Never been one to let the carrier drop

I’m feeling a little poked at.

I’ve been on Ebay buying supplies for a rave that needs to be held a considerable distance from the generators – (I’m kicking the 220 from the gennies up to 440, sending it down 10AWG wire, and dropping it back down to CT’d 220 – i.e. 110 – at the far end. I’m currently guessing about 2000′ of wire, and we’re sending 5kW.. I’m starting to feel like the power company over here.. )

Anyway, ‘my ebay’ has a picture of a locomotive and a banner ‘Grown up? Sell it.’. Ouch.  I will admit that I probably should spend less time playing with trains and more time working on my EV project – but I doubt if anyone would label either of them a ‘grown up’ thing to do.

(What I’m  supposed to do, they tell me, is have children. The problems with this are many, and I won’t enumerate them here only because I don’t have time, but look for a future article entitled ‘why I don’t want children’. We recently added a new item to the list: the presence of babies causes me to have panic attacks. I knew that I was frightened by them, and made very uncomfortable by their presence, and hated to look at them – but I had no idea that when seated next to one that kept groping me on a airplane, this would proceed to full-blown inability to breathe and desire to shrink as far away from the child in question as possible. Luckily the mother decided to move after seeing my reaction… I dislike thinking about the possibilities if she hadn’t.)

Lately I’ve been trading emails with a conservative that I decided to harass after reading a discussion page of a article they had worked on quite a bit on the wikipedia. (I was impressed with their skills in argument, and also found myself agreeing with most of what they said.) We obviously have quite a few differences, but the discussions have still been interesting. They wrote a wonderful Craigslist article (I understand that many of you won’t find it wonderful, but I do: http://raleigh.craigslist.org/rnr/394590164.html).

I need to find some religion that I can start feeling positive about. I’ve about had it with my own negativity.

My work is going well. I’m actually very slightly ahead of where I thought I’d be on my software dev project. My ‘day job’ is doing interesting things I don’t fully understand – I was their open source sysadmin, and now the database engines have all been moved to AIX and career admins hired to care and feed them.. which is why I’m posting blog entries at work. I’ve sent a list of the things I think they might want me to work on, and heard nothing other than ‘Don’t worry, hang in there, we’ll find something for you to do’. It seems pretty clear that they aren’t firing me outright, and I will admit that if the dev project I’m working on gets funded to where they can afford to pay me what my day job does – or even 20% less – I’d be happy to just work for them, as it’s more interesting work – but I do worry idly. Partially I’m worried that I will end up unemployed right before I get all my debts paid off (by best estimate, this will happen around December, so if I can just get $COMPANY to hang in there another 4 months…)

I really like the idea of not owing anyone anything. I’m trying to decide, though.. I’ve been watching E-Bay for a blue Honda Insight with a manual transmission, air conditioning, and <100,000 on the clock – nothing has showed up yet, but if one does, I’ll be tempted to pause my debt-reducing operations while I purchase it.. alternately, I could get my current car’s air conditioning fixed.

Oh, that reminds me.. (goes off to do some stuff)

We discovered that the U.K. edition of Harry Potter 7 has different artwork and is much better bound, more compact, and in all ways superior. So we tried to buy a copy in Oxford while we were ice skating, but we ended up leaving it in a café. I was sad about this at the time, but it led to us buying a copy at Kings Cross station, which just felt way too appropriate. I’m actually somewhat thrilled to have a copy of a Harry Potter book that was purchased at Kings Cross.

My favorite photos from the trip:

http://gallery.sheer.us/main.php?g2_itemId=35435&g2_navId=x508adc0b – cow!

http://gallery.sheer.us/main.php?g2_itemId=35666&g2_navId=x508adc0b – castle!

http://gallery.sheer.us/main.php?g2_itemId=35774&g2_navId=x508adc0b – church

http://gallery.sheer.us/main.php?g2_itemId=35801&g2_navId=x508adc0b – huge – magic roundabout, around two ways – a pentagram of tiny roundabouts making one huge one

Okay, for those of you curious about such things, we are back safely in the U.S., having visited numerous internet peoples, the Edinburgh fringe festival, Swindon, London, Edinburgh, and Glasgow, and driven around through northern Scotland. The last week feels like about a day to me, and as you can tell from me being awake at 8:22 am, I’m somewhat jet-lagged. But I will manage.

Pictures soon..

1) My web page front (www.sheer.us) still pulls from livejournal.com – so as a result, this post will ping-pong from my wordpress, to LJ, to my homepage. Maybe somewhat wasteful, but oh well.

2) I prefer not to think of it as death, but rather as logging out. Given infinity and eternity, chances are we’ll all get together again somewhere, sometime. (Or, as Manaj said.. sometime, when it’s the right party..)

3) I know I said 2. But I need to find a party with obscenely loud anthem trance. If none are forthcoming… (looks towards his garage and snickers) – ten friends, a generator, a car full of speakers, and all of the Great California Desert. Just have to wait a few more months for it to get cool enough.

4) Obviously I don’t know when to stop. Yesterday was a friend’s 5th anniversary of not smoking. I wish I could remember when I stopped, so I could have some clue what anniversary I’m on. I’m pretty sure I’ve stopped for good, because the smell of smoke now makes me unhappy, and even when peer pressured I don’t light up. No big loss – it sucked money out of my bank account, made me feel miserable in the mornings, and wasn’t as effective as coffee in making me alert. And I’ve learned that it’s acceptable to wander around talking to coworkers *without* anything burning

5) In other, less exciting news, 210 days.

6) I hate money. I hate corporations that care more about money than the well being of their employees or customers. I hate that anyone should go to sleep in a gutter, or have no food, because of stupid little pieces of green paper. I feel guilty that I appear to have drawn one of the longer straws, and that I don’t do as much as I should – but I also feel like I will be able to do more if I get out of debt before I start seriously looking for places to spend my money that will help feed the dogs, cats, and humans of the world. I also hate that donating anything results in many organizations sending flurries of letters your way – which makes one wonder if donations aren’t counterproductive because the energy you send in just gets used to send letters to more people

Hm. I’m not in the best of moods this morning. I think I’ll go back to coding.

I have observed in a system of mine a phenomenon that I’m hesitant to even try and classify.

This system is a older AMD64.

I can run a certain very-high-cpu-using process at nice 0 (normal priority) and the system core will rapidly heat up to 64 degrees C (it used to go considerably hotter and then go into thermal shutdown, but I put it in a case with a obscene number of fans, and even added a couple of extra well-placed CPU fans, and now it stops at 64).

Or, I can run the same process at nice 19 – getting almost the same amount of work done – the process still gets 96% of the CPU, and still performs it’s task at very close to the same rate (maybe 15% slower) – and have the CPU sit at 40 degrees C just as it does when the system is idle.
Can anyone explain this? Does that last 15% really cost that much?

I think one of my major failings as a person is that I spend entirely too much time thinking about the past and the future, and not nearly enough time thinking about the present.

I don’t really understand how I got to be this way, but I think it’s a source of a lot of unhappiness for me. Among other things, a lot of my thoughts of the future are in the format “when I ….. then I’ll be happy”, where … can be replaced with get out of debt, figure out how to make N work correctly, etc. And, of course, I get whatever it is accomplished, and then I come up with some new value for …

As far as looking towards the past, I think of things and people long gone – in some cases, dead – and miss them, and feel sad. I think a little bit of this is normal and even positive, but I think I take it entirely too far.

The past is gone, and I should look towards tomorrow not in a planning sense, or in the sense of being worried or fearful about what could come, but in a sense of being excited about what the future could bring.

I sound like chicken soup for the soul or something.. yeesh…

root@peterbilt:/# tw_cli
//peterbilt> info c4

Unit  UnitType  Status         %Cmpl  Stripe  Size(GB)  Cache  AVerify  IgnECC
——————————————————————————
u0    RAID-50   OK             –      256K    1676.32   ON     OFF      OFF

Port   Status           Unit   Size        Blocks        Serial
—————————————————————
p0     OK               u0     298.09 GB   625142448     9QF1ZFXB
p1     OK               u0     298.09 GB   625142448     9QF1ZCFP
p2     OK               u0     279.46 GB   586072368     4NF1V1WY
p3     OK               u0     279.46 GB   586072368     4NF1ZDHK
p4     OK               u0     279.46 GB   586072368     3NF1HAD5
p5     OK               u0     279.46 GB   586072368     4NF1V2M2
p6     OK               u0     279.46 GB   586072368     4NF1RWDA
p7     OK               u0     279.46 GB   586072368     4NF1V2JD

//peterbilt>

So, peterbilt’s RAID finally formatted out 100% good.

We’ve learned many things from this adventure:

1) PCI-X and PCIe are NOT the same connector

2) When partitioning RAID devices, aligning to a 1 megabyte sector boundery helps (use 32768s in parted)

3) parted is much easier to use than fdisk for certain things

4) msdos disklabels are no good for volumes bigger than 2T. Use gpt disklabel instead

5) onboard RAID controllers on motherboards (i.e. ‘fakeraid’) and ubuntu do not get along very well

6) The RocketRaid products are not very good either although they at least work albiet very slooowly

7)  Do not ignore warnings about RAID arrays lest they become more serious warnings about RAID arrays

8) mke2fs has -T largefile for files that contain mostly huge files. Saves time, makes less inodes

9) -E stride=N – N is your RAID card’s stripe / 4. Does help. I knew this before, but was good to be reminded.

10) parted needs better error checking on msdos filesystem for sector counts that wrap

11) raid 50 is *incredibly* forgiving.

12) On thermaltake cases, DO NOT LEAVE THE SIDE PANELS OFF! They keep drives cool to the touch when the panels are on*.. or will burn you when they are off. I figure i hastened at least two drives to their graves. I feel vaugely bad about doing a RMA on them…  but why doesn’t SMART *report* that they’re overheating? Good equipment shuts itself down and lives on to fight another day, IMHO..

13)  Ultimately, the last ditch backup strategy that worked was to go buy a couple of 1T external disks and manually weed the directories out into <1T chunks, then pass some –exclude= lines into tar. Many many higher tech things were tried first, all failed. [But someday soon I will have one heck of a backup server. Yes, backups have now progressed in my life to where they warrent their very own server]

14) Certain unnamed people were extrordinarily helpful in retaining my sanity, and were pillars of strength..

15) I need to get some kind of psychological help – when the thought of losing a terabyte and a third of data is this traumatic.. I mean, literally, I haven’t slept well since this thing started.

In the course of a long life, a man must be willing to abandon his baggage many times. (probably misquoted) –Lazarus Long

I can’t even abandon my data..

* = in peterbilt’s configuration, which is eight SATA disks in 5.25″ removable caddies with individual fans

Does anyone have any suggestions for tools to aggregate a bunch of RSS pages together to form something like LJ’s friends page, but spanning several different blog sites?

By the way – and I know most of you already know how to do this and wouldn’t need my help – but, if any of my friends want help migrating their LJ to WordPress – including free hosting if necessary, or hints as to how to set up your own server – let me know.

(No, I still have not forgiven LJ for their ToS)