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About Shawn

I’m a sales professional celebrating over 21 Years with one of the world’s largest telecommunication/technology companies. The majority of my time is devoted to a small group of Enterprise Companies, ensuring their business goals are being supported via services and a documented strategy.

My devoted family blesses me with their love and support. I’m the father of a wonderful adopted boy, who enjoys math during the day and a mix of Legos and Netflix at night.

The motorcycling hobby has been put on hold, and pedal a bicycle instead. Other interests include unusual computing and content delivery strategies. There are still few cloud instances, services, and one remaining server representing the fun.

Most of the content on this blog will represent the small accomplishments and discoveries made along the way.

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Pushing more to the CDN

My Xenforo Site’s initial take on image proxy had it’s problems. The initial idea was that the images wouldn’t actually be on my server, but proxied through my site to it’s original source. I still prefer that approach but it had a few issues that will likely be resolved in the coming months.

For now, I’m using the new features in 1.3 to proxy the image to my server, which is almost doubling my server’s disk space utilization. However, I’ve also started caching most new attachments to the CDN as well.

Things were going well from an end-user perspective, but a few days ago I noticed that the CDN was taking full 1Gig bandwidth hits at least once per day. Also switched over to mod_expires on my server’s cache expiration settings and that also appears to have improved both user experience and CDN utilization.

Will likely move to a new server next month, using my traditional config, but definitely moving closer to a full distributed computing infrastructure.

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My First KitKat Device


For some time I’ve been dropping an older Acer 7″ tablet in my bag with a Logitech Keyboard and an HDMI cable. It was a good device, but time to move up.

Now that LTE is commonplace, WiFi-only devices had become a struggle for me. Don’t get me wrong, network is everywhere but:

  • Client sites are appropriate when solving their business problems, but receiving most family notifications is best done over my LTE
  • When you’re living life in the fast lane, there is very little time to lounge in a coffee shop
  • If your WiFi at home is wonderful, there are just too many other things to utilize than a tablet
  • LTE is faster than many WiFi enviroments

There are many attractive tablet offers, but critically few that support LTE. I like the simplicity of a native-android device and picked up an unlocked 32Gig Nexus 7 (2013), and added it to my AT&T Account.

It started updating right away after I signed in from the store, and found it convenient that most of my settings were transferred over when it automatically linked into my home WiFi and prompted me to upgrade to the latest KitKat release.

24 hours have passed since. There hasn’t been much time to spend with it, but discovered that life on a modern tablet is wonderful:

  • I can print directly to my Wireless HP Printer at home
  • Google’s Office Apps are more impressive than they were
  • It’s making my living room TV look like something is wrong with it 🙂
  • The LTE feature saves time, and the WiFi is speedy
  • I ended up removing a few auto-duplicated apps that were no longer needed
  • Larger tablet screens are very nice, but being able to hold it securely in one hand is a benefit

My Logitech Bluetooth keyboard is showing it’s age, but will continues to be effective. I’m looking forward to having it close.