picnic turned out great even though it was a little bit hot, but the people that made it had a good time. I shared the announcing and running the games with my 2 uncles, Dean and Fran. It was fun running the water balloon toss and of course the watermelon seed spitting contest. We raised some good money selling this years calendar and Dean and I caused some controversy in the family with the 50/50 this year. So I say that the 2009 La Vigna Picnic was a success and we are already planing the 2010.

Carolyn has had the surgery on her foot so they could get some samples of the bone to see if there is any infection in the bone. We haven’t heard yet back about the lab reports. We have been back to the doctors many times so they can change the dressing. So we hope to get a negative report back about the infections so they can close up the wound and we can move on to the fall without any more foot issues.

Avery is driving now…..with a licensed driver in the car of course. She is getting better each time we go out, so I think if we keep her schlepping Carolyn all over the place while she is not allowed to drive.

Well that’s it for now…not much going on with me other then work and more work and Karma.