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Hiking Trails

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This post is not technology related, so feel free to ignore.

For those that know me or follow me on Twitter, know that I enjoy the outdoors and hiking. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, our family would normally go on several hikes a year, usually when there is a long holiday weekend or during the winter break season.

During the COVID-19 lockdown, I came to learn that my buddy Sunny Dua was doing a fun challenge with his son, 30 hikes in a 30 days (IIRC) and I thought that was such a great idea! I figure I would slowly ease my daughter into hiking, especially as she was much younger than Sunny's son. With that, I started hiking with my daughter (late July), doing one hike every Sunday and see where it goes.

As you can see from the tweet below, we really enjoyed our time together and she also reached an amazing milestone concluding 2020 with 20 hikes, totaling 100+miles!

During this time, I also kept a log of all the trails that we had completed and potential trails for the future, especially with so many options within the Bay Area. I have shared this list with friends and colleagues looking for hiking options and I realize I should probably just make it public for anyone that might be interested in checking out a new hike if you live in area or visiting.

Hiking Trails: https://github.com/lamw/hiking

As of publishing this blog post, we have completed almost 50 hikes in the past three years. As you can see, we have continued with this tradition (time permitting) and will continue to update the list of trails we complete as a family.

Total Hikes: 49 (213.61 miles)

  • 2020: 20 (103.3 miles)

  • 2021: 21 (74.92 miles)

  • 2022: 8 (35.39 miles)

2022 VMUG Advantage Community Group Buy

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It is that time of the year again, the event that you all have been waiting for ... the annual VMUG Advantage Community Group Buy! 😀


For those not familiar with the VMUG Advantage membership, it provides benefits such as access to training, VMworld discounts but also to EVALExperience, which provides you with 365-days access (non-production usage) to the latest VMware solutions such as vSphere, vSAN, NSX, vRealize, Tanzu and VMware Cloud Foundation. The EVALExperience alone is worth the normal $200 USD membership fee and is certainly one of the cheapest and easiest way to get access to all the latest VMware offerings for homelab and educational purposes.

Here are other benefits of VMUG Advantage:

  • Access to VMware Test Drive
  • 20-35% discounts on VMware training and certification
  • This 15% discount is only offered once a year through this offer
  • Advantage members receive $100 USD VMware Explore Discount (not stackable)
  • Full list of Advantage Benefits: https://www.vmug.com/membership/vmug-advantage-membership

The table below provides the respective discounts based on the quantity of VMUG Advantage membership purchases. The larger the interests group, the larger the discount.

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Quick Tip - Enabling vCenter Events for NTP (Network Time Protocol) or PTP (Precision Time Protocol) operations

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Starting with vSphere 7.0 Update 2, you may have noticed a new "Enable monitoring events" setting when configuring time for your ESXi hosts, whether that is using the classic Network Time Protocol (NTP) or the newly introduced Precision Time Protocol (PTP).

What exactly does this enabling this setting do? This was a recent question that I had answered internally and figured I would share the detail as the description may not be super clear. Simply put, this enables the publishing of different NTP and/or PTP operations as vCenter Server Events, which can then be used to audit time skews in your environment for compliance to troubleshooting or debugging.

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