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GRAFFITI -- April 04, 2005 thru April 10, 2005>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message. |
 
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April 4, 2005
0703 - Good morning. First, unimportant matters... I've got a new "favicon.ico" file loaded up. Rick Boatwright didn't like my old one, which was a capital "O" being fragged (I was deep into Doom when I designed that one, but never got nearly enough questions about it). Rick took the 3D yin/yang ball and made a GIF for me. I used ImageMagick to convert it to MS's ICO format, and put it in place last night. To make it appear for you, you'll have to clear the cache, then restart your browser, according to what I've read. Now, for bookmarks, I have no idea. It may autoupdate when you next visit, or it may need to have the bookmark re-set with the new favicon (if indeed you care that much). Thanks a bunch, Rick - it looks great!
We had a fairly social weekend, enjoying supper with Scott Kitterman and his family on Saturday, then having Linda Rose over for shopping (with Marcia, for fabric, duh!), movies and supper (us). We saw ... um, The Incredibles, which was pretty fun, and Sky Captain blah blah blah, which was okay, but only just. It trailered better than it showed. Oh, well. And I can officially say that I've had enough steak to last me for a while, as I had seconds both nights.
I had less fun yesterday afternoon, while Marcia and Linda Rose were shopping. I was fighting to get a SATA drive recognized by my Asus K8N system. I'd say I was having trouble with Linux and SATA with this system, which would be consistent with everything I've read about SATA and the nForce3 chipset and Linux ... but since even the BIOS doesn't see the drive, I'm loathe to hold Linux's feet to the fire on this one. Now I think I'm about two BIOS revs back on this board, but I'm not going to have fun there, either. I had just built a FreeDOS boot disk when I remembered ... no floppy drive in that system, and no spares laying about here. Game over for now. I'll try again one day soon, and happily accept any advice I can get in the interim.
I'm going to have work-week interruptus on Wednesday. Marcia and I take the day off to handle some things. Among them, I'll put the car back into the shop to take care of a couple of niggles from the remodel. Then I'll run Marcia's truck over to the Emissions testing facility in Silver Spring after our morning appointments. The Santa Fe is due for its first screening since we bought it two and a half years ago. Some other day this week or next I'll do the same with the Elantra.
There's plenty more to do around here, and at work. I've got a system to build and test for some custom services for one of our departments, and it'll be challenging, if not fun. I'd better get over there, and start preparing the hardware - I'll want to do an extensive burn-in of the disks and memory, since it's all re-purposed hardware. I would rather it fell over in testing this week, than in production next month. I'll see you back here soon - have a great day!
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April 5, 2005
0722 - Good morning. Regarding my BIOS update problems due to lacking a legacy device in my newest tower, Paul Hampson wrote to inquire if perhaps I would be better served by simply building a boot CD to provide the functionality I need. The short first answer was, "Sure, I might be able to do that, but I'm lazy enough that installing a floppy drive from the copious stack of free-for-the-taking at work is an easier option." To be honest, I didn't think much about his question at the time, and now I'll have to admit, I'm not sure I know how to easily build a DOS boot CDROM to run the DOS-based BIOS update utility to get that Asus K8N close to current.
If I had a license for Windows that I could install on that box then I could use the EZ-Update tool (it's called something like that, anyway) directly from Windows. But I don't and I did install the floppy drive from work, booted one floppy with the FreeDOS Beta9 boot image on it, then popped in a second floppy, ran the BIOS backup, then the BIOS update and all was light and happiness. The SATA drive magically appeared both in the BIOS report and in Linux with the auto-probed use of the libata and sata_nv modules. Poof, 250G of extra storage on our backup/fileserver box. Excellent. Just for fun, does anyone have a DOS boot CD image that does networking with nForce3 chipsets so that I could download and run the requisite utilities from a ramdisk DOS system?
I did spend some time prepping that server yesterday. I stripped down and restrung the entire cabinet, since this is the first box I'm standing up in this rack. Then I rearranged drives among the available candidates for this particular box, and fired up the selected Dell 1650. It's a dual Xeon 1400 MHz, with 2 gig of RAM and three 73 gig SCSI drives in a RAID 5. I low-level formatted each of the drives and rebuilt the RAID yesterday. Today I'll run Memtest all day. Later in the week, I'll install the legacy server OS that I've been instructed to use for this particular operation.
Today is the second day of true Spring here. Yesterday it was blue skies, glorious and mid 60's (farenheit). Today is supposed to be more of the same, only into the low 70's, and tomorrow perhaps high 70's. Then we have weather again for the end of the week, with rain probable for Thursday and Friday. Oh, well. I guess I'd better wind this up and head into work. There's lots to accomplish, I slept late because I'm not yet back up to speed on Daylight Stealing Time, and I won't be there tomorrow. Have a great day!
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April 6, 2005
0730 - Good morning. A full day ahead, not at work, but with many things to do. Drop the car off, go with Marcia to doctor's appointment, come home and get Marcia settled. Take Santa Fe to get emissions testing done. Other stuff. At end of day, pick up car again. If I've time for anything interesting, I'll report it here tomorrow. Have a lovely day.
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April 7, 2005
0730 - Good morning. And out of time before I'm even started. We're moving about a bit later than usual because we're picking up the car this morning. Post-procedure directions included no driving for Marcia, so we couldn't get it yesterday afternoon. The procedure went well, though, no problems found -- a good thing. The Santa Fe passed it's emissions test, too. I did a bit of yard work in the early evening, and so went my day. Have a good 'un, and remember, it's almost Friday. Ciao!
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April 8, 2005
0830 - Good morning. Finally a decent start on a day. I was up and out the door by 0645, which is a good thing, both traffic-wise and getting-my-day-started-wise. Yesterday I built a new workstation for a QA person ... and did some other stuff. In the evening, I started assembling the new patio furniture that we ordered. We found something we really liked at a local store, but it cost a grand there. So instead we found it online, shipped for about 40% off that high price. Oh, and it rained, too, all evening and through the night. More showers today, then clearing and pretty for the weekend. Boy, am I glad it's Friday! Ciao!
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April 9, 2005
1719 - Good evening. No post today. I've got some snaps of the yardwork I did today, but I'm whacked. We're going out to supper, then over to a neighbor's for a couple of hours. Have a great time, see you tomorrow.
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April 10, 2005
0832 - Good morning. Early start for shopping, then chores. Back later.
1755 - Hi. I'm back, and I'm dead. Yesterday we went to the nurseries first thing. Once home, I mowed front and back, unpotted all of last year's deck plants, potted all the new plants for this year's deck, put some tomatoes in play in back, and some spikes and flowers in front. Then I hosed off, we went to supper, then over to a neighbor's for a little get-together. Back home by 2330, and dead to the world. Below, yesterday's pictures:
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Today, we went shopping early, and picked up a recliner for the living room. Once home, I ran a quick errand back to one of the nurseries. They opened while I was driving that way, or I would have called ahead, to find out they were out of the red-dyed hardwood mulch I'm using. Next time I wait and call first. Back again, I pressure washed the whole back deck. That took up about four hours. Then I arranged the potted plants, assembled the new table, and Marcia's birthday present - the fire pit. I am deeply beat, looking forward to a week at work...
Now to the showers with me. Have a lovely rest of your weekend, see you tomorrow!
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
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