Email Outage

by Mike Stankavich on September 7, 2011

If you have sent me email within the past few days you may have run into a bounce message. I have been able to track the problem down to the MailFoundry spam filter appliance at my hosting provider. The hosting provider attempted to fix the problem, but still ran into issues. They have a ticket open with MailFoundry. If things don’t get resolved within another day I’ll just disable the MailFoundry service on my account for a while.

Until this gets resolved, feel free to use my Gmail address miks2u-at-gmail.com to bypass the problem.

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Typhoon Juan (Megi) Update

by Mike Stankavich on October 18, 2010

By now you have probably heard that the Philippines was hit by a major typhoon yesterday.  Here’s a link from The Weather Channel:  http://www.weather.com/outlook/weather-news/news/articles/super-typhoon-philipines-photos_2010-10-18.  While it turned out to be a non-event for us in the Manila area, the northern part of the Philippines was hit very hard.

We are very concerned for Marissa’s aunts, sisters and younger brother that live in Ilocos Sur.  They are on the northwest coast near the South China Sea, which hopefully wasn’t damaged as much as the Pacific coast on the east.  But it’s quite likely that they faced 160-180kph (100-110mph) winds.  Marissa has not heard from them as of yet.  I am hoping that we will get confirmation that everybody is OK later today.

I strongly encourage you to donate to relief efforts, as many people will have lost their homes and their livelihood.  We plan to give to Marissa’s family directly to help with building damage and crop loss as well as donating to general relief efforts.

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The Big Move Part 3: Hawaiian Interlude

October 18, 2010

    Finally things have slowed down enough that I can catch up on blogging again.  The last month has been very busy with the mechanics of the transition.  Ramping up on my new job and looking for an apartment and a car have soaked up most of my free time for the past few weeks.  I’ll [...]

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The Big Move Part 2: Preparation for Departure

September 7, 2010

I know it has been a while since I posted.  But given the amount of change and chaos that have happened over the past few weeks I think that’s understandable.  Let’s recap. Committed to a new job based on a few phone interviews. Left my job at Intel after 12 great years. Sold or gave [...]

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Moving sale 8/14/10 and 8/15/10

August 13, 2010

As part of our preparation for our upcoming move to the Philippines we’ll be holding a moving sale on 8/14/10 and 8/15/10.  If you’re around the Portland area, feel free to drop by.  I’ve put together a page listing some of the bigger items that we’ll be selling.  You can check it out here:  moving [...]

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The Big Move

August 7, 2010

The two or three people who actually read this blog might be wondering why things suddenly went silent a couple months ago.  The explanation is quite simple.  I reached the cusp of a long term goal that involved a big career change, and I wasn’t ready for my current employer to find about about it [...]

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Jack of All Trades, Master of None?

April 14, 2010

As I’ve considered how to steer my career path, I’ve been doing a lot of reading about how to build and present skills to potential customers and employers.  Experts often suggest to specialize and appeal to a specific niche.  But then other experts say that companies don’t want narrow focus specialists and that they would [...]

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Housing Crisis Redux

April 13, 2010

It’s been a while since I wrote about my housing crisis frustrations.  Thankfully I got things wound down with my property that I was selling (more details here and here).  At the end of the day, my HELOC lender refused to release liability so I ended up up filing Chapter 7.  I couldn’t see spending [...]

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Time For A Change. Career Change, That Is.

March 23, 2010

Over the past few months, I’ve come to realize that I’ve had very much the same job for a long time.  I’ve been in the same position at the same grade level with approximately the same responsibilities for eight years now.  And I had similar positions for five or six years before that. That’s a [...]

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How to Securely Access Your Home or Small Biz Network From Anywhere in the World (Part 1)

November 14, 2009

I realized as I started writing this article that I have been playing with VPN and routers for a LONG time.  Amazing how 10 years can just disappear into the rear view mirror. Anyway, to the topic at hand.  Most of us have desktop machines, servers, or both on our home or small biz network.  [...]

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