Monday, February 27, 2006

Totally in Trouble on This One

Ellis is a member of the Deal clan all right.

One, she falls asleep in odd places. These are two shots from the other night when she dozed off underneath the bathroom vanity. She had the doors closed and seemed quite comfy. Notice that she’s kicked her shoes off.

And here I’ve tried to wake he up a bit. She was NOT interested in conciousness at that point. (That’s oreo cookies smeared all over the edges of her mouth). Hey, lay off, sometimes it’s hard to get dinner ready within a decent interval of getting home and you have to have an oreo or two on hand to quiet the teeming masses of children in the Deal Family Compound.


Two, she also has the slightly disturbing tendency to put things on her head and say, “Look at me!” That I’ve done that sort of thing all my life and Reha was actually surprised that it was Ellis who did this and not me says a lot about the kind of stuff we are going to see for years to come.

That’s some sort of spider thing from Halloween. Not usually worn as a hat. Or worn at all for that matter.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

Well Bless Me!

Our company has co-located a server in an awesome local Data Center. Cheap and they are available 24/7 for all kinds of stupid stuff.

Anyway, for eminently practical reasons, they only identify client servers by their customer number. That’s so Company X doesn’t know that their direct competitor, Company Y, is one rack over.

But I guess certain people have no real competion and they don’t care who knows where there server is. Case in point, the Catholics have parked an xserve a couple of slots below us.

What I want to know is, what’s the specific ceremony involved in blessing an Xserve? Is it different if it’s a Windows box? Click on each photo for a larger version.

As you can see in this shot, the processor lights are lit up and it’s churning on something. As a matter of fact that box is ALWAYS churning on something. What’s it doing?

I wonder if our box is close enough to get some residual blessings from San Isidro de Sevilla?

A Small Bit of Payback

One thing about being a SysAdmin is that there is a fine line between “just doing my job” and “being nosy and indiscreet.” Being “root” implies a certain amount of maturity as well, which I occasionally lack, but that’s beside the point right now.

All I’m saying is that when you have the power to read everyone’s email and see every single thing that happens on the network, that’s a helluva a lot of responsibility. I think most SysAdmins would agree that though it’s nice to have that power sometimes you regret it. For example, everyone and their brother asks you questions ALL THE TIME. That can get old real fast.

But sometimes there is sweet, sweet payback. Like now.

A certain person who’s identity I’ll protect, asked me to help her fix a flakey hard drive. She had accidentally pulled out a cable while it was in the middle of a write and now the poor thing’s internal directory structure was totally hammered. It didn’t know which way was up and neither Disk Utility nor “fsck” could repair it. (Which makes sense, since I think Disk Utility is just “fsck” with a pretty face, but I could be wrong about that).

Anyway, I managed to salvage all 75 GBs of the data. Yay for me, but as I’m going through the files to make sure that data isn’t corrupted (as I was asked to do, I wasn’t snooping!), I came across an “iTunes Music” folder.

Tucked in between all the “cool person music” (Pete Yorn, Radiohead, Pedro the Lion, The Shins, that sort of thing, stuff that you might expect to find in a designer’s semi-snooty music collection) was this:

(click for really embarrassing large version that you can read).

Love my job!

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

The Pain That Never Ends

The house is finally warm. Sort of.

My man Kris (he’s my new best friend!) from Action Plumbing and Heating fixed our furnance problem on Saturday. Some sort of sensor went ka-blooey. And we are still having some problems with heating the house to a toasty 66 degrees F. The fan blows constantly, the flame jets come on and off and the house gets warm, but we can’t get above 65-ish.

As has been pointed out on numerous occasions, I’m an idiot. All of our problems stem from the fact that when I began the remodel, I failed to A) shut down the furnace while tearing down dusty sheetrock and B) changing the filters daily if I was going to leave the furnace on during the remodel extravaganza. I did neither of those two things. So the furnace got totally clogged with dirt, dust and a couple weeks ago, a small child. The kid was no big deal, minor jaws of life extration, but the dust, ah the dust, that’s a HUGE problem.

The first thing that happened was that a flame sensor went out. That was a couple of hundred dollars. Then because the blower assembly was caked in dust and crap and not moving air well, we had a guy come out and basically take the thing apart and clean it out. More “couple hundred dollars” for that little adventure.

Then last Friday night we had the “blowing COLD air constantly” trick. That was fun and we got down to the low 40s F in every room. And for some reason, I couldn’t get the fan to stay off. I did the old trick of turning on a hot, hot shower, generating a huge cloud of steam, which gently floated through the house. But then it hit the really cold kitchen and when the two fronts met, a small tornado formed by the fridge. Then it began to hail and finally snow. But we all got to practice our skating there on our vinyl flooring. I think I have a chance at gold, if I can just nail the triple Lutz in my free program on Thursday. Anyway, it turns out another sensor had gone south. One more “couple hundred dollars” for that part and service. But I got to know Kris really well, so that’s nice.

And the best thing? We aren’t done yet! Remember how I said the blower was all gunky? Turns out the coil for the A/C is also clogged in much the same way. Though it makes sense to me now, I didn’t even know we had an A/C coil in the heater. Here’s how a furnace with A/C bolted on goes: Big ol’ Blower at the bottom to Flame Jets to Heating Chamber in the middle and finally A/C Coil above everything in the main path of the duct work. The coil gets really cold when the A/C is on and the blower does its thing pushing cold air through the house in summer. (duh!) Apparently cleaning the blower assembly didn’t include cleaning the A/C coil when we had that done a couple weeks ago.

My new best friend Kris from Action Plumbing and Heating told me that many of our problems could be solved with a new furnace. My man Kris is a sharp one! He also says that our current heater is too large for our house. He’s actually not the first to say this, but I gotta say, I’m not in the mood to drop a couple of grand on a new Trane. He also pointed out that the clogged coil is funky, too. It’s oversized as well, which causes it’s own set of problems in the summer. It tends to generate too much condensation and occasionally causes flooding in the basement. Cool, huh? Want to buy our house? Cheap!

So either tomorrow or Friday, depending on his schedule, Kris is going to replace the A/C coil.

For a couple hundred dollars.

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

New Digs

I have debated whether or not to run with two screens, given that the Cinema Display is quite large, but in the end, the seductive siren call of screen space was too much. One little trip to Mac Docs for an ADC to VGA adapter and I was in business.

The surprising thing is that I feel like I have MORE room on my physical desktop. The old 22” monitor was right in front of my face and it took up a huge amount of desktop real estate. Now it’s “tucked” in the corner on the right and I have a lot more room in front of me.

As you can see in the second pic, I have Illustrator open and all its 396 palettes are on the right monitor.

Proximus

 

Favorite Entries

If you are new around here, the following entries have been reasonably well received. You might want to peruse these.

• Partners
• Correspondence
• Help Wanted
• From the Office of Mis-directed Email
• A Word from the Small Person in the House
• RNT Product Review: Chocolate Mix Skittles Left Me Sterile!
• Jon’s Report Card circa… A Long Time Ago
• Dear Gratuitously Naked Conversationalist at the Gym:
• A Peek Inside the Writer’s Guild and Producers’ Negotiations
• We Regret the Error
• Letters from a Homeowner to His General Contractor
• What I Did There
• Hermaphrodite Administrative Assistants and Receptionists Need Not Apply
• Giving Me an IM Account Was Obviously a Huge Mistake
• Official Ransom Note Typography Vista vs. Mac OS X Shootout
• I Need a Real Hobby
• Beat Down
• Big Fat Lies
• True Love
• Now MY Ovaries Hurt
• Don’t Get Her Started
• Disturbing Trend
• Had to do it
• Mooshy stuff
• Ransom Note Typography End User License Agreement “EULA”
• Diva-licious!
• Just so we’re clear
• PETA may have a point

Holy Crap! Look at all this STUFF down here. It's awesome!

Really, I'm glad you made it down here. Almost no one ever comes down here. I'm like in a freaking dungeon down here. I get lonely. But not you. YOU made it all the way to the end of the page. For this I think I've a little crush on you. I don't know, is "love" to strong a word to use in this situation? Well, if it's not "love," then it's very strong "like." I'm totally in like with you for coming down here. You are awesome. Please love me back! I know, I know, I shouldn't be all needy, it's not attractive at all, but you don't know how it is to be stuck down here. Who scrolls all the way to the end of a page anymore these days? Anyway, thanks for shedding some light down here in the depths. I appreciate it. Shoot me an email and I'll send you a dollar, OK?

©2005-2010 Jon B. Deal All Rights Reserved. I'm not kidding around here, I know people who know other people who would be willing to beat you up or similarly infringe on your rights, should you happen to infringe on my rights.