Bobbis.net

Fahrenheit 9/11 was interesting. It was a little hard to follow, and I think Moore could have done a better job organizing and presenting his ideas clearly. I don't fully understand how he links Bin Laden to Bush. Perhaps a diagram or something would have worked to communicate this better. I have no clue how strong his claim to a connection is. Yes, I am being critical, whoop de doo. I was expecting the facts to be given in a clear way. A documentary should do that right? Even with the my above criticism, I did learn a lot from the movie. I even laughed a few times.

Today, I went to see Spiderman 2 with Adrienne. I liked it better than the first one. I'm not going to go into any detail about it, so I'll just say A- . For some reason, the theater seemed rather hot and muggy rather than bone chilling cold like normal. I prefer it cold rather than muggy.

I had french toast for breakfast today. It has been a long time since I've had a cooked breakfast at home. Ever since my brother developed an allergy to wheat, we haven't made too many pancakes, waffles, or french toast. Even after my brother left home, it didn't really pick up again. I've been really starting to dislike eggs.

I'm looking forward to hanging out on the 4th. I've got to clean house and get some shopping done tomorrow before doing anything.

Later.

Really interesting day today. I bought my AppleCare today online. When I did so, I accidentally ordered 2 of them. I didn't catch this until after the order was passed by my credit card. So there was a good $500 charge. I immediately called apple and got that figured out. I then proceeded to install Windows XP via Virtual PC. I learned quickly that I need more RAM. I was expecting to get some RAM here pretty soon anyway, so I figure why not just do it now. So I do a little shopping around and talked with Nick about it and finally settled on ordering straight from Crucial. I was surprised to find free shipping, but was disappointed that they are charging state tax. At least it's better than Ames tax :D. I almost made the same double ordering mistake again, but this time I caught it and things were good. Meri then came by to drop off the $20 she owed me from yesterday. Thanks Meri! Then, within the hour I get a call from home. My credit card company called because my account was red flagged for fraud. I can understand that! So I had to make another phone call to confirm the order and things should be on their way and my credit card will be destroyed.... and replaced with a new one that they sent me the other day :D . So yes. Christmas in July continues.

The xServe RAID finished it's initializing. So, I quickly formatted the 1 TB drive. I partitioned it 1 TB for a volume called FATMOUSE and another partition called textbooks at 100 GB. Just looking at the proportion between the two partitions made me so excited. So, we decided to do a quick test. We made a 6.8 Gig file in about 10 minutes using cat /dev/random > /Volumes/FATMOUSE/huge.txt. It was cool to watch it go, seeing the caching work and the two CPUs crunching along. 6.8 gigs was just engouh to show a slight sliver on the pie graph of disk utilization. Drooool.

Tonight, Colin and I are going to see Fahrenheit 9/11 at the varsity at 7:00. Perhaps eat on campustown before the movie.

Also, check out Nick's blog about plans for the 4th.

Later.

Yesterday was good. I started revamping the scholarship system here at the ag college. Looking back at the code I wrote a year ago, I realize how much I have learned, especially after playing around with my blog. I am going through to clean up my code and add an administrative feature so they can add / remove scholarships and watch / edit entries as they are submitted. This will give me a lot more free time when time comes to set it up in the fall and to administer the process.

I got the xServe G5 and xServe RAID set up to as far as we can get them today. It takes as much as 18 hours to format a RAID 5 1.5 TB array of 6 disks. I have to say, I have learned a lot about Apple server management today setting this stuff up. Check out what I found in the manual while installing the RAID. I highlighted the monocle popping part with bold:

When you turn on the system, the drives will begin initializing the array. This process will take a number of hours. You can use the default RAID Level 5 array immediately (as the drives are initializing) or delete the preconfigured arrays and configure the drives as you wish.

We decide to wait for the array to initialize before we do anything. There's also an option for RAID 51. Basically, the xServe RAID can handle 2 RAID 5 arrays of 7 disks (14 total), then you can use the Apple Disk Utility on the xServe to RAID the 2 RAIDs to a stripped array of two "disks" (RAID 50) or a mirroring of the two "disks" (RAID 51). Very spiffy. It's still Christmas time here at work.

Yesterday I felt fairly cold most of the day considering what it was like outside. I also had a few unprovoked sneezes throughout the day. My throat is also a little dry from time to time. I hope I'm not coming down with something.

Meri stopped by to borrow $20 so she could make faxes, copies and stuff at the Union while she apparently was taking a break from 4-H activities. I prefer cash when paid back. I don't want to have to run to the bank to get my own money back. Church was nice. There weren't that many people there. Fritz wasn't there so the LoL pastor lead the warship. It felt a little rushed, and she really didn't know the usual way we do things there. After that Colin and I hung out at the UDCC. After getting home around 11:30 I was ready for bed, but since my parents don't have the same sleeping cycle I do, they wanted me to look-up air fare for 3 for the week of Thanksgiving and the week of Christmas so I or all of us could visit my brother. He only gets one day off for each of those holidays. I staid up 'til 1:00 showing them how expensive it is. Pro Tip: Flights out of Moline, IL are dirt cheap.

I found out that the extra money I had in my account was only $22 extra from financial aid payback, and my raise took affect for this time period rather than starting at the beginning of the new academic fiscal year. Yeah!. Also, I guess I did a really good job the past two weeks not spending money. Though that is going to change here pretty soon. Tomorrow I will be buying my extended warranty for my computer. I'm thinking about getting another 512 MB of RAM for my laptop as well. I have been paging like crazy when I'm working really hard. I am also looking at getting an nice office chair for my new computer set-up downstairs. My brother took his chair that I liked so much. I need to get one of my own.

I want to see Fahrenheit 9/11 and Spiderman 2 here pretty soon. I was thinking about perhaps tonight, but I don't know if I'm awake enough to be able to enjoy them tonight. Anyone want to see a movie Friday and / or Saturday night?

Well, this was a long entry. I better get back to work.

EDIT: Sharing an image of my new toys :D

Last night I finally got around to setting up a place for me to work. Though, I forgot to bring my wireless mouse home, it is now not charged, and I had to use my half broken USB mouse at home. While getting the desk from one of the back rooms of the basement, I found a lot of old stuff from my senior year and late junior years in high school. Prom, Winter Formal, Homecoming pictures, stuff from graduation. It was cool looking back at that stuff and remembering experiencing it. Somehow, it kind of goes with the discussions about our time in high school.

I stayed up way too late Sunday night. It didn't really affect me Monday, but I'm really feeling it today. I've got a nice homework assignment to do when I get home, then I think I'm going to take a nap.

I just finished recovering from a server problem. One of our MUG members is out in California at the WWDC. He updated his web web site with a few pics and it got picked up by macrumors.com. This entailed and highly unexpected surge in traffic. Apparently, Apache or the kernel pager messed up and the thing stopped responding within 15 minutes of the links being posted there. I had to restart the server by force to get it working again. Since macrumors took the links down because it got killed quickly, you can find the link here.

R/s is Requests per second. That's 11.9 hits per second. Right now it's staying over 8. Eeep! Normal traffic is closer to that 0.00 R/s as you can clearly see. The gap is where the server was not responding.

Time to get back to work. Perhaps if I get my homework done at work, I won't have to worry about it when I get home.

EDIT: The xServe G5 just came 2 minutes after posting :D

EDIT2: The xServe does not come with video. No VGA, no DVI, no ADC, no old apple, no s-video, nothing. There are two expansion slots, both planned to be filled with something that is not a video card. Who thought not having video would be a good idea?

Did anyone feel that? I know I didn't. I was up at the time as well.

Yesterday was some lawn work and grilling brats :D. Today, I got into work at 7:30 to continue work on a replacement computer for one of the computers whos HD died on Friday.

Eagerly awaiting news from WWDC. Apparently there is no stream either. :(

EDIT: Keynote is over and there are quite a few things that I'm drooling over. I believe there was even mention of an iSync API for you colin :D If I interpret that correctly that means you can sync calendar evens from ATX to go directly to someone's iCal and from there Palm or other reminder devices. Also the Konfabulator rip-off Dashboard has caught my attention. Before Konfabulator was always there. WIth Dashboard, the widgets are a hot-key away, and are not always in your way. xCode 2 has a new diagramming feature that is integrated with your coding. iChat allows up to 10 audio chat participants or 3 video conference chats. The sad thing about this stuff is that most of it won't be available until next year. apple.com

Ok, it's late. I'll try to keep this short.

1) I just realized that next weekend is the 4th or July. Do we have any plans?

2) I have been thinking a lot about the past and am thinking about ways to improve myself. This is a result of reflecting on the HS drama that has been discussed in various blogs.

3) Colin came over tonight. I helped him set up his domain atxproject.net. We BSed a while on our computers. He's going to lend me his new Cocoa book so I can get started learning this stuff. I want to have a basic understanding of OOP and the knowledge to make simple apps by the end of the summer.

4) Talking to Nick about Linux related stuff, I was reminded that I was interested in playing around with BSD. I'll have to try to remember that next time I rebuild this server it will be with BSD and not Gentoo.

5) Meri helped me find out that passwords longer than 12 characters do not work right here. They will get truncated. I will have to look around my code to figure out where this is happening and if I can fix it, and if I can't just put on the 12 char restriction.

Good night.

Work yesterday was a little stressful when I had two cube hard drives go out. To add on to that, their warranties expire today. I had to backup and test out the drives before I had AIT come in to take care of the warranty issue.

I got to bed at a really good time Thursday night. I'm so glad I did, because I felt so much better and was not totally drained by the time I got off work.

After work, I filled up the gas tank and had dinner with Adrienne. Went down to the iCubs game in DSM. Thanks Dave for driving and taking care of the tickets for us. I had a lot of fun. As with just about any sporting event there is a good chance for a wedding proposal. It turned out that the couple were setting just a few seats away from us. The Cubs won and the fireworks show was great. I have to mention that Katherine and Dave's friend (I already forgot her name, sorry) were there as well. It was lots of fun. Thanks guys.

Last night I had a really weird dream where I visited my elementary school. Everything had changed a lot. Very few of the old staff were still there and those that I remembered were really old and senile in the dream, except for the media specialist; she was just senile. When I checked out the library a lot of students were there with books, but it looked like they were all sleeping. Nobody seemed to care. Near the end, somehow it seemed to turn into a Harry Potter movie. I wasn't in my school anymore. By the time I got out of the building it was back to being my elementary school and I met up with my son or daughter (I couldn't tell because he/she was a bird, yeah you read right). I remember he or she was excited about starting school. Then in the real word my mom yelled at me to get me up. I have already forgot most of the details, but it was really strange. I don't dream much. Reminds me of the following comment I came on while ago:

"Like you're having a dream where your having sex with your best friend's kid sister in her room, but then she asks you about your eye color and suddenly her room is your third grade class and your covered in ants."

Makes no sense.

Anyway, there is a lot of work to be done here at home that I was not warned about. Later.

Finally got to do something today. I have felt so isolated lately for some reason. Today, I went to go see The Terminal after work with Colin. I liked the movie, but a few parts seemed a little Disney-like, but not everything was all happy. I rate this movie B+.

After wasting a lot of time surfing my sites, I have concluded that the Internet is boring. I have been updating my blog way too much, it seems other people haven't lately. Though I would think that I am posting here more because of the recent work I have done here. SA is becoming predictable, and since they moved from PayPal for credit card processing, more idiots have joined the forum. Though it's nice that those idiots get banned quickly.

Perhaps the reason that I'm surfing too much is because I'm just to tired to do any work. Last week I devoted myself to get to bed before midnight on a regular basis, and I was rewarded with a good feeling and lots of energy the next day. The past few days I have been staying up later, studying, finishing up stargate, writing in my blog. I'm going to go ahead and get to bed here really soon so that I will be feeling good and full of energy tomorrow for the iCubs game.

Good Night.

Congratulations go to Eve in Bessy for having the most messed up Eudora folder ever to grace a hard drive, and still have it work. I spent an hour trying to figure out how to transfer her Eudora settings to her new computer only to find out every time I try to access the folder it crashes. Using the terminal fails to copy the files properly and the sum of the file/folder sizes comes out to be gigs off what the containing folder reports. I am very surprised that the program is running at all on her machine. I will be going in right after class with an assortment of disk utility and recovery programs to see if I can correct this mess. This is the most difficult problem I have encountered while working here. I'm so glad this person is not a dean or someone we actually have to support. My office is charging by the hour to support her, though I don't really get any bonus for actually doing the work :\.

How could I forget to mention this yesterday. I got myself a Gmail account. My username is jrearick for those of you who are interested.