?

It looks like I might be going to Missouri for the first time ever sometime later this year.

Doesn't look like one of the big places, though.

(Gee, given what others have been saying, I feel like I'm letting everyone else down. Heh.)

I guess I'm updating this thing on a weekly basis now. Certainly not planned, but I am amused that the previous two entries fall into that.

( skimmer speed bump )

2227.2 miles plus around 10 or 15 that weren't counted because I forgot about the trip odometer until I was on 680. Yawn. Mountain Dew Game Fuel does nothing to keep me awake and tastes pretty horrible. (Fortunately, I didn't have that much in the way of nod-off problems.)

( fighting the camera at 9pm yesterday )

VoicePost 43K 0:13

“I just passed the billboard on the Free Way for Power Ball has this disclaimer. Batteries do not replace for investment purposes. Wow.” Auto-Transcribed Voice Post

Roadtrip begins tomorrow! I have a week to go visit my family in Vancouver, so I'll be heading up I-5. Tentative enroute plans: tomorrow + Sunday morning in Portland (Sunday morning perhaps inhaling Carl's exhaust on the way to Multnomah), then next Saturday, Laura's tournament, to be followed by a brief or maybe not-so-brief visit to Corvallis.

Good thing the s00pah-s3kr1t photo project wasn't for this coming weekend. I'd have nothing but behind-the-wheel pictures.

The arrangements of the FFIV songs in FFIV-2 (erm, I mean, FFIV The After Years) are incorrect in places that are sometimes relatively benign (as in, the chord progression still makes sense, even if it is weakened) and sometimes not (as in, the chord progression got wiped entirely). As someone familiar with both Western harmony and the original songs, I find this really annoying. Couldn't they have gotten that little detail right? Yeesh.

I bought registered ECC memory today and then found out that my box won't do registered memory. D'oh.

We have 4 laser pointers in the house, and because of the cats, their batteries are all out.

So I went looking around online. They all take AG13-type cells, and I found some website that claimed to sell 50 for $4, free shipping. I figured it could be a scam, but decided to go along with it.

They arrived yesterday. They work. Wow. Those people who want $6 for 2 can stuff it.

Reconsidering once again. ESXi's network performance for Solaris tops out at 12 MB/s (using a virtualized E1000 adapter), and for a 32-bit Ubuntu VM without the VMware tools (and thus using the virtualized AMD PCnet32 adapter), 6 MB/s. (Copying a file from the Solaris VM to the Ubuntu VM did 6, so it's not the physical networking hardware, which for this box is an Intel 82574L on PCIe x1.)

I can live with both, but uh, this isn't why I upgraded my home network to gigabit. Sigh. Another experiment is in order, this time a straight Linux-to-Linux copy to try and determine an upper ceiling.

Still haven't eaten; I have taken pictures of my phone and a hamper of clothing. Trying to decide between staying local (and checking out Quarry Lakes) or going to SF and sticking my head in at Golden Gate Park. Heh, by coincidence, today's the Haight-Ashbury Street Fair, though I don't think I want to hang out there just to wait for the signal.

It's 1:30 and I still have yet to shower and brush my teeth. Next trigger can happen from 6 onwards. I suspect I'll be missing at least two, heh. Only real reason I'm up is because I've reconsidered and now have ESXi up and going with two VMs: one Solaris for ZFS, and one Linux for serving media. There's enough capacity on the box to permit net servers and the like on it; that might be interesting, since I know a lot of the stuff I do now doesn't need to live on colo boxes.

Yawn. Probably should plug my phone in, too. "Um, I missed everything because my phone was plugged in at home and I was out all day?"

( in case anyone happens to look... )

So let's see if I have this straight:

Solaris: ZFS. Less power management. UPnP media servers act weird. Power draw with one spun-down hard drive: 50 W. Needs 2 GB of memory for ZFS not to do weird things (like pause rsyncs while writing).

Linux: No ZFS. 35 W power draw, one hard drive spun down. 512 MB of memory is probably sufficient.

FreeBSD: ZFS, but it's experimental.

ESXi, Linux + Solaris: 46 W power draw (no hard drive spindown capability, so that 46 W is with one spinning platter, and my full setup would probably be at least 62 W). Needs more memory (= more power consumed).

Linux + Solaris in VMware Server: No idea how it cooperates with power management, because you can't export raw devices in VMware Server.

Blah.

I suppose I should say something since I haven't said anything in quite awhile.

Well, aside from making it through the insane work crunch, and taking several days off afterwards, there hasn't been much to say. At least, not much that comes to mind. I certainly haven't been inclined to say much for months now.

I wonder if it's time to throw in the towel for good. I know I've done it a few times, and taken it back the same number of times. There are those people who would say that if you leave, you should leave quietly and not draw attention to it by saying anything. Well, too bad for those people, particularly since I'm just mumbling through my fingers and not really planning on doing anything yet.

In the last week and a half, I'm pretty certain I've worked more than 100 hours. And quite likely more than 120.

braaiiiiins

skritch skritch skritch

Sex survey going around. ( Hmm... )

Has there ever been a religion that people accepted that said that there was absolutely no way for them to attain, for lack of a better term, the Big Prize (R) at the end? That there was a group of people who would get it, but that most people never would, and that one's chances were extremely low? Or that, regardless of what they did, they were destined for the Ultimate Suckitude (R) instead?

Pretty much every religion I've ever seen that promised eternal salvation or, well, the Big Prize (R) has either laid out that it's within one's grasp if one is willing to do what's necessary for it. In other words, it's yours if you can just manage this. (In the minds of some, they've already by definition done what's necessary for it, even if they know what is necessary for it and haven't yet admitted to themselves that they really haven't done anything for it and are actually working quite well against it. But that's beside the point.) Things like confessions and repenting and penance are means of giving someone who has done something to screw it up another chance.

Doesn't seem to me like anyone else has picked up on that. I wonder why.

It's getting close to bedtime, I find I owe the State of California $3725 in use taxes (and penalties and interest), and I don't have anything else to do to fill in the time. And I'm here by myself. And I look around a bit and see people in town that probably don't remember who I am. I start to think about people I don't talk to much anymore, and how it seems like in the end, I can keep a few people as good friends, but never more than a few.

And then I feel a tap on my knee, and my lap is almost immediately filled by a blob of purring warm fur.

So much for emo. With kitties, who needs people?

Major TMI ahead... you have been warned. Maybe someone has some ideas, though, and can correct my understanding...

( TMI, and of the extremely not fun kind, too. )

I can't find the autoignition temperature of beef fat on the net. I am saddened.