Engagements and Babies, Current or Very Likely

Posted by Thomas Thu, 28 Jun 2007 09:14:28 +0000

Jessica and Mike
Sarah and Jarrodd
Chad and Elisabeth
Drew and Kellie
Colby and Elysia
Dan and Paige
Brittany and Nate

Babies:
Laurie
Laci
Summer
Becky
Mindy

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Re-encoding video

Posted by Thomas Sun, 24 Jun 2007 19:48:18 +0000

For my own future reference when trying to re-encode video (to a dumber mpeg4 implementation for my linkplayer2) with multiple audio tracks all at the same time:

ffmpeg -i 1x01\ Space\ Pilot\ 3000.avi -f avi -vcodec divx -b 1133k -acodec mp3 -ab 128 output.avi -acodec mp3 -ab 80 -newaudio

Be sure to verify video playability, quality and audio sync.

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Weddings I’m (mostly) missing this Summer

Posted by Thomas Sun, 24 Jun 2007 19:41:31 +0000

(a half-update as blatantly stolen from Robert’s facebook)

Ed and Kristen – May 19
Michael and Erin – June 8
Josh and Jaimie – June 16
Josh and Katie – July 7
Sam and ??? – July 7
Pat and Jennifer – August 4
Ben and Lou Lou – August 11

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ah mercury, sweetest of the transition metals

Posted by Thomas Sun, 17 Jun 2007 22:03:29 +0000

Smosh, just found your new blog. Will be keeping tabs. I know you’re on your honeymoon and all, so when you get back and check this, please leave a comment with some gift registry info, so I can send you guys something.

Update: Nevermind Josh, I figured it out.

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Jaimie and Josh

Posted by Thomas Sat, 16 Jun 2007 18:35:54 +0000

Congrats! Sorry I couldn’t be there to throw stuff at you. :) I know you guys have a wonderful life together ahead of you.

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By the skin of my teeth

Posted by Thomas Thu, 14 Jun 2007 00:01:37 +0000

NO!!!!! Goodbye, Mr. Wizard. You will be missed.

I really hate it when I can’t shake that sinking feeling in my stomach. I helped tow a co-worker just after work. Nothing happened, but it was definitely a little hairy at the onset (while going down what turned out to be a much larger hill than I thought — at about 30–35 mph). I took some turns a little wide, since we were moving so fast (so we got honked at a little) and at the end of another hill’s climb, we had a good number of cars stacked up behind us. We finally got to our destination (with a U-turn even), at which time I was informed that towing a car like that is illegal in Georgia. So, no harm done and no tickets, but it was a little loose and fast for my hindsight and definitely harrowing at the time. It seems like the older I get and the more experience I accrue, the more I can play things much more by ear and worry less about being absolutely perfect and seem to get away with it. :)

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Wednesday Early Morning

Posted by Thomas Wed, 13 Jun 2007 01:11:08 +0000

I continue to be incapable of going to bed before 2am. And apparently I cannot get myself to tidy up my apartment. I half tried over the weekend, but never really got around to it.

I am also less pissed at OpenSolaris, but have narrowed down my filer issues to primarily nfsd crapping out under heavy usage, causing zfs to freak out and not do destroy or snapshot operations in any timely manner, pretty much requiring a reboot. Time to learn about tuning nfs under Solaris (and why isn’t it tweaked to begin with?).

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Makes mouths happy :)

Posted by Thomas Sun, 10 Jun 2007 00:56:21 +0000

I have been supremely pissed at my home network. After having to get it back up and running twice now since I’ve gotten back (due to power eventss), I’ve decided two things. One, that my current ups hasn’t been pulling its weight around here and could use a little more exercise. And, two, that I need to put my critical infrastructure onto ups. Those fit together nicely, don’t they? My ups is now taking on more load and getting more of a workout. I think I’ve only had one day where the power was out long enough to be on battery for longer than a couple of seconds, so my reduced run time really shouldn’t be an issue, even if it does worry me some. I didn’t put my filer on it, but making sure my box, the router, switch, and another core infrastructure box weathers the storm well should let me sleep a little better at night.

All of this frustration has caused me to kick it into high gear and fix many things that have lingered half-broken, the laundry list of which I’m not going to go into. Let’s just say that I think NFS over tcp is a God send, and how you should always disable fam for Samba on Solaris. Makes mouths happy. :) Getting those two things working smoothly really put my mind at ease. I was really worrying there for a little while that I’d invested all of this time and money and in the end it wasn’t going to perform well at all. Hopefully, now, though, it will chug along nicely.

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uUpdate

Posted by Thomas Thu, 07 Jun 2007 22:46:00 +0000

Apparently my website was hacked more than I thought. I’m blaming WordPress/galleries.

I biked Sunday, yesterday and today.

I’m still hating on OpenSolaris.

I RMA’ed a drive today.

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Ridiculous

Posted by Thomas Wed, 06 Jun 2007 10:13:11 +0000

This is getting positively ridiculous. I absolutely must stop going to bed after 3+ am.

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The Elusive California Post

Posted by Thomas Wed, 06 Jun 2007 00:49:58 +0000

Yes, well, I still have valiantly managed somehow to not post about California and stuff I have more than once thought about and even blogged about blogging. I suppose now I have blogged about not blogging.

Otherwise, the apartment was still here. First things first, I got my network back in order. Pesky network. I’ve been fighting a lot with Solaris over the past couple of days. Honestly I have no idea why everyone sings its praises, because I think it sucks. Sane logging is nowhere to be found. Oh, it’ll tell you that a service is trying to be started/stopped/started/stopped, but it won’t tell you why. Wouldn’t you think that important? And, it doesn’t always like to completely reboot. It just hangs for no good reason. I have to manually reset with a dumb paperclip a time or two. SSH is wack sometimes and will ask for my private key password multiple times, even after I’ve entered it and ssh-agent is running. Samba is crazy slow. Practically unusable under Windows 2000, my testbed. I added a re-shared the directories on argento (via an nfs mount) and it was lightning fast. I don’t know why Solaris hates me. Also, the snapshot directories don’t show up with normal names under Windows. I don’t know what that is either. Also, I keep forgetting that you can’t take snapshots during a resilvering, which is terribly annoying. </rant>

California on the whole was quite amazing/terrific/awesome/spectacular/exceptional/wonderful. Definitely a lot of people networking, learning, and getting to do cool new things (and with it bookoos(sp) more things to do and manage and keep track of). Like I’ve said before, I am still amazed by the California landscape. I’m pretty sure my first trip, I didn’t ever think/realize that there were mountains. There are. Little ones and big ones and pretty ones. Lots of trees, really nice weather, and generally a very temperate climate. Even so, for all its proximity to the Pacific along with its vast coastline, it was much more dry and brown than I would have thought. Like West Texas BrownTM. For as much farm, cattle, and tree grove land that I saw while driving through the valley, I would have expected there to be more rain and greener pasture grass. Even up near Yosemite, it was quite dry, I thought. I passed over many a water canal, which I pretty much think to be preposterous. The whole concept is so foreign to me. Why don’t they cover the canals?

Driving through all that land also made me think about how big California is and how rural the majority of the landmass must be. It’s like the 5th biggest economy in the world or something, so I’m sure that agriculture plays quite a large role. But when I think of California, I think LA/SF/Hollywood. I don’t think small to medium farmers trying to make a living, driving very large and very expensive farm implements and driving diesel guzzling trucks. I wonder how all the farmers feel about the exorbitant gas prices in Cali. I do think, though, that it was cheaper in the rural parts than in the city.

The people I met were quite normal and temperate people. Of course, I just interacted with people from Google, but they weren’t all crazy, liberal people. I’m sure there were a hand full, but that’s to be expected everywhere. Which, I would imagine that the liberalness is prevalent in any major city. And even while more so in California, and less so in Texas, bigger cities I would think would breed a liberal slant to things.

I am happy to be back (in my own bed and the like), but was definitely sad to leave. I did get kindof sick, but I also got kindof better kindof quickly, so all is kindof well.

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