MAmisano.com

Our sweet beautiful boy turns 1 today! It’s hard to believe that 1 day before his birth Michelle and I were simply a couple and the next day we were a family. I can not express how profound and blessed an experience it is to be a parent. I always thought I knew what it was about before he was born but there is simply no way I could have guessed how significantly my life would change for the better. Every day I pause and think about my family and how lucky I am, I am perpetually smiling on the inside.

The transmission in the Tribute failed on us last week, on our way back from dropping off the Contour to its new owner, lol. The band for 2nd and OD broke due to excessively high line pressure which means I was only able to drive with 1st and 3rd gears. This appears to be a common problem with this automatic transmission which has been used in other Ford products such as the Contour, Cougar, Mazda 626 and of course Escape. $1900 later and the transmission has been rebuilt… looks like I sold the Contour just in time to get money for this It’s also a good thing this didn’t happen when we drove to and from South Carolina 2 weeks ago for my Cousin Sandy’s wedding!

I found some nice information about tuning FeeeNAS 7.x from a few sources last week.

A blog post HERE made by Learned By Error details some settings to use for tuning FreeNAS for increased network performance. That post combined with information from the FreeBSD Wiki article called ZFS Tuning Guide and a U.S. Department of Energy article called TCP Tuning Guide – FreeBSD Tuning helped me determine the optimal tuning settings for my system. Prior to the TCP settings I was only getting around 25-30 MBps between my PC and the server. Now, with the new settings, I am getting up to 80-90 MBps (bursts) with common speeds of 55-60 MBps.

Here are the settings I currently have under System -> Advanced -> sysctl.conf

Well, I deviated slightly from my previous home server plans. I am using FreeNAS (based on FreeBSD) as the operating system which runs from a USB Flash Drive. The storage drives are arranged using the ZFS file system which has very high performance and redundancy. The software includes Samba support which allowed me to configure it to use Active Directory integration for access control. All in all I am very impressed with the performance of this free open-source software. It does take some technical know-how to configure correctly for optimum performance but I wouldn’t have it any other way

After 11+ years of ownership, I decided to sell my 1998 SVT Contour E1. I had grand plans (listed in previous posts) for the car but with the arrival of Alexander my priorities have shifted. We picked up a used 2001 Mazda Tribute (twin of the Ford Escape) earlier this year as a family vehicle and we also have the 2004 Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec V. The need for an older car like the Contour diminished as did the desire to spend time and money on modifying it. Last month I mentioned it was for sale to my friends and a few weeks later it was sold to someone who could really use and enjoy it. The sale was definitely difficult since I have owned the car for 1/3  of my life and it was purchased just after meeting Michelle. I take great joy in the fact that the new owner really enjoys the car and will get practical use out of it for the foreseeable future.

Alexander has been on the verge of crawling for the past few weeks. Well, this past Monday (August 9th) he officially started to crawl. Now we are in the mode of finding out exactly what he can get to and trying to make the house “baby safe”. The best part is seeing how happy he is and his non-stop laughing when he is exploring his surroundings. I was lucky enough to capture his first time crawling on video and will post it up here when I get the chance. I don’t think this stage is going to last long though, he is already trying to figure out how to stand up!

Well, I finally went ahead and built a new home server to replace my current Athlon 64 X2-3800 powered system. Here are the specifications of the new system which I am in the process of installing Windows Server 2008 x64 SP2 on.

• AMD Athlon II X2 245 Processor
  • Dual-Core 2.9 Ghz, 65watt maximum power consumption
• 4 GB DDR2-800 Memory
• Biostar TA790GXE Micro-ATX Motherboard
  • On-board Audio, Video, Gigabit networking
  • On-board 6 SATA ports which support Raid 0/1/0+1/5 levels
• Hard Drives:
  • Operating System: Hitachi 80GB SATA
  • Storage: 3x Samsung Spinpoint F2EG 1.5 Terabyte
    • Configured in Raid 5 Array with a total of 3 TB of usable storage
• Operating System: Windows Server 2008 Standard x64 SP2

Michelle, Alexander and I went up to Northport on Saturday to take a nice relaxing stroll. We hung out on the docks for a while watching the endless parade of boats enter and leave the harbor. After that we walked over to the playground where Alexander went in the swing and played in the sand. Check out the video of Alexander in the swing!

Click here for Videos

If you get the IFC channel then you should try and catch a show called Z Rock. The show just started it’s second season and is original and very funny.

Z Rock’s IFC web page: http://www.ifc.com/zrock/

Well, after 5+ years and 51,000 miles I have finally added a performance part to our Nissan Sentra SE-R SpecV. The first modification I made was replacing the stock exhaust manifold with an XS Power 4-1 Header. Everything else is stock with the exception of a short-shifter installed 2 years ago. Performance of mid to upper rpm range is noticeably increased versus stock with a definite improved pull to redline. The unfortunate side-effect of the new header is a definite rasp from the exhaust under hard acceleration. I guess a cat-back exhaust will be needed sometime in the near future

Stock exhaust manifold versus XS-Power header

XS Power 4-1 Header for Sentra SpecV