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My family's favorite Chicken Fried Rice I cook.

Chicken Fried Rice Recipe Ingredients: Boneless Skinless Chicken Breasts (1-2)        Instant Rice (2-4 Cups or ~1 cup per person) Eggs (2-4) Soy Sauce (1/4 cup for boiling rice) Water (for boiling rice) Canola Oil (3-4 Tablespoons) Cooking Instructions: I prefer to use an electric Wok or Skillet to fry my ingredients, but a regular skillet would work. In a pot boil water minus the ¼ cup for the soy sauce.   Example 1 ¾ water plus ¼ soy sauce for 2 cups rice. While the waiting for the water to boil, cut the chicken breasts up into small (1/4 inch) pieces. Heat the canola oil in the wok or skillet.   I set my wok on 300 degrees. Once the water and soy sauce has come to a boil, stir in the rice, cover and set aside. Fry the chicken pieces in the oil till golden brown and then remove from the oil. (I set mine on a paper towel in a bowl or plate). Occasionally fluff and stir the rice. Crack eggs and fry in the oil mixing them good. Once the egg
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NextGen® (formerly Mirth) Connect 3.7.0 HL7 Integration Engine new installation on Server 2016 with Microsoft SQL Express 2017

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First off long time no post here on my blog, but thought this one might help other people out having difficulty in installing the latest version of Mirth (NextGen) Connect into a Microsoft SQL or SQL Express environment. In this quick rundown I will explain how I created a new Mirth Connect installation using Microsoft SQL Express 2017 and OpenJDK. Mirth Connect, now called NextGen Connect is a powerful open source HL7 integration engine with many features and a huge online community of resources and help. A big piece of the puzzle is Java.  Oracle will no longer support Java 8 and free updates at the end of 2020.  Basically starting in 2019 companies will have to license Java 11 (what happened to 9 & 10?) and the runtime be embedded or included as part of the fees.  Consumers will no longer have access to free Java runtime environment. (link:https://www.java.com/en/download/release_notice.jsp) Mirth Connect has relied heavily on Java for running.  The good part is they do s
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Thinking about updating Cisco Certifications

So Cisco has changed quite a bit over the years, and so has the certification process. I decided I would like to upgrade my Cisco skills and certifications. Thankfully I work for a company that has been in the process of upgrading a lot of our equipment to the latest Cisco Meraki gear. With that upgrade process, a lot of older Cisco, Dell, HP, and other gear is being pulled out. Having great people to work for, I asked to build a Cisco test and certification lab from the old equipment. So starts the journey of pulling together all of the equipment, taking inventory, and find out what can be used for a current lab build. I have done quite a bit of reading on different certification sites, including ones that sell labe equipment.  It seems that about 90% of the commands for the certifications tests can be done in 12.4, and if necessary, some older IOS levels. Having version 15 would be great, but that usually involves fairly new equipment that could be costly.  Even some of the au
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Bring in the Quad Core, Hardware system #8

Still out to prove I am not an AMD or Intel fan boy I bring in my two Quad core systems.  The first of which will be an AMD.  Right now with a lot of people asking about whether to wait and see if Sandy Bridge will be fixed soon and whether all the problems will truly be fixed, they want alternatives.  The other problem that people get upset about is the constant change of sockets in the Intel side where AMD is a little better at making backwards compatibility.  Already a few motherboard makers have proven you can run older Core i5 series chips in the LGA 1156 on the 6 series chipsets.  Why did Intel change the socket to 1155?  Many people believe it was to force a whole new hardware change.  I for one had not jumped into the Core series because I kept hearing of a socket change.  Intel had already did it once when the came out with the first Core chips that required LGA 1366.  People who jumped onto the X58 chipsets and boards were met with pricey chips and triple channel memory.  For
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Celeron renamed to Pentium Dual Core, Hardware system 7 and 7a

Currently the Sandy Bridge recalls are in full swing and it looks like March or later before early adopters will be getting fixed chipsets back. I was fortunate enough that someone needed a fairly inexpensive computer and preferred reliability to the latest and greatest.  Socket 775 is vastly still available and at a great value as well. The value machine was going to mainly run office software and surf internet.  Multiple cores are pretty much a given anymore and I would not recommend less than a dual core. Earlier in my blog I also spoke about the difference between the Celeron value chips compared to the more expensive Pentium, now Core 2 and Core series chips.  Intel went and changed things again in the Core 2 and Core series by reintroducing a value chip and calling them Pentium Dual Core.  Now talk about some confusion. The other pretty standard item seemed to be DDR3 instead of DDR2 which was fine because DDR3 prices have fallen.  250GB and larger hard drives are also just w
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Getting closer to the current generation. Hardware System #6

Now with Sandy Bridge out although many boards are being recalled due to a chipset bug, I have some components that are within 2 generations. The components here are close to one of the latest Socket 775 chipsets and one of the newest dual core models of the Intel Core 2 Duo processors.  Socket 775 was somewhat replaced by Socket 1366 and 1156 and Sandy Bridge uses an all new Socket 1155. Socket 775 was also the last socket that had multiple chipset vendors.  NVidia had several chipsets that ranked above the Intel chipsets.  In graphics if you wanted SLI you needed the NVidia chipset based 775 boards. Socket 775 processors did not have video integrated as well, it was still on the chipset. System Components: CPU  Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3Ghz, 2 Cores/2 Threads (Dual Core), 6MB Cache, 1333Mhz Rated FSB Socket 775, Wolfdale 45nm, Stepping A, Revision E0, Multiplier 9x, FSB-333Mhz MMX, SSE 1,2,3,3S,4.1, EM64T, VT-X Board  OEM (Dell) Intel Q45 / 82801JD (ICH10), Socket 775 2 * SA
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Not an Intel or AMD Fanboy. Hardware system #5, 5a

Up until this system all of the components have been Intel processors on Intel Chipsets.  Maybe I have spent  many more hours repairing, replacing, and upgrading Intel systems than AMD.  Possibly the amount of actual AMD hardware I have laying around is much less. I am always an equal opportunity builder and recommender when it comes to Intel and AMD processors.  Intel has been many times the software vendors recommendation and AMD always brought excellent value to the table. If the vendor recommended or only certified Intel, then that is what a customer got.  If not, I always tried to prove how valuable an AMD system could be at a better cost. AMD has many times brought innovation that made Intel rethink strategy.  The 64-bit AMD processors was one instance where Intel said no one needs 64-bit on the desktop and then went and started adding 64-bit instructions to the processors to compete. The following hardware was one of AMD's answers to Intel's Pentium 4 processors.
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