New stuff

Posted by Thomas Sat, 28 Jun 2008 00:57:21 +0000

I finally tonight bought a new computer. I’ve been putting it off for like over 6 months. The price has logically dropped in that timeframe, and only time will tell if the savings were worth the not-enough-ram-for-everthing-I’d-like-to-keep-open-all-the-time and only using one of my 2 really old 19″ crts…

Informal poll: Who thinks I should buy L glass to replace my broken kit lens (specifically the 24-70mm f/2.8L USM)? I’m really starting to jones for it. And if all of my major purchases in the past month weren’t enough, the jonesing for a very large tv is rearing its ugly head again.

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Nexenta 2.0

Posted by Thomas Tue, 24 Jun 2008 00:02:52 +0000

is reinstalling his filer yet again. This is like the second time it’s locked up and then decided not to want to boot up after I’ve kicked it. Does not bode well for long term Nexenta stability. Granted I have like zero low level Solaris troubleshooting skills, but I can’t recall the last time it was I had a linux system totally buy the farm. I’ve managed to get myself into some sticky situations, where my linux skills have saved me, but this is ridiculous. Let’s just say I haven’t been impressed with Solaris. Honestly I have no idea why everyone buys their expensive stuff.

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Sweet and Low

Posted by Thomas Mon, 23 Jun 2008 10:28:12 +0000

In my head this morning: Augustana “Sweet and Low”

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How I Met Your Mother

Posted by Thomas Mon, 23 Jun 2008 01:25:55 +0000

During some late night flight back from somewhere to Atlanta, I watched “How I Met Your Mother” on the plane. I must have caught a couple of episodes on a couple of flights. Anyway, it struck me as a decent show, so I finally started watching it. I got through the first season (yesterday?) and through most of the second today. I’m sort of stuck on an episode at the moment (18 to be exact). Which is bad because I was starting to think I might have been able to finish it today (the second season). But it’s getting late, so really I should go to bed. Anyway I’ve like it pretty well and will catch up to current filming (they finished season three). The first season was really good, but about a third of the way through the second season, a lot of the tension was resolved and it seemed to move to more episodic stories. Before there were some longer arcs and long unresolved issues, which I really liked. And of course you can drag those out for too long *cough*lost*cough*. So I understand the need to move on from those story devices, but having episode after episode of everybody getting along and nothing terrible really happening can get a little boring and mundane pretty quickly. Don’t get me wrong, I still like it and plan on finishing it. But it seems like something changed from the first season. Maybe it was that I finally felt like I understood the characters, so little is surprising now about how they act and react and what I expect. I guess I should try and check out the commentaries and see if they’re interesting…

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5TB goodness

Posted by Thomas Sat, 21 Jun 2008 13:45:37 +0000

# before
root@filer0:~# zpool list tank
NAME      SIZE   USED  AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
tank     1.82T  1.56T   266G    85%  ONLINE  -

root@filer0:~# zpool add tank raidz c2t5d0 c3t2d0 c3t6d0 c2t2d0 c2t6d0

# after
root@filer0:~# zpool list tank
NAME      SIZE   USED  AVAIL    CAP  HEALTH  ALTROOT
tank     6.37T  1.56T  4.81T    24%  ONLINE  -

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The price of milk

Posted by Thomas Mon, 16 Jun 2008 00:41:15 +0000

So besides sweltering in my own apartment due to an air conditioner that I think is working much less optimally than it should, for dinner tonight, I decided that since I didn’t really want fast food, that I would just eat some cereal. Having just returned from two weeks traveling, I of course didn’t have any milk to speak of (well you might assume that I still had rotting milk in the fridge, and you might be correct, but I did have the foresight to throw the milk out before I left). Standing in line to check out with my one item of half a gallon of vitamin d, whole milk, the lady behind me asks me, “how much is the milk?”. Which is a perfectly valid question. You know like, maybe it was on sale, or maybe she’s wondering if the price of milk has gone up with all the transportation price hikes due to gas prices. I had no idea how much the milk was. I felt really bad for not knowing. There was this episode of West Wing, where the press secretary was making a point about how the other side was out of touch because they didn’t even know the price of milk, only to realize that they themselves didn’t know the price of a gallon of milk. The price couldn’t have made a bit of difference to me. I only care in so much that it would have been cheaper than buying a combo meal at <insert your favorite fast food place here>.

Sort of like the price of gas. I have to pay it, and there’s no real way for me to game the system to get cheaper gas, so I just buy it. I buy it at the place where I know it’s usually the cheapest (Kroger). But I did a few days ago look at my gas spending, and while I thought that it was a bit low, it looked like I’m spending $100 a month on it (over the last 6 months). Which seems odd because when I figured it before it was like $125, but that have been over a longer period when I had some additional commuting. Now I don’t have that, but it still doesn’t seem like that would account for the doubling of the price of gas and my cost per month dropping. If it is true, then it’s really a good sign that I don’t really need a new car for the gas. So, if that number is correct, and if the new car doubled the in-town mpg (which would be asking a lot I’m guessing), then the car payment would have to be like $50. Which I don’t think I’d want any car that came with a $50 monthly payment. :)

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Gonna make you sweat

Posted by Thomas Sun, 15 Jun 2008 17:05:06 +0000

is sweating in his own apartment. Not cool.

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Physics is to math as sex is to…

Posted by Thomas Thu, 12 Jun 2008 21:07:08 +0000

Classic. Definitely a new fave to add to the collection. Sort of reminds me of Chad’s story about “mathsturbatory”, though I only recall the word and not the story. :)

I did buy drives at Frys (3 1TB drives), so I’m looking forward to taking them on the plane and getting them into service in the array. I also called BoA this week and they were super helpful with the whole fraud thing. They should be sending me an affidavit and hopefully after some not short length of time, I’ll get the $$ back.

~One more day left in Cali (um, did I mention I’ve been in California for almost 2 weeks now?) and I’m looking forward to being back, though from what I hear it’s pretty warm there. :)

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Writing Regret

Posted by Thomas Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:18:19 +0000

Don’t you hate writing something you know you’re going to regret later, writing it anyway, and then regretting it later? I sure do.

Times like these should remind me that the grass really isn’t greener over there in talk-more land, and I should just keep to what I know best, being quiet. :)

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Drives

Posted by Thomas Sun, 08 Jun 2008 19:32:43 +0000

is buying 1TB hard drives from Frys, one drive at a time.

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How are twitter and friendfeed not over glorified rss aggregators

Posted by Thomas Sat, 07 Jun 2008 02:24:06 +0000

How is twitter not just an rss aggregator that limits the blog posts to 140 characters? So maybe you can post from a text message via your phone. That’s novel, but not particularly earth shattering. Surely in 2008 it should be fairly easy to text from your phone to your blog if you so desire. Maybe it’s the social aspect to it? But I already follow my friend’s blogs, have the ability to comment on their entries (though I may not see all of the comments on all of their entries…). And doing an exceptionally simple search to find my friends solely based on email is neither novel nor nonobvious. The ability for me to log in with openid and you to use my foaf to find my friends would be much more robust. I guess it also has favoriting and replying to specific posts, but again replying to a post would be like making a comment on another’s blog, and favoriting I guess I just don’t really ‘get’. There also might be the soft real-time nature of it, whereas an rss aggregator has a pretty relaxed update guarantee. Surely that could be solved by liberal use of trackbacks or a push architecture.

Friendfeed seems equally as unoriginal. Honestly it seems more like an aggregator than twitter. Actually, looking at it right now, most of what I’m reading is an aggregation of twitter. Now don’t get me wrong; I love the notion of having the tiniest scrap of update of all of my friends in one place (like facebook’s news feed on steroids). And while I do think that is totally awesome, it is very much a natural and logical extension to what already was on the web. twitter is to blogs as blogs are to … geocities. It’s like we’re repeating ourselves that we couldn’t find enough content to publish in the 90s, so we eventually turned to blogging about the mundane details of our life, and now we’ve regressed to the point where we’re micro-publishing the inane blatherings direct from within our skulls. I mean I blog, but I don’t expect it to be terribly interesting. I digress from bashing friendfeed… How are rooms not just mailing lists of people with common interests, or newsgroups for that matter? Again you have the very heavy social aspect to it. And I totally applaud their functionality to make it hella simple for me to tell them about my flickr, netflix, delicious, linkedin, twitter, etc. But honestly shouldn’t those services already be exporting my feeds (and most probably already do). And again we come back to this notion that I should be publishing all of “my” sites (flickr, netflix, delicious, linkedin, twitter, etc) from a single source, where you can then crawl them and do what you like with the feeds. Granted you can’t comment on certain things, say on the last movie I got from Netflix. And maybe that is worth the lock-in, but I’m having a hard time biting.

It all comes back to my desire for a single authoritative profile, with no particular vendor lock-in based on any company’s implementation, information based on open standards, and decentralized. I should own all of the data and relationships contained within, instead of some company tos‘ing me to death. If I spent all that time building up my profile and finding my friends, why shouldn’t I be allowed to take that with me?

</rant>

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PayPal Sucks

Posted by Thomas Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:11:10 +0000

I am super not happy. Over a month ago, I bought some hard drives on eBay with buy it now. I never saw the drives, and I’m wondering if I’ll ever see the rest of my money. I got back $200 from PayPal with their modest buyer protection, but after calling their customer service (who was a nice English-as-a-first-language lady who answered my questions as best she could) I have little faith that my $450 will ever be recovered by them. I paid straight through my bank account, so there isn’t any protection via my credit card company, but I might call BoA anyway and see if they can do anything for me. It’s been a while now, and I’m sure the longer I wait the harder it will be to recover the funds. :( I guess I’ll be sticking to the retail versions of things for a while, while I lick my wounds from a hard learned (and costly) lesson in seller feedback percentages and ways to protect myself better against possible fraud.

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Volleyball

Posted by Thomas Thu, 05 Jun 2008 01:49:42 +0000

So there was some song in my head this morning that I was like “I should post that before I forget”. And then I forgot, and I couldn’t get random Coldplay and Third Day’s “I’ve Always Loved You” out of my head long enough for the other to come back.

I was totally a slacker today and played volleyball on campus for 30 or 45 minutes with some peeps from my team. Good times.

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Things Forgotten

Posted by Thomas Tue, 03 Jun 2008 17:32:13 +0000

Things I forgot on Monday:

I forgot a Dr Pepper in the friend’s car I rode in to the airport. I hate to leave trash in someone else’s car.
I forgot my WSJ paper in the back of the seat in front of me on the plane. Again with the leaving trash for someone to pick up after me.
I forgot to bring a jacket to cool Mountain View. I realized I had done this about the time I was scheduled to be picked up and taken to the airport. I though I could have made it back home again to grab one, but I was already cutting it close and didn’t want to miss getting my checked luggage checked.

Nothing Earth shattering, but definitely a thorn in my brain.

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