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GRAFFITI -- September 01, 2008 thru September 07, 2008 >> Link to the Current Week << Last Week << Mon   Tues   Wed   Thu   Fri   Sat   Sun >> Next Week Search this site : 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.

MONDAY    Tues    Wed    Thu    Fri    Sat    Sun   
September 1, 2008

2055 - Good evening. Happy Labor Day, if you celebrate that. I "celebrated" by doing yardwork in back. I pruned several trees, trimmed all the hedges, cleaned up the dog gifts, strimmed and mowed the lawn. This time last year, the garden was toast, and I ripped it out. I've got three or four more weeks of tomatoes and peppers coming, unless we have an early freeze. I may, next weekend, put a couple of the beds to "bed" for the winter, to lighten the load when it's time for the balance to be done.

While I occasionally consider a calorie-restricted diet for the dogs, to cut down on the amount of backyard cleanup I need to do, I did actually buy them their next set of doggy treats. They get one rawhide chew (small: 10 mm dia. 125 mm long) each evening at around eight. I buy them by the thousand lot, about every 14 or 15 months. We're about halfway through the last hundred-pak of the bacon-basted ones I bought last. The time before that, it was "peanut butter". So these will be cheese-basted. I imagine they'll be a hit ... until Christmas 2009, when it'll be time for another round.

Row 1 - Normal rainfall Glenn Dale Bell Station, 1921-1987

We finished up August nearly three inches down from normal rainfall for the month. The storms that pasted Bob and Barbara barely made a wet spot in the middle of the yard. I'm guessing right now that our next major rain event might be due to the remnants of Hanna, on Saturday.

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September 2, 2008

2053 - Good evening. Paul wrote to remind me that the 20 or so inches of rain that we've had since May is quite a lot compared to the utter lack of drenching that California had this year, and pointed out how quickly I forget such things. Indeed. I have seasons, snow to shovel, and the occasional hurricane and tornado. Oh, and I live within the 20 megaton kill zone around DC. But we have few wildfires, immeasurable earthquakes, and nobody shipping our water into the middle of a native desert. There are always trade-offs.

Tonight, the offsite backup routine runs, shifted 24 hours due to the holiday. Not much else going on. Ciao!

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September 3, 2008

1831 - Good evening. I, too, received my email announcing that I was a freshly minted Best Buy Premier Black member - something to do with their rewards points program and whatnot. Not nearly as much of our disposable income goes to Best Buy as you might expect. But I do shop there. Anyway, I clicked on the link for the Concierge, figuring that'd be the best way to determine the depth of their new marketing program. What I found was reefs and rocks. More to the point, their servers didn's scale to meet demand. Maroons. So, the "best" customers they have, invited to the premium rewards service, are greeted with "Server too busy". That's not the way to win friends and influence people.

Meanwhile, it turns out that California has invoked copyright over its laws. Yeah. The taxpayers of California pay lawmakers to intrude into their lives, then have to pay again for some uses of the laws they paid for once. Slashdot directed me to this story about Carl Malamud, who's inciting a lawsuit in hopes of freeing the laws. Go, Carl! A possibly overpaid bureaucrat noted in the article: "We exercise our copyright to benefit the people of California. We are obtaining compensation for the people of California." No. You're double-dipping and cheating taxpayers out of their money, making them pay (again!) for information they must (by law) know. Maroons.

That's two maroon stories. Can we make the trifecta? Sure — this is Planet Earth — stupidity abounds... Obese People to Blame for Accelerating Global Warming? Yep, that's the capstone of today's post. Thanks to Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That? for bringing it to my attention the other day. Be well.

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September 4, 2008

2200 - Good evening.Oh, hey, it's almost Friday! I can dig that. We're under Tropical Storm Watch, and Flash Flood Watch, as Hanna is expected to skate through here in the next 48 hours. Ike, on the other hand, looks to be death to Florida (but it's early days, yet). In other news, over on Jerry's site it was pointed out that the Kindle version of Inferno is out (in re-release pending February's debut of Escape From Hell). I note two things. When poking around, I find that the trade paperback list price for Inferno is 13 bucks. THIRTEEN FREAKING DOLLARS?!?!? Discounted, it's still above $10. The Kindle version is a shade under 10 dollars ... for no printing costs and miniscule "shipping" costs. I love to read, but this is just looney.

I've got to get signed up for my 401K. For the first few months, I wasn't eligable, then Marcia's job situation was rickety for a few months, making that move unwise in the short term. Now that things appear to be stabilizing, I've got to get that stuff rolling in the right way.

On the school front, indecision shouldn't imply immobility. So I've signed up for another 3 unit course on the CMIT major track while I decide what path to take. The classes are, for the most part, directly applicable and useful to me in my working environment, so that's not bad. Oh, yeah ... I got an A for the summer session class.

Now... 0700 at work tomorrow, like most of the last two weeks, to get the facilities vendors in and working early. So it's time for me to retire. ignite!

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Mon    Tues    Wed    Thu    FRIDAY    Sat    Sun   
September 5, 2008

2206 - Good evening. Yay. Oh, and the rain's on it's way — 0.06" so far, and with the main part of Hanna to sweep by tomorrow AM. As long as there's no power events, it's probably a good day for house cleaning. There'll be time enough for relaxation after I'm dead. Ciao!

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September 6, 2008

1316 - Good afternoon. So the cleanup today is more computer related than house related. I'm starting off with clearing a problem message stuck in the queue up at Zidane. We used to run Amavis to interface with SpamAssassin. That lasted just a few hours into the new system we're running at SoftLayer. Now ... we use something else. But a message has been stuck in a Postfix queue, trying to be sent through the now non-existent localhost TCP port for smtp-amavis:

Sep 6 11:53:23 zidane postfix/qmgr[4228]: warning: connect to transport smtp-amavis: Connection refused

I spotted this while investigating something else this morning, and asked Greg about it. Turns out it's just hanging chad. So I found the one message hanging out in the Postfix active queue (for a long bloody time)

root@zidane:/var/spool/postfix/active# strings \
/var/spool/postfix/active/02E6D1E04AE

C? 14234 174 1 0T
1196749745L
smtp-amavis:[127.0.0.1]:10026F
...

And then I deleted it...

root@zidane:/var/spool/postfix/active# postsuper -d 02E6D1E04AE
postsuper: 02E6D1E04AE: removed
postsuper: Deleted: 1 message

One cleanup done. Now I'm going to reorganize storage, systems, and printer location. That'll eat ALL of this afternoon and much of tomorrow.

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September 7, 2008

1733 - Good afternoon. Yesterday, among other things, I did a furniture mod, to accommodate my networked laser printer down within reach. Sitting on top of the hutch over my desk, it both loomed and was hard to use, even for me. I uncased Marcia's old AMD 64 system out of the Antec Overture case, and plunked assorted components into a "spare" Sonata case. That had previously housed a P4/D915 system. Once it was all together, I installed Ubuntu 8.04-1 x86-64 version. Then I started selectively migrating data. The upside of cheap, large disks is that there's plenty of room for everything. The downside is that there's plenty of room for everything! /home on Magickthyse was usually running at between 450 and 550 GB out of 978 GB available. I've culled that down to 89 GB on the /home here on Slartibartfast. There's still 80 GB worth of virtual machines over there, some of which are likely to make the trip. This has always included backups from Zidane (I'm carrying two weeks worth of that in hardlinked trees), and backups from Marcia's current system. Here's what it looks like today:

slartibartfast:/home# du -sh *
49M   backup
17G   bilbrey
44K   greg
30G   marcia
457M  reference
717M  svn
41G   zdata

Hanna rolled through here yesterday. I guess we got off easy — parts of the surrounding areas took 8.5" of rain - we only got 1.82 inches in our back yard, and most of that was between 0900 and 1400. The ground sucked it all up. Right now, it looks like the Florida keys are going to get a relatively light drubbing from Ike as that storm passes to the south. But Texas dosn't look like a good place to be by next weekend.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, the beat goes on: our kids dying for the freedom of another country. Noble, and with great intentions, every one of our service members makes me proud! Our condolences to the families and units of our fallen warriors.

• Spc. Carlo E. Alfonso, 23, of Spokane, Washington, died on Aug. 26 of injuries sustained when his vehicle struck an improvised explosive device in Sadr City, Iraq.
• Spc. Jorge L. Feliz Nieve, 26, of Queens Village, New York, died on Aug. 28 of injuries sustained from a vehicle incident in Mosul, Iraq.
• Spc. Steven J. Fitzmorris, 26, of Columbia, Missouri, died on Aug. 25 of wounds suffered from enemy fire while on a dismounted patrol in Adhamiyah, Iraq.
• Petty Officer 1st Class Joshua Harris, 36,of Lexington, North Carolina, died Aug. 30 from injuries sustained while conducting combat operations in Afghanistan.
• Pfc. Patrick W. May, 22, of Jamestown, New York, died Sept. 2 in Baghdad, Iraq, of injuries sufferedfrom a non-combat related incident.
• Sgt. 1st Class Gregory A. Rodriguez, 35, of Weidman, Michigan, died Sept. 2 of wounds suffered in Ana Kalay, Afghanistan, when his mounted patrol came under small arms fire.

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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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