Someone else recognized my plight and politely attempted to assist me by jumping the car. However, I was already doubtful that this would even work since I had just replaced the battery last month. The guy who was helping me out hooked up the jumper cables to my battery terminals and asked me to crank the engine again. Still, I was met with just a click. By now I had accepted my fate that after 9 years of faithful service, the starter was dead and that my car was going home on the back of a flat bed tow truck.

There we were, my daughter and I rode shotgun in the front of Rodney’s truck being chased by my car which could be seen out of the back window of the truck. We arrived at my house, and my car was gently rolled off the back of the flat bed into my garage where she waited for me to get her back on the road.

In the morning, I woke up early and headed down to the discount auto parts store to pick up a new starter for the car. I came home, jacked up the car and replaced the old starter with the new. I slid the key into the ignition, to my delight I hear the car purring away like a kitten. My car started instantaneously with absolutely no delay! I returned the old part to auto parts store for my core charge and off to work I went. I pretty much had all this done before people get their first cup of coffee finished.

By doing this maintenance myself, I had saved at least in the neighborhood of $140+ in labor and the extra time of dealing with someone else to perform this labor while probing for a ride to get back to the shop once it was done to pick my car up. On top of that, shops like to put an extra charge on the part so a starter that cost me $130 probably would have ended up full retail at $250.

Once you buy a car, learn it well enough to be able to inspect the important items, change the oil and do minor repairs. The more stuff that you can fix on a car, the more you will save. Just about every car on the internet has a forum or enthusiast website dedicated to it that is stocked full of freely available information on how to work on your car. Rather it be changing out a headlight to doing an engine rebuild, someone has done it and put it on the internet. If you are lucky enough, you might even be able to find yourself a service manual freely available on these websites which enhance the definition of the scope of work you want to perform. I have had my car for almost 9 years now and have never had to take it in to get repaired. I have learned how to pretty much do anything I need to do on my car including engine rebuilds off of the wealth of resources on the internet. If you are not comfortable with using the internet, go take a course at your local community college.

The cars with less bells and whistles on it even add to the simplicity of the car repairs since it will have less points of failure. Some of the worst cars you can buy are luxury cars which tend to use bleeding edge technology and bunch of electronics. The more of a base model car that you can get, the better! The point of a car is to get you from point A to point B. For those who think that the car is the point, then they should be willing to invest the time to learn how to work on something they are so passionate about.

If you depend on a car, it is undoubtedly one of the most cost consuming item in your budget. Paying off a car is the greatest way to save money and the next would be maintaining the vehicle yourself. Although, I will add that no matter what even if you are paying the mechanic, it is still cheaper to maintain a car than it is to keep buying new ones. It is worth the investment of your time and patience to learn how to do so.

About the photo:

I took this picture of my Mitsubishi Eclipse overlooking the mountains from my trip up to North Carolina that I took towards the beginning of 2010. I went up there specifically to drive US 129 out of Deal’s Gap on a a segment called “The Dragon”. The Dragon has 318 turns in 11 miles and was a great thrill to drive!

Nikon D90, Nikkor 18-200 vr2

At some point in time, if you began using the bundle, you should have unzipped/untar’d it to a given location, for our servers we used /opt. For simplicity sake, I will just state that liferay is rolled out to a directory called “liferay” beneath /opt. Your directory may be “liferay-portal-5.2.3-ee-sp4″ or something to that effect. Beneath /opt/liferay, you should have 4 directories, “deploy”, “ee”, “data” and the tomcat directory encoded by default with the specific version number that was bundled with your install.  For the purposes of this update will refer your current directory of the bundled Tomcat install $TOMCAT-OLD and the one you want to upgrade to $TOMCAT-NEW.

Download the latest version of Tomcat 6 here: http://tomcat.apache.org/download-60.cgi

Stop the current running version of Liferay/Tomcat.

Unzip apache-$TOMCAT-NEW to the same directory as your Liferay bundle “/opt/liferay” then rename to the same naming convention (removing “apache-”).

Edit $TOMCAT-NEW/conf/catalina.properties
Search for the line:

common.loader=${catalina.base}/lib,${catalina.base}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib,${catalina.home}/lib/*.jar

Replace the line with this:

common.loader=${catalina.base}/lib,${catalina.base}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib,${catalina.home}/lib/*.jar,${catalina.home}/lib/ext/*.jar

Edit $TOMCAT-NEW/conf/server.xml
change each instance of

redirectPort="8443" />

to

redirectPort="8443" URIEncoding="UTF-8" />

(three instances, one of which is commented out)

Copy setenv.sh from $TOMCAT-OLD/bin to $TOMCAT-NEW/bin

Delete all contents of $TOMCAT-NEW/webapps

Copy the contents of $TOMCAT-OLD/webapps to $TOMCAT-NEW/webapps

Create directory $TOMCAT-NEW/lib/ext

Copy the contents of $TOMCAT-OLD/lib/ext to $TOMCAT-NEW/lib/ext

Create directory $TOMCAT-NEW/conf/catalina/localhost

Copy the contents of $TOMCAT-OLD/conf/catalina/localhost to $TOMCAT-NEW/conf/catalina/localhost

Review the $TOMCAT-OLD/bin/catalina.sh, you may have custom environmental variables. This is a sample chunk of what gets moved to $TOMCAT-NEW/bin/catalina.sh

CATALINA_HOME=/opt/liferay/$TOMCAT-NEW/tomcat-6.0.29/  
 export CATALINA_HOME  
 PATH=/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/bin:$PATH  
 export PATH  
 JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18  
 export JAVA_HOME

and append with

CATALINA_BASE=/opt/liferay/$TOMCAT-NEW/  
 export CATALINA_BASE

(Be sure to make sure all instances of $TOMCAT-OLD have been replaced with $TOMCAT-NEW).

Test the new install of tomcat by running

/opt/liferay/$TOMCAT-NEW/bin/catalina.sh

If you are starting Tomcat automatically, copy the new catalina.sh over to /etc/init.d/ and the existing symlinks from the proper run levels will be updated as well.

If you have any issues with this process, please feel free to comment below.

Every so often, we will come to a point in a game where are down 5 points and there is a minute left on the clock. In that time, one of the team member’s communicates, “oh man we lost”. Immediately, it seems that now there is one true fate for the team, and that there is no use in pushing on to finish out strong within the game. Why continue to grip the controller ever so tightly to get in those last few sweet moments of mowing down the other team to score the final points of the game. This member of your team, “Negative Nancy” has sealed the fate for the rest of the team.

I must confess, there was a long period of my life where I was a Negative Nancy. I always though that I was seeing the world for what it really was, and that I was being a realist. In my mind, people who were positive were clueless and hopeless. I used to think that these people were out of touch and wanted to stuff their head in a hole and solely live through bliss by ignorance. However, that realm of thought was just immature on my part.

When I began looking at life through the lens of positive and uplifting thought. A whole new world of opportunities began to unfold. Whatever direction you want to head to, no matter how impossible the odds by going into it with a positive attitude totally changes outcome. I’m not saying that a positive attitude alone will always equal success, but it will get you much further than self defeating negative thoughts.

The most common time this happens, is when you break from the norm of popular thoughts. For example,if you want to leave your high paying job to seek out self employment, you are immediately met with negativity. “How stupid can you be for leaving that nice job to go paint pictures?!”.  Another example, someone writes a story from the heart but is met with ridicule from spelling and grammar mistakes instead of focusing on the story itself. Further yet, when your accomplishments are met with negativity because they just were not good enough. In all cases, you must hold a positive attitude and emancipate yourself from other people’s concerns. People that are still in this state are simply no healthy and not good for nurturing your spirit to push forward in life.

Simply put, most people do not want to see you succeed. It is evident in society, that doing the right thing and being successful makes you evil. If you are financially successful, you are in the cross-hairs of other people that want what you have. Which is odd, instead of approaching you to see how you became successful so they can learn, they would rather ostracize you and dismiss you with a random generalization.

The solution, is to surround yourself with other healthy people that are interested in lifting you up just as you are there to lift them up. Every one of us has different dreams or goals that we may not necessarily agree with, but we should be right behind each other providing a support system. We need to be cheerleaders for each other, especially when your chips are down so you can pull out strong and maybe even end up winning the the game when there was 5 points down and less than a minute left on the clock.

There was a time when writing this blog would have been impossible for me. I would have been defeated off the bat with negative thoughts. I tend to be very critical and hard on myself. As a testament to my faith in positive attitude, I have been publishing my photography and my thoughts here even though I am admittedly very intimated by what some people might think. At the end of the day, I am pushing to do something where the Negative Nancy’s will comfortably stay on the side lines in a prison, paralyzed by their own negative thoughts.

In the great words of Yogi Berra, “It ain’t over till it’s over”, stay positive and keep focused on what you are doing until the game is complete. Seek out the positive light in others, lead by example to spread a positive attitude with others.

About the photo:

I took this picture before the sun even began to peek over the horizon in Mount Dora. The myriad of cloud patterns behind the iconic Florida palm just hit me. I experimented with some different shutter speeds to get different effects with the clouds, however this was my favorite.

Nikon D90, nikkor 18 200 vr

At the elevation of 148 feet, this city is one of the highest places above sea level which is evident with the amount of hilly terrain that it is set on. The architecture of the buildings adds a certain village charm which has served as a winter retreat since 1887. There was even a lodge which looked like a big doll house set across from a park setup for lawn bowling.

If you are looking for a place to get out to take the spouse or family for the day to take in bite to eat, art or entertainment, this is a great destination!

About the photo:

These are still some of my favorite photos.

I absolutely love this section of stores and the lighting wound around the railing of the second floor cafe. I sat down on the sidewalk across the street and shot this with a tripod.

The yellow and silver topped dollhouse was home to the lodge 248 Free Masons. I am finding these masonic lodges littered all around Florida.

Nikon D90, Nikkor 18 200 vr

It is like I am living the life of Bill Murry in the movie “Groundhog Day”, but like a machine, I am doing what I’m programmed to do. In this day in age, we continue to keep doing this until we are worn out and can no longer keep pushing forward.

When I first took the job, I was excited that I was going to have a very secure place to work to insure the integrity of my family through retirement if I wanted. This excitement comes from the fact that I have a difficult time holding a job for one reason or another for extended periods of time. I do not believe that it is in my DNA to work for other people or be assimilated into the belief that I should depend on just one group to control my fate throughout life. A few years into working this job, I felt that I was due for a promotion, so I opened Tearstone Performance reselling automotive parts to fill in the gap where I was not getting a promotion. I was aggressively going after an increase of pay without having to beg or plead the institution I was working for.

I have learned that with money comes problems and that there may be something to living a simpler life. Most people grow up with dreams of having a nice car someday or having a big house or even being rich. The bigger house you have, the more money it is going to cost to heat that space, repair things when they go wrong and taxes you are going to have to pay on that property. The more expensive car you buy, the higher your insurance, repair costs and in most cases fuel will be also. On top of this, usually it is done by getting even deeper in debt slaving yourself away at lining the pockets of banks with extra money from the interest accrued which could have gone to buy twice to three times as much of what originally paid for to begin with.

The original reason why I was struggling to become more successful and build a better paycheck is to accommodate for all this extra stuff I have been accumulating. I was in debt so bad at one time, I was praying everyday that nothing would ever happen to me while I was working this job. I opened up Tearstone Performance for the soul purpose to help bail us out of the debt we were continually accumulating. I was a slave to work to pay for all my stuff.

Fast forward to today, after working intently from my very good friend Kim Staudenraus, a David Ramsey financial counselor, that debt is dumb. She coached me through pulling myself up by my bootstraps and charging head first into paying off this debt to get my head over water. Today, I have no credit cards and no car payments. I only owe money on my house which using the same principles as before.

So now, being debt free I am evaluating the need to work for someone else at all. The American dream is to focus your life at learning a marketable trade to eventually seek employment for someone else to make them rich so you can buy a bunch of meaningless junk that emotionally degrades your quality of life. I cannot help to feel that if I walked away from this career how many people would scratch their head to say “wow he walked away from a killer job, working at a killer company”. When I am lying on my death bed, I doubt I am going to say “only if I would have worked more”.

Sitting here at this company watching other employees fight tooth and nail to gain the admiration of the management in hopes they will move up in the company. These same people make this company their life by working late and taking time from their family and kids. They are caught in this rat race to pull out the stops to make more money to support a life that they continually grasping for constantly sacrificing time with their growing children they cannot get back. I am punished with reprimand because other people make these sacrifices and I do not. As I get older and begin to understand the big picture, that it is time to truly sacrifice things such as a big house or a new fancy sports car in exchange for focusing on being home and watching my children grow up. It is time to start working on getting out of this rat race and into a place where I can be in the driver’s seat of my own destiny.

I am sure there are many people that may feel guilty about the course their life has taken or may just be unaware of what they are giving up. Perhaps the greed of amassing a bigger income to have nicer things forces both parents to work while the kids fend for themselves at home. Even those who do not have kids, sacrifice their relationships to focus on their own careers instead of each other. This country in general has it’s priorities screwed up and admittedly I am no exception for falling in the trap.

The path less traveled would constitute securing a means of self employment which would give the flexibility of time without having someone manage my time for me. It would be nice to be able to go to my daughter’s open house at school or to a doctors appointment without having to be chastised by management about creating a pattern or taking too much time out of work on taking care of personal matters.

After the long day is done, it is time to go home. Within that time, the family is preparing for tomorrow to do it all over again.

Live simple, live happy.

About the photo:

This was a segment of track that lays down next to Orange Avenue in downtown Orlando.

Nikon D90, Nikkor 18 200 mm vr2

Eventually I imagine as long as the Orlando area continues to keep growing, this area will also be filled with large multibillion dollar buildings such as the one I’m standing on for this picture.

This was taken on top of the Dynetech Building downtown on the 29th floor. Used a f/10 with a tripod.

People have gone so far as to terminate their land line in favor of just paying for a wireless cell device. They put their whole world and trust in this, even in the even of an emergency. Imagine if as a result of a disaster we lost these precious towers and we were to rely on another form of communication?

A lot of people believe radio or the radio hobby is dying or dead. Amateur radio hobby is still shared by over two million people around the world. Unbeknown by most but still willing to license anyone of any age that can pass the standard technical exam. It’s a hobby and service where amateur radio owners can communicate through various radio to other amateur radio owners for recreation and public emergency coordination.

What separates a licensed amateur radio operate from someone who can just pick up a walkie-talkie or CB is that amateur radio has more freedom to work with frequencies and output power to communicate over longer distances. In one night, one man can communicate with 100 different places over seas to other amateur radio hobbyists or communicate with a friend on the other side of the city.

I primarily communicate on a 2 meter band with a local repeater to talk with other amateur radio owners around the city. Normally, when you communicate with someone on a frequency, they also have to be tuned into that frequency to listen. Each frequency acts as a chat room for all parties involved, depending on the frequency you may only be able to go a certain distance or be blocked by hills or mountains as some of the lower bands are more line of sight oriented. In order to accommodate a larger chat room, antennas that are usually mounted centrally in the city are mounted high enough to increase the availability to other operators to talk to others through longer distances. Repeaters receive the transmission and retransmit it out to everyone else who is tuned in. The most popular repeater here in orlando is 147.120 operating on the 2 meter band.

To communicate over seas or at greater distances that require bouncing your signal off of the atmosphere (or ionosphere to be more precise), to follow the curvature of the earth. This would require separate equipment than what you would use to talk locally with.

I officially appeared in the ULS database as a new General HAM on 2/23/10 and go by call sign “KJ4SLR“.

For more information, check out the FCC Amateur Radio home page: http://wireless.fcc.gov/services/index.htm?job=service_home&id=amateur

About the photo:

This particular antenna was directly across from the Orlando Amtrak train station. I have a fascination with antennas, and for the most part they do not photograph well for exciting pictures. However, this one had a lot of equipment on it and the sky painted a nice backdrop.

Nikon D90, Nikkor 18 200 mm vr

Nikon D90, Nikkor 18 200 mm vr

After some experimentation, what worked for me best was a f10 stop with a few seconds of exposure time.

I also learned first hand, that cheap $35 tripods are not adequate enough for the weight of a DSLR. The Nikon D90 is 1.5 lbs, and the Nikkor 18-200mm lens is 1.2 lbs so the camera ends up being roughly 3 lbs. A cheap tripod you pick up at your local mega retail store is fine for maybe a pocket size point & shoot or perhaps even for your kids to use around the house for setting a repel tower for their GI Joes.

My style is to shoot low, so I’ve never extend the tripod to clear a guard rail before. Atop a 29 story building, the wind adds a new ingredient to the challenge of getting a concise clear shot that a small aperture and longer shutter speed. These tripods simply are not made to handle the weight of the camera, it nearly felt like it was going to fall over with the extended weight of the lens and was excessively wobbly. The only successful shots were from collapsing the tripod and mounting it on a portion of the roof that had a deep low wall top.

Taking it all into consideration, it does not make sense to use a cheap $35 tripod with a $2500 camera. It is no different than buying a fantastic $1500 lens and defeating how awesome it is by using a cheap $20 filter. Lesson learned.

Nikon D90, Nikkor 18-200mm VR2

For this example, firefox was the affected package.

[root@myserv ~]# up2date firefox
 
Testing package set / solving RPM inter-dependencies...
########################################
error: rpmts_HdrFromFdno: MD5 digest: BAD Expected(81c2d6e93ee1f7ace498245b09bd61e8) != (aaa9b7a5ca1c69d470b3a2d3ea67fdc1)
firefox-3.6.7-3.el4.x86_64.  An error has occurred:
Unable to fetch requested Package
See /var/log/up2date for more information

This error is triggered from a package that is broken, and is not uncommon to happen.

To correct this, go into /var/spool/up2date and remove the broken package.

[root@myserv ~]# rm /var/spool/up2date/firefox-3.6.7-3.el4.x86_64.rpm

Run up2date again, success!

[root@myserv ~]# up2date firefox
 
Testing package set / solving RPM inter-dependencies...
########################################
firefox-3.6.7-3.el4.x86_64. ########################## Done.