Got a call sometime around 12:30 from the shop that has my car. They had just put the car on the lift to do a final look for the leaks they were fixing and such. When my fancy alarm locked the keys inside the car. So I had to find someone who doesn't fill out a time card who'd be willing to take me to my house to grab a spare and then to the shop to drop me and the key off so I could deliver the key and pickup my car... But I've got my car back power steering leak fixed and transmission has been "serviced" as well.
Since I've got my car back and was pretty much out of clean clothes I did laundry. At the Laundromat some woman was using SEVEN dryers! I was a bit dumb struck and thought damn what a rude evil bitch and considered putting my stuff in hear hers when she was loading/unloading/checking one of her many loads then if she said anything just calling her names and mentioning the SEVEN dryers that she was monopolizing. I didn't though.
Car would have been ready if only they had the filter for the transmission. So no car tonight. Gonna ride the bus to work. I think I will shower tonight before bed then roll out of bed dress and catch a bus to work.
This whole time change thing is kinda lame. It's now kinda light when I leave for work and then nearly dusk when I get off work.
Horray Beer.
Later in the afternoon I talked to Catherine. She had some interesting observations about some of my behaviors and attitudes. Something to at least think about.
Then I went and took some pictures... On my way home I picked up some candy, OJ and beer.
Spent most of the day geeking around. Got a PXE server setup and it can do kickstart installs and http installs over the network. I've got some more things to try with it tomorrow like maybe get it to load a ghost session or maybe a setup for diskless workstations or maybe setups for other linux distribution installs or even a back/recovery system... The possiblitys are really nearly endless as far as I can tell. I'll have to play with it more tomorrow.
Work was much more busy than Friday but that wouldn't take much as last Friday was pretty much on life support.
Got my oil changed. Found out I have leak on one of my power steering hoses. Car goes in Monday for fixing... Not sure how that will work out but oh well...
No plans for the weekend yet. Maybe might go to Salem and hang with Joe, Cat, Chris, and others. May just stay at home and do nothings.
A couple I just converted with the windows XP raw dealy and it stripped the EXIF data which is annoying I will most likely reconvert those using something that won't strip the EXIF data and reupload them.
Last week I got hooked on a wonderful old tool for linux/unix. For years I had done my best to avoid using if for no other reason I simply couldn't be bothered to learn to use it. Well last weekend I needed to download some files and I didn't want to leave my desktop on downloading the files nor could I leave my laptop on to do the download as I had to take it with me. I've been known to use a ssh session to download something to have it on my server when I get there and been known to leave a shh session going over night or longer and leaving my laptop on, but this time I needed to take my laptop with me so I had a couple options. One use the nohup and & to simply push the job to the background and not have it stop when I disconnect or use screen and be able to access it and see the status and spawn more shells to do more work. I went with screen and damn it's awesome... Seriously someone should have forced me to use or learn it years ago...
I had a project planed and nearly ready to excute or at least work on. But I wasn't able to really do much on it as it seems to services I need from the fedora servers are currently down/broken because of the high load...
The plan/project. Setting up my X22 laptop with a customer run level, most likely 4 , to serve up and kickstart installs of fedora. The thought right now is to speed reinstalls/recoverys up. Use the kickstart file from the server it will be restoring to get close to the previous image/state then recopy config files and perhaps other scripts etc... I will post more once I get things moving...
Hung out with Mike and Mina last night. I saw them a few weeks ago at mikes birthday party. But I really hadn't seen mike in at least 2 years and Mina in something like 5 years. We went Nightmare Before Christmas 3D then just stayed up late talking and drinking beers until around 6am.
I woke up around 10. A little later I was joined by Mike and we took off to the store for stuff to cook up for breakfast. Mike proceeded to cook things up and Gina (mikes girlfriend, not Mina) and I proceeded to eat. Later Mina got up ate some then disappeared back into her room to sleep more.
It was really good to see them both again. It had been far too long to see them. I don't intend going so long with out seeing either one of them again.
Work was dead yesterday, as in I didn't pick up the phone once for a help desk question. After I escaped from bordom I went home and killed a couple hours washing and waxing my car. Once I was satisfied my car's clean shineyness I watched an episode of top gear. Then when that was over I got into my clean shineyness and drove it over to NiteMayr's place to watch Equilibrium and Crank.
So I was thinking about my sad multi-purpose server that has served me so well fo years and years now. Its a sad server because it has at least one failing harddrive, mostl likely two or three, and only 512MB of RAM. When I recalled seeing a 512MB stick of PC133 RAM kicking around when I was cleaning my place up. So because I couldn't recall, I looked up the specs for the board in my sad server and it takes PC133. Then I took a look inside my server and happy day, I've got a single free slot free to accomodate that 512MB stick-o-ram.
The problem is I am hesitatnt to take the server down to perform the upgrade. For fear of the server not starting back up. It hasn't really been off off for quite some time now, rebooted but not really off off. I fear a drive will refuse to spin up or function. The other reason is I've got close to 120 days of uptime on it and I don't want to ruin the long run. If I am going to take it down I want to do more than just add a bit of ram and make it more worth my while. While I do have a couple drives around that are larger I don't know what their health is like nor do I want to invest the time in replacing a failing drive with another drive that could be failing as well. Maybe one of these weekends when I'm home or something goes very bad wrong o shit boom I'll do these upgrades....
Went to see Employee of the Month after work. Decent flick. Worth seeing had a few great moments but not as smart as the previews had me thinking but still great. I'm sorry but a grown man on a tiny motor cycle is funny.
That is all.
Monday: Thai in the lunch room. Out of bananananans in the lunch room as well. Huge downpoor of rain it was crazy. Work was work, nothing to report really. Made my car payment after work, less than $3500 to go.
I installed Fedora Core 5 on my other Laptop today. Mostly cause I found out it comes with a nifty little app called f-spot which is similar to iPhoto from Apple. It can upload to flickr and read raw files from my dslr. It's quite useable but not with out it's problems. But for the features it lacks is where gimp and photoshop would be the better tools for the job anyways.
But as my evening progressed I thought back to the last time I was at the Lotus website. I recalled the nearest dealer being in California someplace. So where would one get their Lotus serviced in Oregon? This one has Oregon plates so it belongs here. While the engine is sourced from Toyota I doubt many dealers would have anything to do with it. So today I checked and found that there is infact a Lotus dealer in Portland. The world makes sense again.
It's the first weekend in a while I haven't had something planned. I can't help but feel like I'm forgetting something even thought I'mreasonably sure I'm not. I'm not quite half expecting my phone to ring and have plans up north.
I think Cat gets back this weekend with her boyfriend that she found when she was in Washington DC for the summer, and I promised I'd meet him and hang out with everyone. But when that happens is another question of it self...
Work was very slow today.
I kinda had plans for the evening. But I'm feeling more like taking a nap, except it is far to late to be taking a nap so I really should do something like clean my place up, wash my car, go to the barn and see the finished arena, take pictures, go for a walk, or something.
bah. tired.
On an unrelated, computer type, note HoneyRyder is still quite upset about the drives. I'm now tring a diffrent file system. Something else I noticed is it seems to stop accessible after the attempts to put a file system on it, a reboot seems to help with that but i wonder if it's a mater of a lot of activity causing a problem or something like that.
I replaced the license plate lights for my car so my license plate is now lit by two lights again rather than just one. This also means no more error on the computer in the car. Yay.
But I got a call from chris it seems the server that lives with him is very unhappy with the new hard drive or the new hard drive is very unhappy with the server. I was able to repartition it after it lost it's partition that had appeared to have been functioning. Then I put a file system on it and again came up with an error. I then attempted to look at it with fdisk, only this time fdisk wouldn't even read the drive. So Chris is gonna use the CD that came with the drive and do some tests on it like burn in and such to see if he gets something. I think we got's a bad or at least a troubled drive on our hands...
The server transplant was mostly a success. The powersupply I bought wasn't/isn't compatible with the motherboard. So Chris drilled a couple holes in the case and put the powersupply from the old case, a 1u unit in. It's a lot more quite than it was but, but its still a bit loud because of the crazy fast fans needed to keep the small power supply cool and functional. So I'm going to have to shop around for another compatible power supply and buy it when I can.
I did manage to take some pictures today with my new lens. I'll have to wait until Sunday, Monday, Tuesday or later, once I have some free time to sit down and look at them, pull them from camera, process and upload them to flickr.
Tonight: heading to Vancouver for a server transplant. Also to do some work on another server or two that live with Chris.
Saturday: we hope to go take some photos if weather permits such an event, possibly find some other havok to raise or something as well.
Sunday: Family stuff in Salem.
Took a few snaps with my new lens today. Nothing good or worth uploading. Just goofing off really. Also I deleted them so I couldn't upload them even if I wanted to, which I don't. The plan is this weekend get some better shots off at someplace more interesting than my little studio apartment. If photos don't happen this weekend I'll be sure to make some happen sooner than later.
I've already packed the altus up for the server transplant tomorrow evening in Vancouver with Chris. I've got the other goods in my car as well. I just have to pack my clothes and other personal effects and I'm ready to go.
I'm hoping to get a chance to shoot with it over the weekend with Chris. I may take it out before then as well if I can find the time.
It didn't really fit in my camera/photo backpack. I had to make some adjustments to the bag to get it to fit with the other lenses that I have in there. I may need to make more adjustments to the bag but thats ok.
Work was ok today. The morning part went by really fast I spent a bulk of it tring to get a module to load at startup on the vmware server that lives with Chris. I eventualy got it although I thought the method used was a bit of a hack. But it worked so its all good.
Did laundry.
New computer stuff shows up tomorrow.
Likely heading to Vancouver to do the server case/brain/stuff transplant at Chris' place. Then maybe go out phtographing on Saturday. As I may have a new lens in tow.
I recently replaced both fog lights as well. Which I initially thought was waste of time because only one lit up after the replacement, the same one that had been working. Well last night they both came on. I suspect something wrong with the switch which should be easy enough to replace once/if it starts acting up again.
One small step for my geekyness. One giant large step for lazyness. My cellphone can now wake my desktop computer up wherever I happen to be assuming I have service. I can use any computer to do it really but it was setup with the thought of using my phone do so.
Good times. I'm try to hang out with them again soon as it had been about 5 years since I saw Mina and at least a couple years since I last saw Mike.