Life is a State of Mind

So it turns out I have led a rather spoiled life, racking up system time on big-endian systems from a variety of UNIX vendors… I am baffled by some of the little oddities of x86 architecture.

I’ll buy beers for the geek that can help me get my Norhtec Microserver GP+ (SiS 55x series x86 chip set) to recognize all 512MB of memory I just bought for it and installed. For some reason both the BIOS and the OpenSuSE 10.3 operating system I am running only see 247MB of the 512MB SO-DIMM. This probably has something to do with the silly extended memory architecture, but I am baffled.

Any help?

Erci and I have some pretty amazing good fortune/karma lately. We came home from work to find all the lights on (a feature of our lights is that events can trip an ALL-ON signal to all the X-10 controllers in the house and turn on all the lights). Typically this is from the alarm being tripped, but the alarm was not tripped. Nor had we lost power (sometimes the brown-out will cause the X-10 controllers to think they got a signal).

A little annoyed we went around shutting off lights, which meant we paid a visit to the laundry room (that we ordinarily have not been to until the next round of laundry in a few days). There was a mysterious hissing noise and that turned out to be a leaking washer hose! No puddle yet, it had apparently just started leaking!

She suggested we shut off the water, finish our dinner while it was hot, then fix the plumbing. Calm Sutragirl. Great idea. After some pretty good take-out Thai food from Grand Thai and Sushi (606 and 50), we got out the necessary tools and fixed the hose connections. She rocks…

I am thinking of a month ago when I caught the 30 gallon fish tank just starting to leak, and I am very thankful both leaks were caught so soon, before any real damage happened.

I am about to find out if there is such a thing as a free thumb drive. Buy.com and Google Checkout have a deal going where you can knock $10 off the price if you sign up for Google Checkout when you buy something from Buy.com.

Last week a co-worker (you rock Ben!) found this sweet deal on 1GB thumb drives for $10.24, and he used the $10 discount to get a 24 cent thumb drive. It works great. I was too busy to join him and half the team in getting the slick little devices.

This week the price is lower… $10.00 even now, and the discount still applies.

That’s right…. you can get a 1GB micro thumb drive for free, as in beer.
Kingston 1GB DataTraveler (mini-migo edition)

I love having a house full of people. We have the La Belle Winter Gathering going on right now, and that means 12 overnight guests (including Erci and me), 3 guest dogs, and 8-10 additional daytime visitors each day. We’ve been singing, learning about the medieval church, discussing the chest building project, and catching up. I suspect that we’ll have some Western martial arts drill, some pourpoint and/or gothic fitted gown fittings, and possible a field trip to a museum.

Erci, being an introvert, is a little stressed, but she loves the food prep for so many appreciative people and showing off her aquariums. Bailey is a little freaked whenever the dogs (two rescued greyhounds and vizsla hound) come to the main level to go outside, and he only handles the small children one on one, though he does that very well. I have been loading medieval music into the server and adding it to a smart playlist.

We lost power at the house at 12:55 this morning. It came back on just as I was calling to notify NOVEC at about 4:15, but went off again at 4:20. It came back on again at 4:36 and the house is starting to warm back up now.

Brrr…..

Bring warm pajamas if you are visiting us soon, just in case… and perhaps a flash light (we have several, but you can’t have too many).

Made an interesting discovery… the gas fireplaces have electronic controls… which means no power prevents a change of state. If they are on when the power goes out we have a little heat in two locations. If they are off… no joy… Guess we need to get a backup generator.

At least the aquarium sumps are all large enough to handle the loss of power.

Weather forecast is for gradual clearing up and no more precipitation, but continued cold nights and just above freeze days.

Herndon is getting really huge (~1.5″ each) flakes of light, fluffy, perfect for snowmen and snowballs, snow.

It is coming down thick enough that I cannot see the other side of the toll road from my employer’s 7th floor plate glass windows that over look the toll road directly.

A lunch time drive to one of our remote data centers and lunch was hairy-scary as Dave’s Subaru slipped around (controlled slides) the streets of Sterling and Herndon. Northbound 28 is a parking lot, BTW.

I like snow… but this will play hell with this afternoon/evening commute.

We expect 4″ and have about 2.25″ now. Time to break out the snow-blower at the house…

For the last few years I have always wanted something that was shown at Macworld San Francisco by Apple. Last year it was the Apple TV that lets me watch internet content on my big screen television from my comfy chair. Most expos they release 3-5 new products that are interesting, but not personally compelling except for one. This year Apple showed three compelling new products that I want now.

The most revolutionary is a little gadget called Time Capsule. This device is a network attached backup disk (NAS), Wi-Fi base station (WAP), gigabit ethernet switch/router, and USB printer server all in one. Two capacities: 500GB and 1TB for reasonable prices. This makes Time Machine on several machines back up to one big shared drive. I am getting one of these for the house, and can see Apple having trouble keeping them in stock.

I have wanted a smaller and lighter laptop for many years. I even briefly experimented with a Fujitsu Lifebook B142L, and the hardware was cool and light, but Windows was an unacceptable operating system so I have avoided all the Windows based PC ultra-lights (most of which have very good hardware). I have a 12″ PowerBook G4, and I like it a lot… but even though it is small, it is quite heavy (over 5 pounds). It has many things built into it’s shell that I rarely use… (optical drive, cable bundles, modems, etc). So the showing of the brand new MacBook Air is a long awaited dream machine come true for me. I want one very much. I will wait a little, and get a few questions answered, but I will likely upgrade to the lovely little machine fairly soon. I know that smaller and lighter is not for everyone, but it is definitely for me and for many people like me.

The third compelling new device is the re-launch of last year’s Apple TV, with a pretty major software update to handle movie rentals and flickr and .Mac photos. The software update will go into the older AppleTV devices to with an upgrade due in a couple of weeks, but I want the larger (160GB) capacity model as our 40GB one is filling up regularly. I love my current AppleTV and get plenty of fantastic content for free off the internet every day. Adding movie rentals is not compelling for me, but being able to hit photo galleries online will free up the internal disk space that had photo slide shows until now.

There is also an iPhone update (Erci is playing with that now, the big question is will Notes be able to sync with the Desktop/Laptop), an iPod touch update, updates to QuickTime, iTunes, and some other software. The new location finder on the iPhone maps application is amazing, GPS-like navigation without GPS reception, and it works!

Egads! Now I sound like an Apple fan-boy… but I am not… these are just practical innovations.

Last August we went to Maui, and I never web published the photos.
My trial .Mac subscription makes it so easy that I finally decided to publish them, enjoy.

My .Mac Gallery

So we have the new 120 Gallon aquarium up and running, we have seen most of the fish and shrimp this morning, but we are missing one of two neon gobys, my six-line wrasse, a watchman goby, and a pistol shrimp.

I took a few photos, and they are up on the experimental .mac site, wow that was easy. I may have to subscribe to .mac regularly. Trivial to publish photos!

Full Gallery

I just finished reading The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and it is excellent reading and really grabs the reader emotionally. Highly recommended. The graphic details will transport you to Afghanistan and then the Bay Area, and the events are captivating and disturbing. They challenge the reader to think about their own reactions to life’s challenges.

In other news, we finally migrated the livestock from four small marine aquariums into the new big tank. The fish are freaked out, but we hope they’ll relax once they get used to the new digs.