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Yule tree is up, 5 gallons of Blackcap Mead bottled

Erci rocks! She bottled the first five gallon carboy of Blackcap mead today while I cleaned the dining room and foyer, then we decorated the tree together and watched the cats pretend to be forest predators by stalking each other and us from under the branches of the artificial tree. We’ll have to get more bottles to bottle the other carboy (cranberry honey mead). black cap mead
Yule tree 2008 We’ve been in our house a little over six years now, and the bamboo floors are holding up fabulously. I do not see a need to replace any of the bamboo despite dancing, martial arts, maille armor, and use as a workshop. The cork is still fine, though I can see it needing replacement in 4-6 more years; which means it was better than linoleum by that much (it cost the same and we estimated it would last the same, it’s done better than expected). The wool rugs in our bedroom has been a small disappointment, mostly because the dye is fugitive in spots. All the berber rugs (some blend including chemical fibers) are all holding up well.
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2008 12 21 snolan Christmas
House
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Deeply Concerned about Obama’s choice of Rick Warren

Rick Warren is an obnoxious slime, that is pretty much self-evident to anyone capable of independent thought. He is, at first calculation, a horrible choice to have speak publicly at any inauguration (even a conservative one). The fact that Obama has chosen him to speak at this inauguration has mystified me for several days. It just does not make much sense.

Here is Obama’s explanation:

Simple link for those who don’t get embedded videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syIEoSIJHis

I am beginning to form a new theory about it, not necessarily one I agree with on timing, but I suspect that Obama is concerned about those Americans who cannot think for themselves, and there are millions of them. If Warren speaks in the same public forum as Obama and many others, and pulls his usual sociopathic ass-hattery, then perhaps some of those Americans will see for themselves Rick Warren’s message of hate and cherry-picking of scripture. Perhaps by shining a bright light on the contrasting messages in full public view we can get some decent public discussion going about these people who preach hate. Obama might be sending the message that we all need to start pulling our own weight. We supporters need to actively combat ignorance and stupidity, and not remain passive to the aggressive onslaught of hate-mongers in America.

Full Disclosure: I actually own a copy of Warren’s book “The Purpose Driven Life”, given to me by a very confused brother one year after he discovered I was Buddhist. The brother is still very lost and confused and thinks I am damned. The book is horrible beyond belief, but I keep it to remind me how messed up huge portions of our country’s people are and how easily they can be misled.

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2008 12 20 snolan News
Politics
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My employer is selling off some old servers

If you can use any of this stuff – ping me; I am sure my boss will take almost any offer.

We have three 1U rack mount servers, each powered by a single core Intel P4 Xeon @3.00GHz with 1024K L2 cache, 1GB of memory (two 512MB PC3200 sticks filling two of four DIMM sockets on each server), each has two SATA controllers, and ATA/IDE with one 80GB drive (Seagate Barracuda 7200.7). Each has an IDE controller with a 24x CD-ROM (note: that is NOT a DVD-ROM) and two ethernet ports (1 GigE, 1 FastE). Two of the three have a floppy drive. They each have three PCI slots and an AGP slot. These servers are LOUD and intended for a server room and not anywhere near a human being.

We also have the previously mentioned SuperMicro chassis (3U high in your rack) with 2 Intel Xeon 3.06GHz processors (4 cores), 4GB of memory (2 sticks of 2GB DDR333 and 6 open slots), 8 Ultra320 bays with hot pluggable sleds, and 7 Seagate Cheetah ST373307LC drives at 10,000rpm with 68.36GB each (the 8th drive failed), Adaptec 2010S RAID PCI card, two ethernet ports, 6 PCI slots (one filled with the RAID card), VGA, Serial (db9), parallel, 2 USB, 2 PS/2 (keyboard and mouse), 3 power plugs (needs two of the three), CD-ROM, floppy.

A pile of old Sun Sunfire gear (V210, 280R, V440 series stuff) is being scrubbed and inventoried now.
Ping me if you need some server gear, lovingly used. You can arrange a visit with the stuff if you like; we are in Herndon.

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2008 12 18 snolan Computers
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New Palm or iPhone as a PDA?

So, according to the “Palm Pins Its Hopes on Nova” article in BusinessWeek, Palm is about to release a new PDA operating system. I am interested because I still use my very old Palm Tungsten C device regularly, despite having an iPhone 3G now.

The iPhone 3G is a fantastic mobile phone (perhaps the best I have ever used), and it is spectacular at a couple of traditional PDA applications (Contacts, Safari, Email), but it’s Calendar is not quite as good as the old Palm Calendar yet (though it comes very, very close), and as for Notes – well, that is the main reason I continue to carry my Tungsten C. The iPhone 3G simply sucks as a notepad. No cut and paste feature, no global search feature, and though typing on the touch screen is acceptable for a quick text message or short note, it is painfully frustrating for any serious note taking. The iPhone really should simply allow Bluetooth keyboards to connect to it; they could even start with Apple’s own Bluetooth keyboards for Macs and expand to 3rd party ones later… sigh.

So – as all portable devices have a limited life span due to wear and tear and natural use, I am very interested in what Palm is doing next and hope that Nova is good enough, though I am not holding my breath.

I also hope Apple, or a 3rd party, develops a secure method for cutting and pasting from one application to another on the iPhone, and that global search for text strings gets deployed soon.

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2008 12 17 snolan Personal Comments (1) Permalink

Visiting Family in New York State

Steve (my brother) and I drove up to Rome to visit Mom and his daughters who live in Utica, Herkimer, and Camden. There was a winter snow-storm in Norwich and Utica Thursday night, but thankfully the roads were clear by the time we drove through Friday night. Beautiful scenery though with all the fresh snow and trees with one side coated and other side bare.

My nieces are very able to create a lot of noise, warmth, and good cheer. I am getting together with some high school chums (Terry, Melissa, Ant, and Paul) later tonight for a few hours. My old stomping grounds of Utica, New Hartford, Oriskany, Rome, Verona, and Westernville have changed a lot in many ways (mostly the steady decline in population, revenue, and business) and remain exactly the same in others (the local radio station is still playing the same rock playlists I grew up with in the 1970s and 1980s).

Most of all it’s cold. Daily highs of 19 degrees F are warm for this time of year here, so long as it is sunny and calm, and people just trudge around the piled up snow and admire the frosted trees; but my blood has thinned out living in Virginia/DC/Maryland since 1990, and it feels very cold to me. I do not miss having snow melt off my boots and get on the floor where I take them off, nor the crazy parking when no one can see guide lines in large parking lots because we are all parking on top of an inch of packed snow and ice. The frosted trees are pretty, but the brown slush on the roads and next to them takes away from the ambiance.

A pack of family is in the kitchen now making “double fudge balls” and it’s a pleasant sound. Mom’s partner is watching a football game in the front room, and the remaining nieces are all playing with holiday gifts in the back room. The cat, who is now quite elderly, is curled up in his bed, and all seems right in the world.

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2008 12 14 snolan Personal Comments (0) Permalink

Ouch, first expensive repair on my Prius

So that dragging feeling I recently noticed, and the lower gas mileage, and funny metal clanking noise were not random; turns out I busted a front axle, boot, and UV joint. Dealer is estimating over $840 just for that repair, and my 45,000 mile maintenance is due as well (another $300-$400). Ouch!

Guess there is no new Linux server in my immediate future.

At least it is getting fixed before the long drive to Rome, NY to see my Mom.

Ah, hint – if you owe me money, and have not been too worried about repaying me at all, could you at least worry now, or pay a little? You know who you are.

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2008 12 09 snolan Cars
Personal
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Grumble, Intel Atom 330 is close, but not quite there

I have been quietly searching for a low power, quiet, affordable dual core x86-64 processor/motherboard combination that supports Virtualization Technology so I can load Xen and Linux instances for some home servers. Intel’s new Atom 330 comes very, very close; but lacks the Virtualization support and only comes with the hot and power-hungry 945GC graphics chipset. Integrated graphics is not a problem for me, as I am planning to make this a mostly headless server, but we could go much smaller and lighter than the 945GC.

Fudge, more waiting for the perfect solution…. So close, yet so far…

Update: So it turns out that if I have no need for Windows or any other operating system that is not aware of virtualization, the Atom 330 will work fine for Xen and Linux! Woo hoo! Now I have the difficult decision of do I wait for a board with no graphics or more efficient graphics, or do I go ahead and grab one of the cheap motherboard/processor combination boards now?

Happy Dance!

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2008 12 08 snolan Computers Comments (5) Permalink

What do you do with a SuperMicro server?

My company has me scrubbing data off a few years old SuperMicro server with 4 Intel Xeon 3.06GHz processors, 4GB of memory (2 sticks of 2GB DDR333 and 6 open slots), 8 Ultra320 bays with hot pluggable sleds, and 7 Seagate Cheetah ST373307LC drives at 10,000rpm with 68.36GB each (the 8th drive failed), Adaptec 2010S RAID PCI card, two ethernet ports, 6 PCI slots (one filled with the RAID card), VGA, Serial (db9), parallel, 2 USB, 2 PS/2 (keyboard and mouse), 3 power plugs (needs two of the three), CD-ROM, floppy. The catch, it burns a whopping 3.6 amps when it is idle!

Question is, what do you do with such a machine? It’s odd that a circa 2002 linux server is already considered obsolete because it burns so much power (it’s also quite noisy). It was only a few years ago that I was paying around $400 a drive for the Seagate Cheetahs even without mounting sleds!

I have a sad feeling that the parts are worth more than the whole.

2008 12 05 snolan Computers Comments (0) Permalink

Whoa! Terminal.app is tabbed now?!? Cool!

I have no idea how this slipped under the radar, but the Mac OS X Terminal.app, which is probably my most heavily used application, can be used in tabbed mode now! Many friends and co-workers switched to iterm or other terminal programs for this feature prior to Leopard (10.5) because the included Terminal.app only supported one session in each window, but apparently, since 10.5/Leopard, Terminal.app can be tabbed as well. Now I can run many UNIX shell sessions in one window.

On my huge desktop screen this will no matter, as I’ll probably continue to just fire up dozens of windows; but on my little laptop, saving the screen real estate will be a big help. Thanks Apple!

In other happy news, screen rocks for detaching from running shell sessions and re-attaching later.

    screen
start long running jobs...
CNTRL-A d

exit

...
enjoy lunch or a frothy beverage
...


ssh back into your connection
screen -r

    there are your running jobs… still running or finished and happy to feed you all your output

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2008 12 04 snolan Computers Comments (2) Permalink

What are you watching these days?

Right now the most riveting television we are watching is Heroes, it is not nearly as good as season one was; but it is still far better than most television. This season has been particularly rough on some fans as many heroes turned into villains rather easily. I guess they want to show that power corrupts. Hiro and Daphne

Friends turned us onto Fringe, which is vaguely reminiscent of X-Files. The jury is still out, but it has promise as a series and the weird science is fun.

Of course we still regularly watch Firefly on DVD, as it is the best television ever. I listen to The Signal and Firefly Talk regularly on podcast because Firefly is just that good.

We are catching some Dr Who, sporadically, though sometimes I feel it has jumped the shark, always has very witty dialogue and I still recall the original Dr Who series from childhood with fondness. Likewise, we sometimes catch Torchwood for it’s amazing dialogue (same team as Dr Who and Coupling, which I still miss deeply and profoundly) and the eye candy of John Barrowman as Captain Jack!

Our background noise when we are doing other things are all the syndicated reruns of:
CSI Miami, Angel, Charmed, CSI New York, CSI (Vegas), and sometimes Law and Order. We do not go out of our way to watch them, but if they are on when we are working they entertain but do not distract from homework or work at home. It’s also how we compromise between Erci’s taste for icky pseudo-science and super-natural documentaries and my taste for silly romantic comedy movies.

We are looking forward to another season of So You Think You Can Dance; I hate reality shows, and the silly contest rules means you cannot take the competition seriously, but the dancing is fantastic. Absolutely stunningly fantastic.

Dollhouse promotional photo I can’t wait for Dollhouse, another Joss Whedon creation starring Eliza Dushku of Tru Calling and Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame.

We’ll probably give Battlestar Galactica a watch when it comes back on, though I have mixed feelings about it, my partner is enthusiastic about it. It will be fun to watch them reveal my friend Johnny Hunter as the 12th cylon (ok, so that’s just a joke folks).

We just finished first season of True Blood on HBO, which justified a subscription to HBO this Fall all by itself. It is a vampire/lycanthrope/genre series based on the books by Charlaine Harris. It is raw and gripping the way several of HBO’s television series have been (Carnivale, Rome, Sopranos, the film series John Adams) and it has Anna Paquin in all her gorgeous glory and amazing acting by Rutina Wesley (Tara), Sam Trammell (Sam), and Ryan Kwanten (Jason). True Blood on DVD will hit the streets on May 12th, 2009.

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2008 12 03 snolan Fun
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