Just a quick update, nothing interesting happening.

- I sent off my sister’s computer.

- Have TSM training all next week in Boston. I have to commute every damn day in a crowded cattle car for an hour in each direction.

- Got my home operation back up and running. and already at 73% of my new 335 gig set up (still waiting for an IBM 75 gig RMA to happen

- Tried to watch Blue Crush, but it sucked too bad

- Watched City by the Sea, and it was pretty good, but I can’t stand seeing DeNiro all choked up and on the verge of tears (Verge of tears ’cause DeNiro just doesn’t cry, EVER!)

- Decided on my new favorite “Movie Pirate” group, they call themselves “The Chosen Few” (TCF). They aren’t as timely with their releases, but they are by far the best quality ever since Centropy (CTP) dropped out of site.

- Decided on my 2 Favorite movies of all time!

Number 2 is Dark City. I watched it again, and realized how awesome it is. You have weirdos in trench coats with mind powers and can fly. You have Keifer Sutherland, being his normal bad-ass self. The protagonist (Rufus Sewell) looks like he should be a bad guy. And you have Jennifer Connelly PERIOD. How much better can you get? Hmm, I almost convinced myself that this should be Number 1. However Spy Game made my Number 1 movie. Just plain no-nonsense great movie. I call it a “mental-action” movie, where the confrontations are actually mind oriented. Throw in a bit of history, terrorists, communists, and CIA. Let simmer…out comes pure bad ass-ness!

- Bought 24 Season 1, and I like it so far. Keifer should totally do more movies like this. (Alot of these new series, I just call straight-to-TV movies, because they are all melded with each other, and they are not very episodic.)

- So I noticed that Matt Damon did a spy movie with Bourne Identity, and his boy Affleck did Sum of all Fears in the same year. I wonder if they just decided over a beer, “You know what? I think we’ll make Spy movies popular, let’s do a couple of them” So they start the process, people hear about it, kick off all the TV shows (Alias, Agency, 24, etc) Boom, you have a full blown fad. I wonder if those things start as simply as that.

I finished setting up my sister’s computer. I am such a nice brother. I plugged in my new one, and wadatai! It is pretty darn fast. Also got the chance to use the DVI connection on my flat-panel. I can’t really tell the difference. I guess high quality stuff is wasted on me sometimes. I started running 2 copies of seti on that (since it is a dual cpu) and it was crunching through that pretty quick. It came with XP though Which is the first thing I will dump when I get some time. The free T-shirt I got is awesome, I wore it yesterday. Just a plain black shirt with the alien logo on the front.

My sisters new computer is my “old” Dell, only not so old. P4 1.8 gHz, 1 gig of ram, 12x cd-rw. I put XP home edition on there, an actual legal version that came with the machine in the first place. I am getting too respectable in my old age.

I’ve been doing this restore for about a week now, but my DLT drive keeps on dropping the leader. It took me a while to figure out how to fix that, and a couple of restore attempts to figure out I can restart the restores fairly reliably (without starting from the beginning again). So this time I should finish (maybe sometime tomorrow). I also just received my Alienware computer, but haven’t set it up yet. I wanna set up my Dell for my sister first. Still waiting for my Titanium zippo I ordered on ebay. All in all, a fairly productive week. At work, they told me about a tape library I can take home, but they don’t have any drives yet. Still waiting for those.

Some family I’ve never met came up to New England to do some tourism stuff, and visit me at the same time. Good people! They live in Houston (where my sister is) I should have been visiting family more often back then, they really are pleasant folks.

All that stuff I was talkin about yesterday, GRUB and the order numbers, etc, almost all a bunch of crap. After trying out my theory, failing, re-installing RedHat a few times, failing, I realized what I did. “Had I known” I coulda fixed it in the beginning without going through all this crap. I said “almost” because I did have to change the grub.conf to hd4. The extra IDE drive did cause the device.map to change. But even that didn’t work. The issue was that I was installing the bootloader on the MBR, as I have been doing for years. For some reason that I can’t think of, MBR is an IDE-only deal. It was putting the bootloader on the first IDE drive, but I was telling the bios to boot of the SCSI drive. I could have either installed the bootload on the SCSI drive, or (which I ended up doing) is tell the bios to boot off the first IDE drive, which redirected to the SCSI. All is good now. Packed up my 75 gigger for an RMA. Enjoying 320 gigs in my /pub filesystem (trying out that snazzy ext3 thing). Running a massive restore right now, and all is looking good so far (24 hours into the restore). I gotta alot-O-crap, and an old DLT library. Even then, backups kick ass!

Almost nothing goes according to plan. Well, the Sparc project went fine. I borrowed a SUN keyboard and mouse to do all the network card stuff, and I did that in 10 minutes. No problem. The hard drives are a different story. First of all, I tried all the GRUB hd numbers up to 7, and I couldn’t find something that worked. I could have tried some other stuff, but I backed up all the conf files I needed, and I wanted to give the LVM in RH 8.0 a try. So screw it, I decide to just reinstall the OS. To recap, I have:

1-9gB ultra160 scsi drive

2-75 gB IDE’s

2-120 gB IDE’s

Since I have 4 IDE’s and am too lazy to pull out my scsi cdrom from my other box, I need to install over the network. Took me a while before I found that the http method through my workstation was the best way. I set up the partitions and all that, checked for bad blocks. I then found that one of my 75 giggers is bad! Weird clicks comin out of it and all that. I could have made the partitions around the bad portions, but it’s still under warranty, so I decide to plug in an old 20 gigger in its space. So now, for IDE space, I got about 320 gigs. That should hold me until the bad 75′er comes back. Doing that bad block test on a 120 gig drive takes forEVER!. not to mention 2 of them plus a couple 75′ers. So, I left the installation chuggin away while I’m at work. see what happens in a few hours.

Started on some upgrades I needed to do. :

Add an sbus 100mbit card to my sparc 5

- added the card fine, and closed the case again, but since this was a network card I was changing, I needed to get on the console to do the changes. I never got around to getting a null modem cable, and for some weirdo reason, I leant out all my sun keyboards and mice. I thought I kept one in case I needed it (like now). So I’ll try and borrow a keyboard and mouse from work tonight and return it tomorrow. The whole weirdo sun keyboard and mouse thing chaps my hide!, I can’t even plug it into my KVM without a really expensive adapter. Anyway, that project is stalled until I get access to the console.

- Install new 120 gb drives and add ‘em to the raid setup in my file server.

One thing I notice about Linux and other Unices, is that once you set up a box to do a job, its a toaster, you just don’t have to mess with it at all, cause it just works. The downside of this, is that when you want to modify or upgrade it, you forget alot of what you did in the first place! My fileserver’s setup had a scsi boot disk and 3 IDE disks (2×75’s and 1×20 gigger). So when I installed Redhat 7.2 last year sometime, I set up software raid to have spanning device over the 3 IDE disks. I did it with the install GUI, which isn’t available after installation. I want to avoid donig a reinstall, so I read all the docs and have a good idea on doing this at the command line. The new setup is going to have the scsi disk as the boot drive and a raid device spanning 4 IDE disks. So I did all the physical stuff, and powered up. At first it didn’t detect a boot disk. Ok, so I go into the bios, and notice that for some reason the SCSI disk wasn’t set up as the boot drive. So I change this. I also set it to look at the floppy drive for a boot disk as well. (In case I need to boot off the floppy to repair the boot loader) So the next time i boot up, it just clears the screen and displays GRUB. It won’t accept any keyboard input. So I’m thinkin I’m screwed. but I know I didn’t modify anything on the disks, so what could have happened? So I’ve been around linux since kernel 1.2.13, and have used lilo the whole time with no problems. Apparently when I installed this box, I chose the GNU GRUB bootloader. Since it was so long ago, I didn’t remember anything about it, so I read up on it. Sounds like its was better than lilo, but there is one peculiarity about it. Apparently, on bootup depending on your BIOS boot sequence and the number and type of drives you have, it numbers every drive you have as hd0, hd1, hd2, etc. Also, I tends to put IDE before SCSI. So before I had GRUB set up to boot off of hd3 (the IDE’s were hd0-2) Now, since there is a different IDE configuration, those numbers have changed. So it isn’t set up to load the correct disk. So I boot off a floppy disk, and change the setting to hd4. Which should work. Once I changed the conf file, I was looking for a way to “activate” the configuration (like you do in lilo) I missed the comments in the conf file that says this isn’t necessary and spent about an hour figuring that out. Anyway, I reboot, and the same thing happened. Just stuck at the GRUB screen. So the only other thing I can think of is that since I changed the boot order settings (and I don’t remember what they were before) My counting method has gotten all out of whack. So I guess I just have to try hd0, then go up one at a time till i get it. So I ran out of time, and had to come to work. So., we’ll see what happens tomorrow.

I just realized I was spending too much this past month. I have however done some responsible things, like join the ESPP for my company. Got a couple credit cards to work on my credit. (I’m 26 and these are my first credit cards) What I need to work on is:

- figuring out the IRA thing, like if 401K contribution affects how much you can put into an IRA

- Find an accountant

- Set aside the whole 3-6 months of living money

- Somewhere in that chronology, I need to set up a budget. I want to wait until I see the effect of this ESPP before I iron it out.

Stuff I bought in the last 2 months:

- Dual Xeon 2.4 gHz Alienware

- Couch and coffee table

- Trip to Brownsville, TX

- Washer and Dryer for my mom

- pair of 120 gB IBM drives

- Sopranos seasons 1-3 for myself, then bought a copy for Humby (bday)

- Bunch of DVDs and stuff from Amazon

So am I spending too much?

Just finished a week of training in Boston. I got up every morning with an “alarm clock”, rode the train for an hour, walked 10 minutes to the building, sat in training, went back to the train at around 5ish, rode the train back for an hour. Everyday “normal” work week for so many people. I can’t stand it! First of all the train is always crowded that it gets hot from just the shear number of people on that thing. Finding a seat on an hour train ride isn’t all that fun either. Boston was nice, lots of female scenery, pleasant to walk around, etc. The training was also good, except I knew most of the stuff already. It did fill up some gaps that teaching myself missed. But not enough to make it worth the cost! I can’t figure out how people do that stuff every day! then only get 2 days off on the weekend. No wonder people are of a “sour dispositions” up here. Have training again in a few weeks. Not looking forward to it too much, but it will be good to see my old friend TSM (IBM product) One thing training does give me… it reinforces the thought that I really am familiar with something. When I teach myself something, I never am sure if I know enough to actaully advertise that I know it. After training I’m pretty sure.