Wednesday 2011-11-30

Started off the morning with page storm caused by a xen domU jumping ahead 30 minutes and then time stopping on it. This of course caused all kinds of problems with encryption and such. System could not be rebooted and had to be destroy/created.

Went Middle School shopping with the wife. I think we have found a good one, and will look more into it over the next couple of weeks. Had tea at Satellite Coffee.

Getting excited to be in Blacksburg Virginia for FudCon. One, I am bringing my dad. My passion for computers would not have been as wide and strong if my dad had not introduced me to a Heathkit 8008 system. I was told I couldn't get a bigger computer until I programmed it.. which I spent a whole summer getting it to do a little light show. My dad's friends would have these MicroVaxes running this thing called Unix (because VMS was for accountants as I was told at the age of 10 or so). He had a great time at SELF last year and Mom wants a weekend to herself so up we go.

Second, Blacksburg Virginia is home to Blacksburg Tactical Research Center which had some of my most favourite gaming supplements. Well it was 20 years ago. Now to see how their Open Gaming Supplement system works.

Tuesday 2011-11-29

Last week was mainly taken up with little tasks to make sure Fedora IT would survive American Thanksgiving break, which it seems it did. Yesterday was decommissioning some servers that were not properly configured originally. Tomorrow will be fixing their replacements I guess.

Spent today working out how to end of life mediawiki 114 and 115. I will be end of lifing mediawiki116 as soon as the reviews for 117 and 118 are submitted and fulfilled.

Not much else on the list of things.. my head feels like someone took a 2x4 to the left of it for some reason.

Monday 2011-11-21

Most of the weekend turned into a blur of things I can't remember exactly what I was doing. I thought I was going to read some comic collections of Schlock Mercenary and Sheldon the Kid. Instead they were quickly taken by my son to his room where giggles and saying of gag-lines kept echoing out of. I thought he was done with them yesterday as they had reappeared on the coffee table, but they quickly went back as "I wanted to read them again." Since I have not seen our Calvin and Hobbes in years.. I expect I will have to order another set. [On the other hand, for all the other comic collections we have that don't get boggarted like that.. it is a fine complement.]

Oh look this was in my drafts for some reason.. getting published.

Thursday 2011-11-17

Well no one seemed to notice the Ubuntu Chuck say YEAH to the Beefy Miracle in my last post... I dodged something I guess.

Tasks

1. Email deluge
2. Learned NOT to read users@fedoraproject.org if you want to feel happy about what one does.
3. Found out that I broke mirroring for people getting spins from alt.fedoraproject.org due to my missing that the rsync target was called alt before and fedora-alt later.
4. Struggled with setting up APC power strips for remote logins. Got 2 to work. Had to get help from RHIT on the other two.
5. Tried to get to building those systems he started on Monday and got sucked into the morass of configs.

Wednesday 2011-11-16

Tasks for today

1. Phone call with various people around the world on PPC systems
2. Thanksgiving lunch with son.
3. Finish off rsync's off Fedora 13 and Fedora 14 to archives. Will redo 14 after EOL. Will also work with dgilmore on a clean hardlink of the entire archive tree.
4. Worked a bit on the Fedora Hosted FAD.
5. Finished off a budget.
6. Took a meme too far (with apologies to my friends in Ubuntu.. who are currently looking for eyebleach. Also apologies to anyone who uses the gimp professionally.. I butchered this badly.)
7. Read about SOPA. Having seen how badly the current DMCA and similar rules are abused regularly.. I figure this will it even worse.
8. Work out which systems I would abuse tomorrow.

Tuesday 2011-11-15

Today was another mass of email, but finally let up around lunch time... just in time for phone meetings. Didn't get a chance to try Bovril.. will put that on the list later.

Tasks

1. Fix certificates on alt and download servers.
2. Try to get alt and secondary to do weird stuff with URLs. [well not weird but getting puppet it to do it for me is the weird part.]
3. Wipe disks on serverbeach05
4. Sync Fedora 13 from production to archives
5. Sync Fedora 14 from production to archives
6. Try to figure out how to do spreadsheets

Music

WCPE because I need to relax or I will strangle myself on a spreadsheet.

Monday 2011-11-14

Spent most of the weekend not sleeping well to this lingering cough. My mood was quite foul and rude by the end of yesterday. Broke down and got some cough medicine which helped my sleep last night quite a bit.

After extensive semi-blind testing (making identical sandwiches and then randomly eating them later in the day), I have come to the conclusion that Dennis Gilmore is correct: Vegemite tastes much better than Marmite. I think it has to do with the Malt extract in Vegemite versus "Vegetable" extract used in Marmite.  Then lo and behold this evening a third contender appeared on my doorstep all the way from Shropshire England: Bovril.

Tasks today

1. Email catchup. Two days of email is quite a lot.
2. Try to figure out serverbeach routing with Kevin
3. More email.
4. Clean up old disks off of serverbeach05
5. More email.
6. Lots of tiny IRQ's all different.

[Edited 2011-11-15. I got Bovril not Marmite.]

Thursday 2011-11-10

Got an extremely good nights sleep last night. Thank you Theraflu :).

Spent the morning catching up with emails from the last couple of days. I had put a pile of them on my "will read when my head isnt' spinnie" and since it wasn't, they needed to be read.

Spent the rest of the day trying to figure out how many systems we use, where and why. Not a lot of fascinating work but one of those "hmmmm".

And today I got several emails of people who say they have read my blogs and wanted to know if I could advertise for them :). The answer is no. This blog is meant for making sure I write something weekly and to let my boss know I didn't die :). I don't feel right using it to market stuff.

On other news.. we have everything ordered for Thanksgiving Dinner. I just need to finish the gaming module off.

Been sick (2011-11-02 => 2011-11-08)

Tuesday night last week (2011-11-02) I got a horrible headache and went to lay down.. ended up getting some sort of "creeping crud" that was going around the neighbourhood. Spent most of Wednesday and Thursday laying in bed watching Economics lectures I had gotten earlier in the year as a present. I went to a technical school which at the time didn't have much in the way of softer sciences like Economics so it has been an area that is interesting but foreign. When Economists use the words like people are "rational actors" it means something completely different from what a psychologist would mean. I can see why it causes so much confusion with people. I also finished watching the lecture series on Chinese history, which was quite good but now I want to find out more details on various periods.

On Friday I got back to work and spent the day reading emails and getting quotes for new systems... and then spent the weekend sleeping for the most part. Went to a Magic show one day which was fun, but I was wiped out too much to try and figure out how the tricks were done. Monday was getting ready for the upcoming release. Do we have enough disk space (yes), Are permissions set correctly (yes), Did we correctly calculate the speed of a laden swallow (no). Tuesday was watching servers, going to some phone meetings, and ordering equipment I got quotes on last week. Ordered some Xmas presents for family and started to figure out what cards to send this year.

Today has been dealing with a lingering cough from the "creeping crud". It  goes from just a burble to something that sounds like Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Work wise was a deluge of emails and deal with next years ordering cycle.

Finally for people looking at interesting ideas in computer games, I found this article fascinating. Glitch sounds like a game I would enjoy playing in or writing. Cooperative games have been more my pull. That said, I am actually trying to figure out the old Empire game.

Tuesday 2011-11-01

Wow another November.. that means Thanksgiving is coming soon. I got to hand out some candy last night. Our street is reaching historic "dead" levels which means I may just go to some other street next year (or put up some sign "Diabetic Rush Here. Get your 5lb sugar bags!"

Tasks

• Email. Not as much as normal.. Snow storm in northeast I think has hit a lot of core emailers.
• Download RC3. Changes in XFCE not a lot. Not sure if we are ready for a final release though.
• See that RC4 does need a bunch of retesting.. wait for it to appear so I can grab it.
• Put out for various quotes.. will see if they come in the morning

Ended up with a headache in the afternoon and went to laydown. When I got up no more headache, but now I have a sore throat and thick cough. Well one of the benefits of working from home is I can't get my co-workers any sicker than they would be :).