The Daily Diversion Archive For April, 2003

Tuesday April 1, 2003

Happy April Fool's Day everyone. No foolin' here though.

I read a nice description of the American Way of war. Here's the link to the National Review Online. The column is by Victor Davis Hanson. I especially like rule #2, It is as difficult to provoke the United States as it is to survive its eventual and tardy response.

Friday April 4, 2003

Sarah's pregnant!

Whoo Hooo!

In other news, we're going to the Twins' home opener tonight. It should be a good time. On Saturday night, we're going to our friend Tim's restaurant opening. Solera's the new restaurant's name and it's in the old Bravo space two doors down from The Orpheum. It should be a good time.

It's going to be a good weekend.

Monday April 14, 2003

It sure has been a while since I've posted. I'd feel guilty about that if I hadn't been busier than heck.

The University of Minnesota Golden Gopher Men's Hockey Team is NCAA champions for a second year in a row. The most exciting game of the tourney was the game against Michigan. It seems that Michigan gives us game every time we see them. This is good. What's also good is that I didn't get a single game wrong in the NCAA playoff. That was pretty cool. It was worth bragging rights and more.

I'm home this morning waiting for the contractors. They're going to be replacing our furnace with a new one and adding central air. They're also going to do a bunch of ductwork as well. We'll be without heat for a couple of days, but that's OK as temps are supposed to be in the 60s to 80s for the next couple of days.

Preparing for the tear out and installation required me to move a bunch of stuff around in the basement. Our basement is nothing if not moveable. Most of our stuff is in bins, not boxes. The bins have handles. If space needs to be cleared, then it is no big deal to clear it. I also have a two-wheel dolly to move anything else I need to move. This was very helpful moving the filing cabinet and the 'fridge. Anyway, I spent a large part of Sunday moving stuff around the basement and I also moved my office around.

It had come to my attention that the table I bought for my office just wasn't getting the job done. My 19" monitor was too heavy for its plastic surface and the top of the table sagged under it. There just wasn't enough support for it right underneath the monitor. I did move the monitor to a spot that had more support, but I just didn't like the fact that the table was giving way under the monitor. Sarah needed a laundry table and so she now has one. I'm going to try and make do with just the one table in the office, but I can already see that this will be somewhat difficult. I'm hoping that I can find a different place for Sarah's Mac other than on my one table. I think I have a solution, but it's gonna have to wait until the contractors are done.

The other big news is that I went to the FreeBSD user's group on Saturday. Here is their website. We had our first meeting at the U in the EE building. It was fairly well attended and our host was very nice. Thanks, Gabe. We learned a bit about Kerberos and we did an install on my dualpro machine of FreeBSD 5.0. The install went pretty well with just a bit of a hang-up recompiling the SMP kernel. I was also fortunate enough to sell said machine for a fair price to one of the club members. It was a good meeting.

I got a ton of reading done and pretty much did what I wished for the whole weekend. It just doesn't get much better than that.

Tuesday April 15, 2003

I just posted a long auction description to eBay in preparation to sell my old laptop. Unfortunately, it took me too long to post it and I ended up timing out my session token. Bye bye an hours' work. That hadn't happened to me in about 5 years of being on-line. I didn't like it then, and I don't like it now. It's my own fault, however. I need to take less time to post stuff on eBay. Apparently.

Operation Physical Plant is almost finished. The AC guy said he'd most likely be finished with it today and that we'd have air conditioned air coming out the ducts by tonight. Funny thing is, it's going to snow later on in the week. Did I mention it was 85+F here yesterday? Minnesota weather is nothing if not mutable.

I got a line on a motorcycle. He's here in town and it may just be the thing I want. We'll have to wait and see.

Friday April 18, 2003

Operation Physical Plant Upgrade is a success. I must say that the new furnace is MUCH better at heating the house. The house seems to be heating far more evenly and it doesn't seem nearly as drafty. It also seems to hold its heat better somehow. Listening to the Contractor, I realized that HVAC (Heating Ventilating and Air Conditioning) is a science and one I know doodly-squat about. We hired the pros and they came through for us. Life is good. Big recommendations for Boehm Heating in St. Paul, MN.

My buddy Peter had used them a couple of years back to do pretty much the same thing to his house that we just did to ours. I know Peter pretty well and when he said he got estimates from 8 contractors, that's exactly what he did. I also know that when he said that Boehm were the only ones of the 8 that seemed to know what they were talking about, then the rest of the contractors were clowns. Peter is meticulous in his research and I felt pretty confident in going with Boehm. Considering all this information and the fact that he's gone a few years with no problems gave me all that much more confidence in my decision.

We ended up doing quite a bit of work on the basement to get ready for the install and I'm going to purge the junk this week. More broken junk, papers, useless waste and unwanted things are hitting the out door this weekend. I can't tell you how conflicted I get about this kind of thing, but I must say that given how much of it I've done in the past couple of years, not only is it getting easier, it's starting to feel pretty good.

I had my old laptop up on eBay yesterday, but they disagreed with the wording in my listing and took it off. I'm going to have to make the changes and repost it. I guess you can't sell a computer with an unlicensed operating system installed on it even if you say it's for demonstration purposes only. I guess I can see this, but this is a change from a couple of years ago when I sold my first laptop.

I wonder if that guy is still using it.

In other news, since I have the dualpro sold, I'm going to try to use my old AMD K6/2 550MHz PC as the interim FreeBSD 5.0 server. Service to you, my faithful page viewer should be more or less seamless. The idea is to not only have a faster machine behind the web site, but to implement a few back-end changes. Of course, it will all look pretty much the same in this page.

Monday April 21, 2003

We had a lovely weekend. We cleaned the house and I bought some shelves to store some more of our boxed junk on. It worked out pretty well. We were able to retire about 8 boxes of stuff. The basement will very soon be usable. Yay!

I also bought a shelf for some of my junk in the computer room. I'm trying to figure out what to put on it, but I think I have that problem solved. I'm just dying for some more space/less junk down there and I was able to purge a bunch of stuff this weekend.

Speaking of purging, my old Tecra laptop is now title="where I'm selling the laptop">listed here on eBay. The bid price is up to $61 and I hope for it to go much higher.

The primary reason I've had so much time to update the site today is that I'm on hold with Maxtor tech support. I have a MaxAttach NAS box at work that is having issues. It's still under warranty, so I want to RMA it. Unfortunately, Maxtor is no longer selling this particular device and are supporting it like they just don't care. Given that Friday was Good Friday and was probably a holiday for their support department, I called them and got no closure notice and spent 2 hours on hold. This morning I called them at about 8:45 and it's now about 9:20. I'm getting the "all agents are busy, your call will be answered in the order in which it was received..." message, but I don't think anyone's there. I'm just about done with holding for these people. I really hate under supported tech support call lines and I'm really tired of this particular product. Grrr...

Maxtor. Not getting my business in the future for whatever product.

In a moment of weakness this weekend, I bid on and won an .mp3 player for my Visor on eBay. It didn't cost very much and I've wanted one for a while. It was manufactured by Good industries which, just like my Maxtor fun, no longer manufactures this product. It was a good product in its time and I'm hoping it works for me. If not, there's always eBay, right? With shipping it cost less than a stand-alone mp3 player with a similar amount of storage, so I'm kinda pumped. It was less than $50 with postage and I really can't wait to get it.

New toys.

Tuesday April 29, 2003

Busy, yadda, yadda, yadda.

We had a nice weekend. We turned the central air unit on for the first time and felt the house get cold. It was delicious.

I planted some grass in the back yard. We'll see if it grows.

I've been putting some extra muscle into my SETI@home push for 600 data units completed. Unfortunately, the only machines I have that can contribute to the effort are some non-Intel processor jobs that aren't doing such a great job.

I have my Athlon workstation kickin' out the jams and my PIII800 does a fine job of tearing through the data units as well. The most surprising thing about SETI is how Mac-friendly the process is. We have a 7300/180MHz Power Mac running SETI and it finishes data units far faster than my Cyrix MII 333 (250MHz@~85MHz FSB) or my AMD K6/2 550MHz. The latter is hugely disappointing as it should really be kickin' for a 550MHz machine. The truth is, it's not appreciably faster than the Cyrix and the Mac finishes data units about 4X faster. That's quite a difference.

This isn't saying that any of these back-seaters is all that rippin' fast to start with. The Mac takes more than a day to process the average data unit. I'm not real certain about the Cyrix's performance, but it looked as if it was going to take the K6/2 about 3 days to get through a data unit. That's not impressive. I guess it all has to do with the processor architecture and the math processor.

The K6/2 is going through a shake-down period so that I know it is stable. If it proves to be stable, I may make it my new web server. However, if it performs poorly processing Perl modules in Apache, I'm probably not going to replace my current machine. I need something that's going to be a good bit better as I expect that Nick and I will be needing a bunch more back-end power to run things like we want.

I'm also thinking about picking up a K6/3 processor. Due to it having its level 2 cache on-board, it won't matter that the motherboard I have can only cache 128Mb of RAM. They're also supposed to do better at number crunching.

We had the car in for maintenance stuff yesterday. We dropped a truly scary amount of money, but we had a bunch of PREVENTATIVE stuff done to it that we never have had done to any of our cars before. Mostly, I think, because our cars of old were already afflicted with whatever malady these things try to prevent. It's nice to have a nice car, but it does take money to keep it that way.