Tom at 16

Week of April 8th, 2002

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Sunday April 14, 2002

Today is the 90th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. If you haven't seen the movie, do so -- recommended. IMHO, a perfect mix of romance, special effect, and accurate history.

I was going to post last night, but I couldn't. I lay on the couch, in limbo -- unable to move, think... No, I wasn't sick again. Far from it. I was recovering from a way-too-excellent dinner ;-)

I made a casserole last night. Spicy Italian sausage (de-cased), onion and garlic (of course), tomato paste, some red wine, and spiced to taste. That was the base. Over that I put a bed of egg noodles, then spread a white sauce over the noodles. On top of the noodles I place two layers of thinly sliced zucchini, topped with crushed tomatoes, topped with a huge layer of three cheeses, all freshly sliced. Needless to say, it got rave reviews from all. I even ate two square, and generally speaking, when I cook I do not eat until later in the evening (yep, I taste and sample as I cook). That wasn't the problem. The problem came later when I was cleaning up.

I took what was left of the casserole and put it into another dish so I could clean the original. 'Cept it wouldn't all fit. I had two squares left over. So I figured: "Self, we need to do something with those two pieces. So instead of dirtying another dish, we should just eat them and be done with it". Mmmm. They went down great. But like a great turkey dinner, the effects hit about two hours later. I felt like I had over-consumed TWO turkey dinners. Oh my. But discomfort was worth it...

Today is a landmark day at Syroid Manor. I'm currently in the process of removing WinXP from my notebook and handing the whole drive over to Gentoo. I've had a look at KDE 3 and it's stable, as well as functional. I like the Gentoo distro -- it's a perfect fix for my nature and knowledge base. I can add and remove as I please, and all dependencies are calculated thanks to the Portage system. I'm looking forward to this. I know I've tried "living" in Linux before, but I think this time around there will be no turning back. Wish me luck!

I won't be checking or answering email until late tonight or tomorrow morning, so if you write, don't expect an immediate answer.

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Friday April 12, 2002

I'm a happy camper tonight. No, nothing to do with accomplishments -- although all things considered, it wasn't a bad week. I didn't die from the flu (although at times I thought I was close); I managed to get some work done; I hacked together the server enough to make it function; I managed to 'finger' out how to install Gentoo on a single RAID drive ;-) No, I'm happy because (a) it's FINALLY Friday, and (b) I'm sitting here with a cold beer, feet up on the couch. Funny how sometimes it's the little things...

No more computing for me today. If you so choose, have fun. And be well. I'll check in this weekend sometime.

Oh yeah... welcome back Moshe. Didn't think you'd be able to stay away for long (he-he).

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Thursday April 11, 2002

I'm not amused. Nope, not at all. My LCD screen on Phaedrus was dancing like the Northern Lights a while ago; my new keyboard (what? three weeks old?) developed a squeaky space-bar key earlier in the week; and last week I discovered my upper PCMCIA slot didn't work. Bah. Back to the workshop. I love my notebook, and Dell have -- to date -- provided me with excellent service, but the fact remains that every time something goes south I have to send it away for three days [mutter, mutter, mutter...].

I have my xServer up and running. It's a bit like a Ferrari running around two on 8 of 12 cylinders, but it is indeed running. I figured out a way to boot off the one good disk in the array. Yeah, I know. An oxymoron. Using one disk in a RAID array. But I managed to get Red Hat Skipjack up and happening after about three hours of head-scratching and trying a bunch of unintuitive things. So how did I celebrate my accomplishment? I tore RH off, and had a go at installing Gentoo (1.1a).

Long story short -- three hours (1/2 of which was taken up trying to figure what modules to load) and I had a fully functional install. And MAN is it quick with everything custom compiled. The system is now churning madly away on QT 3.0.3. I decided to load KDE on the box to have a look-see, as I've got tons of room (it's running on an 18GB SCSI drive). I don't generally do server admin stuff from a GUI, but it will be interesting to see what's available.

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Wednesday April 10, 2002

Sorry for the long pause between posts -- I got slammed with the nastiest bit of the flu I think I've ever had. I haven't eaten for two days, I'm exhausted, I got the shakes... I'm feeling better tonight, but man, I wouldn't wish that on my most hated enemy (if I had a most hated enemy).

Anywho, on top of my two day visit with the great white toilet bowel, we've also been busy packing and organizing the house. Yep, we're moving May 1st. We weren't planning a move until August when our lease runs out, but Leah found an awesome 4 bedroom + office on the other side of town, and we just couldn't pass on the opportunity. So Leah's working at finding someone to assume our lease; I'm trying to get my office packed without throwing my daily routines into any "now where did that book go" messes; and Landon is merrily giving both Leah and I a run for our money. Sigh.

I'm completely stumped by my new IBM xSeries server. It's a dual 1.2GHz P4 with 512MB of RAM and a two disk hardware RAID array. Problem is I can't get the drives to initialize properly. I can get one drive "up", but when I add the second the first goes "defunct". I've tried every combination (3 days worth) of SCSI IDs and drive positions I can think of to no avail. Bother. Tomorrow I'll have to break down and talk to someone at IBM support. I'm either holding my mouth very wrong, or there's something amiss from a hardware perspective. I've set up many, many RAID arrays in my time without trouble; this one, however, has so far elluded my every effort. More as I know more.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to get some sleep.

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