click

She has

nice earrings.

Why oh why do I

Keep fucking up.

--Neil Young.

Man's best friend

By my side

When death is my bride
and I have nowhere left to hide,
wrapped in her quiet embrace
I'll caress her ashen face.
Together we will remember
a life so sweet and tender,
so quickly gone and yet forever
I'll wish that there were more.

--original

Young, Dumb, and In Love

When I was younger (i.e. college) I used to lie in bed all night long talking long distance to a girl in another city called Mary. This, mind you, was back when long distance calling actually cost money.

Anyway, we had a thing going on for a number of months. We'd take turns driving the 250 miles or so on the weekends for visits.

But back to the phone thing.

It wasn't like we actually said much. By 3-4 AM you were so tired all you really did was listen to the other person breathe on the phone. I guess then that was enough for me. I specifically remember one time after a 10 hour call telling this girl on the other end of nowhere 'I hear birds'....because it was sunrise.

Of course nothing lasts forever. One Christmas she flew off to New York and got engaged, so after that nothing was quite the same anymore.

More data, please

I ran some diagnostics on those two failed hard drives. Basically the hard drive manufacturers put out a set of tools that let you determine if the drive is really bad or you're just smoking some bad crack.

The tests showed one drive dead, the other fine. I added the theoretically good drive back into the raid array and it seems to be ok.

We'll see.

When data dies

I'm paranoid about losing data, so I've spent quite a bit of money feeding that fear. My current computer runs an adaptec 3805 sata raid controller, with 6 250G drives set in a raid 6 configuration. Basically raid 6 means you'd have to lose 3 drives before your data went 'poof'. I also have an external 500G backup drive that I create images to.

Well, somehow the controller alarm was turned off, and I had a failed drive for who knows how long. That was pretty dumb on my part. I should have set up the storage manager agent to email me on events.

Anyway, one drive dead, the other throwing bad blocks... basically all bad news. I messed with it a bit until I was satisfied that the drives were indeed failing, then went online and ordered 2 more replacements. It's money I don't have to spend, of course.

If the array goes partially down, the controller will do a rebuild in the background on boot. Basically it uses the parity calculated for the data to rebuild the data. Everything is fine and good until windows gets involved. On boot, windows defaults to checking the disk if it thinks there is a problem. The issue with this is that it fucks all your data before the parity checks are finished. Windows was taking forever to boot so I walked away. Later, of course, it had decided to check the array and started screwing up the data. It would have been nice if the default was NOT to check the data.

I ran a new backup as soon as I found the failed drive, so I'm OK, but it is still annoying.

This Mortal Coil - Song to the Siren

Sunday

Another Sunday in paradise.

Well, it's likely that this week will not suck as much as last week. I may even take some days off. I do have one non-final office action to look at today, but hopefully that won't take too long.

I was also thinking about getting a tree. One problem with the new career and job is the huge pay cut. It's temporary, but being temporarily broke as dirt for 6-9 months is still broke. Basically it means I have to NOT spend 2-4 grand per month. How I'm supposed to do this is still something that I have not quite figured out yet.

I AM working out this morning. Yesterday I goofed around till about noon and then had to meet Jeff and Mel for a movie. So far it's only 10am and I may actually make it.

Yesterday morning I spent about 4 hours logged into the company server in Boulder and updating it. I was magically elected the IT guy after solving some authentication issue on day one, and now it's all my problem. I don't mind too much, because computers have always been easy for me. The only issue is that I had 4 years worth of patches to apply to the domain controller, and every one had me convinced I'd fuck the thing up and get my ass fired. The funny part about remote server management is that you HOPE the thing reboots and comes back so you can continue what you're doing. If it doesn't, you're driving to Boulder to be on-site, which wasn't what I had in mind either at 6am or at midnight. The server is set up to email me on events which are abnormal, and a restart is one of them. In a way I felt like NASA with the thing on Mars, wondering if it was still alive while waiting for a reboot. Of course this part isn't even my real job. I wasn't even an IT guy before this, I designed electronic control systems. I guess you get elected to do what others don't have time for.

I finished my first two patent applications on Friday. Both were pretty straight forward, but honestly kicked me right in the nuts. I guess that is normal. It ended up being a lot harder than I had expected. Luckily for me two out of the three office actions I needed to file on Monday went away for various reasons.

I know what I should be doing today around the house, project wise, but what I want to do is absolutely nothing at all. Maybe I'll feel more ambitious after 45 minutes of sweating at 24 hour fitness. We'll see.