Never been one to let the carrier drop

But I can’t resist, so I’m going to mention.

In my mid-teens, I helped a friend pick out a computer – a 286 – and then dumped the contents of my hard disk onto it so I could install stacker. (Big mistake, but that’s another story). The process included moving 40 megabytes from one disk to another, and then back to the first. We did it over a RS232 cable.  It took about 4 hours each way.

My recent backup and restore was interesting in that the backup averaged 40 megabytes a second, and the restore a little over 80.

Yes, that’s right. It’s not enough that we can carry around a mini-SD card the size of your pinkie that stores 20 times the data of my first – full height, 5.25, 10 lb – hard disk – not only that, we can move the entire contents of my first hard disk in less than a second.

Just think how the people 20 years behind me must feel. Of course, on the other side, at least their computers hadn’t achived levels of complexity that start making them look like thinking beings.

By the way, a quiz question for the geeks out there – if you were going to hypothetically build a video editing workstation, what type of PC would you use, these days?

So, Peterbilt (mail and file server) had a bad video card that was resulting in spontaneous crashes and reboots. After about fifteen of these, the RAID array showed a failed port, and couldn’t rebuild. Finally, after much tearing out of hair (and a attempt to build a backup server that failed – although I hope to get it done soon – I’ve ordered another 3Ware card after attempts with motherboard fakeraid and rocketraid card both ended badly) I backed it up – almost all of the data was intact – and am now restoring it after reformatting.

I ended up formatting with a 256K stripe. Last time I was running 64K, and I had some trouble with mp3s skipping on playback when users were accessing their mail spools – and I found somewhere (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/concepts/perf.htm) that suggested that filesystems with lots of small files should use a large RAID stripe, somewhat counterintuitively. We’ll see what happens. I’m certainly not wanting to go through the whole backup-format-restore process again.

Interestingly, the restore process went much faster than the backup process even though the array was initializing at the time.

I have this problem.. once I start spending money on computer equipment, I really don’t know when to stop. Today I had to bite my fingers to avoid buying:

* 2 extra disks for PB, to replace any bad drives that come up

* A 3.0Ghz PC to replace the 1.8Ghz one that currently drives our TV set

* A 14-drive rack of 15k RPM 18GB SCSI drives.. (I was just thinking, what a swwweeet video editing array that’d make..)

The sad thing is, I don’t yet know that I’ve totally resisted – all three sound good. But I’m still not out of debt…

maybe when I get back from the U.K.

For those of you interested, we’re going to the UK on the 6th of Aug and returning on the 14th. We will be visiting Enyc (in Swindon) and Madrory (in Gasglow)

Yet another health insurance provider has declined me.

I’ve pretty much decided to stop applying. Among other things, I don’t particularly feel like supporting the current system, and that’s what I’m doing if I pay in – in the unlikely event that I can find anyone willing to underwrite me.

I keep finding things, over and over, which make me think that money is a power for the side of the universe that I would describe as evil. Hm. I guess someone did say money was the root of all evil. And yet, very few embrace my desire to do away with money entirely.

Most geeks are familiar with the common types of computer timestamp – and the common types of human ones.

The rest of this post has absolutely no point at all. But it’s funny.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to do timestamps as seconds since the big bang? Yes, it’s true, it’d be a much larger feild, but it would represent all possible useful dates. Of course, since we don’t know precisely when the big bang occured (to the nearest millisecond) it might make figuring out what time it is now somewhat difficult…

Then, of course, someone is going to come along and say they want to be able to refer to times *before the big bang*, to which I will suggest using a negative integer. Then they will point out that it’s possible that the universe loops such that before the big bang IS after the big bang – and/or, there’s another big bang before that, and another after us, stretching infinately in both directions..

This problem comes up in other areas. One starts looking for absolutes, and a few jump out – absolute zero, for example. (Funny, they never talk about absolute one – is there a hottest possible temp?). What’s below absolute zero? What’s negative one Kelvin? The physics people sometimes tell us there’s no such animal, but I’m not so convinced. Yes, all the little subatomic particles may be at rest at zero K – but perhaps -1 K is where they do really, really interesting things? Or perhaps you just fall to a lower energy metastate, and the process repeats.

Feel free to criticize -n- correct my physics.

And in other news, 4 of my 6 credit cards are now paid off. I anticipate finishing paying them off by the beginning of September. This will leave me with just hospital bills, taxes, and personal loans to finish up – I am still thinking I will have paid off everything by December.

Thanks to helpful peeps including Dan S. and Chris M., I now have my wordpress blog up and running and crossposting to Livejournal. Perhaps I’ll set it to also crosspost to myspace.. wouldn’t that be fun?

Lately I’ve been feeling like digging up old friends.. I’ve managed to find a bunch of friends from relatively early in my childhood via MySpace, and I’ve been finding contact information for and spamming people from Seattle.. I sort of vary between intensely-social-wanting-to-be-in-touch-with-everybody and intensely antisocial and wanting to hide in my cave and write software.

The drug that I was using to help me sleep has now more-or-less conclusively been linked with my continous stream of nightmares, which leaves me with the difficult decision of do I return to being a often-insomniac with mostly good dreams, or do I return to having nightmares every night but being able to sleep predictably and on schedule?

Went to Seattle for the 4th and set off many large fireworks. Much fun was had by all. Thanks to Bruce S. (if he reads this which I doubt) for hosting me and other considerations.

Back in the swing of work, slowly.. trying to work out the kinks in some code that involves Flex talking to PHP talking to STOMP talking to Perl. Very multilingual.

Finally got around to convincing the Slingbox to talk to the network again after renumbering. There are still some machines that have some issues with talking to the net. Also finally shut down Gateway and AIXER – I hate to have machines not up and talkable-to, but it was just getting too bloody hot in my garage. I’ve got a managed power strip that I need to put out there so I can turn on and off individual machines as appropriate. Especially needed because my friend’s BSD box (and he’s constantly commenting on how much more reliable BSD is than Linux) seems to crash about once every month..

Bought tickets for the UK to visit Enyc and Maddy.

Not much else to report. Currently my religious investigations have me poking at unitarian universalism – I glance at these people every once in a while, and every internet ‘find your religion’ quiz I’ve ever taken has said that they’d be my first choice. I have to say I agree with just about everything I’ve read about them so far. Eerie.

(My $RELIGIOUS_FAMILY_MEMBER, of course, still can’t admit that clearly no $LOVING_SUPERUSER is going to $DO_AWFUL_THINGS to me $FOREVER for $NOT_BELIEVING_SOMETHING_THAT_I_CANT_BELIEVE.)

[guess who’s been reading alt.sysadmin.recovery]

It was good seeing T0ry & Meg, too.. I hope Tory will come down and do a music video or record a new track or something with me.

Testing WP -> livejournal crosspost.

After a breif outage while I tested several different blog packages, updated WordPress’s import to support private vs. public (friends-only isn’t something I’ve bothered to figure out yet, so those were all stuck in the ‘private’ bin), Sheer returns to the blogsphere. I’m sure that I won’t have nearly as many readers since I’m no longer in LJ’s ‘friends’ system – although I may later try to configure a automagic crossposter – but, anyway, I’m here.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5015557

Do I believe there’s one being in the universe who is the most powerful? Probably. The most advanced? Probably. The most enlightened? Yes.

Do I believe that there’s a being in the universe who has superuser powers? I think it’s possible we all designed – or design, as we go – the universe so that was impossible in order to prevent things like Hell.

[[placeholder for a article I’d like to write someday]]