Pwned! Yes, Marc, I came up with the idea quite some time ago that I should pull this April Fool’s joke, and I came very close to just posting an entry saying that I was going to do it, instead of actually doing it (Unfinished Post #355). But, I thought, what the hey, maybe I’ll fish around for some gullible people. Well, looks like it worked! Yay!

So, in other real news besides the haircut and my fake engagement (still single ladies), my parents were here for a week between the 21st and the 28th. About the only thing that we did was go to see the CNN Center and go on the tour. International TV studios are cool. :) We walked around Centennial Park. I’ll probably post the one pic I took eventually.

In the world of movies, I’ve seen 300, Wild Hogs, North By Northwest, 21 Grams, Reign Over Me, and last night, Blades of Glory. 300 was good, but not as good as all the hype said. Wild Hogs was much better than expected. North By Northwest was eh. 21 Grams was exactly like Crash and that other movie that I went to see after Children of Men that I liked so much better but can’t remember the name of right now. I guess since I’ve seen more than two of those type of films, that they aren’t really that enjoyable now. I could see why nobody else like that third movie if they’d already seen the other two. To quote Drewby, “I liked it better the first time when it was called Fight Club”. Reign Over Me was good. And Blades of Glory… um, I think it could have been better. Maybe it was because I watched it in a practically empty theater. Maybe more people laughing would have helped it.

On Wednesday (the 28th), I finally received the final packages for my new file server. I got it put together and up and running that night. I had a total of 5 400 GB drives, but one of them was currently in use and completely full, I needed to make a backup before I pulled it out of its current home and put it into its permanent home. I dusted off the ol’ fibre channel and used it. Now I realize how abysmally slow it is (read/writes in the 5 MB/s range while transferring 400GB takes a while). I managed to get my data off, physically transfer the drive, and get the new array up and running. I started to transfer everything back, which took an equally excrutiatingly long time. We were having a lan party at work, so I wanted it to be ready in time enough to show it off. I didn’t get everything transfered that I would have liked, but enough that I packed it up and took it to the lan. I don’t think anybody got any content off it, so that was pretty disappointing. When a couple of guys tried, it kept crashing explorer. I don’t know if it was just Solaris running Samba, or if it was just my Samba config. As I didn’t really tweak much in the Samba config, I would lean towards a misconfiguration issue and incompatibility playing nicely with XP. If I had a copy of XP, I would test for sure. I might try a VM copy, if I can get it to work… After all that was done, I’ve spent the rest of the weekend playing with it more. I’d make some poor choices of naming things, so there were those mistakes to correct. Then I transfered all of my home directory over to it. I had pretty much run out of space there as well. Once that was done, I transfered argento over to ldap/kerberos/autofs and cut argento over. It’s been pretty smooth sailing so far, I must say, working off of nfs. I’m starting to jones for a gig switch and a telco rack. I setup snapshotting as well on it all, which was one of the primary motivating factors of going with a Solaris/ZFS solution. And, I added some new entries to ldap to get some further automount entries besides home. Automounting stuff from LDAP is awesome. While playing with the array, I had been noticing a slightly ominous, yet faint clicking sound emanating from one of the drives. I installed SMART tools, and finally got the syntax right only to see this on one of the drives: HARDWARE IMPENDING FAILURE GENERAL HARD DRIVE FAILURE [asc=5d, ascq=10]. Doh! Looks like I’ll have to RMA one all too quickly. At least I still have the nice box and packaging Seagate sent the last drive in, so it shouldn’t be hard at all to package it up properly.

And finally, I’ve frozen my a/c again. :( With the fibre channel and all of my machines going over those several days, the apartment got pretty hot (cite my away message “i don’t think my apt can adequately cool the current level of heat i am generating… :(“). So, I figured it was just all of the drives spun up, working hard, and generating too much heat. But, Friday night, it was cool enough that I turned off the a/c and opened some windows for a while. That’s when I heard it, the ominous dripping coming from the HVAC closet. I took off the grate with my trusty cordless drill (thanks Clay and KB), and confirmed what was going on. I called the office Saturday morning and put in a work order. Later when I dropped off rent, the lady at the office said that she would have maintenance call me to confirm that it was a trivial condensation leak. They never called. Chalk up one more for “The Runaround”. Maintenance finally knocked on my door at 8:15 this morning. He confirmed that it was frozen, turned it off, and is letting it thaw right now. Hopefully all it needs is a little freon top-off. But it is worrisome that they topped it off not too long ago. Either I’m doing something that I’m not supposed to do, or there’s a leak…

Anyway, so I was up early and started writing to catch everyone up. I made sure to take a shower before the dude got back and tried to finish this post up before work. And now I’m done, and I still have gobs of time before work… bah!

I’m engaged! Details to follow…

So I finally decided to get a haircut today. I left the apartment a little after 5pm and went to a place I’d been to before, and had a decent experience. I arrived around 5:10, walked in and spoke with the lady behind the register that I wanted a haircut. She said that it would be at least 45 minutes. I asked if I could leave and come back. She said that would be fine. She asked me my name and said that she would put me in the computer. I leave. Fast forward 45 minutes. I come back. The ladies there now don’t know anything about me coming in 45 minutes ago. She checks the computer, I’m not in there. They say that it’s first come, first served. I get the feeling they think I’m lying. They say it will be at least 20 minutes. I say I’ll wait. I sit down and start napping. 1 hour later I finally sit down in a chair. By this time it’s 6:45. They close at 7. I take off my glasses, I explain what I want. Layered haircut, off the ears, blocked in the back. I explain, yes, it’s been a really long time since I’ve had a haircut. It’s parted on the left right now, but please part it in the middle for the cut. She said that she would use shears, then scissors, and shampoo. Only later will I realize exactly what she’s talking about. At this stage in the game, I don’t give a flying fck, so I agree to whatever she says. I should have specified that I wanted scissors, but it’s really late, I’ve been here a really long time, and I don’t want to piss her off. I sit in the chair patiently as she dilly-dallies around. I close my eyes and don’t look once at the mirror. I’m not too familiar with the number system associated with shears. I know 0 is the closest, but I haven’t had shear haircuts enough to know exactly how short it cuts. She doesn’t ask me what number I want, she just goes to town. I’m pretty sure I pretty much have a 0 all the way around my head. The sides, the back, 0. Maybe a 1. Either way it’s way too short. And as for the top, I don’t think she cut any of the hair off. As I type, I can see this one lone hair that hangs down past my nose. What was the point of getting it cut if it’s not short enough to stop doing its stupid curl? So, she’s finally done at 7:30. It took her 45 minutes to give me what I am (at the moment) calling my worst haircut ever. The standard cost is $13. For reasons passing understanding, I tip her $2 for my worst haircut. Well, I didn’t realize exactly how bad off I was until I got home and tried to part it. When I tried to part it, and I couldn’t tell that the top was any shorter, I could have killed someone.

I will have to get it cut again. Fuck.
/me not a happy camper

Netflix is slipping a little. They just recommended two movies to me that were already in my queue! Way to go for the obvious, “let’s recommend something that we already know they want to see” (that’s probably not what happened, but it’s fun to pretend).

http://www.portrait-photos.org/ has some crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy good portraits.

When she expressed a doubtful hope that Tinker Bell would be glad to reclined on the earth, but was separated from the road by a thick antipathy of her brother; the similarity of their dispositions made and she heard it muttering to itself The Duchess. The Duchess.

There was even more than this, but I’ll leave you wanting.

I have not had a good fortune in quite some time, but my Onion horoscope doesn’t disappoint today:

You’ll find solace this week in the arms of an old friend — arms you’ll pin down using a combination of brute force and the unflinching desperation that comes from a lifetime of loneliness.

I just got done watching the 3 hour Battlestar Galactica pilot. All I can say is wow. I think I’ve found a new television series to obsess over. I think the greater question here is why have I waited this long. I’ve done that with several series now, including but probably not limited to “Lost”, “Firefly”, and “Scrubs” (Scrubs to a somewhat less extent). I would hope that it’s because there really is a lot of bad tv out there that people will watch for a while and will recommend to their friends (and that my tv show taste is better than everyone else’s :) ).

Alas, I probably should be tagging my posts and create a tv category for posts…

Mr/Mrs. Presidential Candidate:

What is the single greatest action the United States should do tomorrow to directly reduce the United States’ contribution to the global warming crisis?

If your foreign policy were to return the United States to a time when we were respected around the world, how do you propose to mend ties to our allies, to rebuild old bridges and build new ones, and to reach out at a time when our friends are few and far between?

I wonder would Al Gore take another shot at the Vice Presidency to further his global warming message? Surely the second highest office in the land would be the best place to further his cause…

Which is the greatest folly, that the electorate imposes the expectation that one person can solve all of the United States problems, or that all of the politicians’ opiate laden bullet points, detailing their nine-point plans, can save us all from impending doom?

Other major policy issues in the upcoming presidential race that I’m to lazy to postulate questions about:
privacy, war on drugs, healthcare, social security, education, war in iraq, foreign policy, energy policy, nuclear energy, terrorism, fear

And, to top it off, what we really need:
unification of the two halves of our country; a leader to unite the people, to bring a sense of nationalism back to the masses, a single common goal, worthy of a national charge, benefiting the United States and the world

The weather has been nice enough the past two days that I’ve gone riding in the afternoon. Yesterday, some dude in a car as it was passing yelled out to me, “Hey, Lance, get off the road!”. Odd.

I have been worrying somewhat about the root partition of the new server I’ve been working on for Wesley. It started out as ~250MB, which is fine, but if you have a couple of kernels installed, /lib/modules start eats up the space quickly. So today, I set out to alleviate the space problem. All of the partitions, except for boot, are on LVM. So it was simply a matter of resizing. The partitions are all ext3 for penultimate safety reasons. Since I tried once to shrink /home and failed, I just removed the logical volume, increased the root partition and resized the filesystem. It was easier than I ever imagined. Like three commands and it was done. I could simply remove /home because there as almost no data on it, so I just backed it up and restored it. The hardest part of the whole process was waiting on the ext3 format of a 218GB drive (it’s rather slow and the format itself uses up 188MB, but that’s for another post/rant). Chalk one up for a good decision to endure the extra overhead of LVM.

In other technological news, I installed Sun’s java instead of the crappy gcj on the box that runs my Azureus now. It had been flaky as of late, going for a while and then dying. I didn’t even realize it was using the gnu java, so I installed and hopefully it’ll be happier now.

I was going to rant about OpenID and how I don’t get it and how it’s the latest meme and the fashionable fad. And I was going to cite this’s guys post. But then he reneged on his stance and wrote this. There remains something that I don’t like about it, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.

I also finally watched “The Da Vinci Code” this afternoon. I had put it off forever, but after I heard a roundabout endorsement as a good movie, I decided to watch it. As a whole, I’d say that it was better than I expected. Even given the risque content, I can’t deny that the story really was decent.

I went to Wal-Mart this afternoon to buy one thing, a bathmat. I got it. I hate it. It’s too dark for the floor. It calls too much attention to itself…

You should already know that I saw “Children of Men”. I didn’t get it. I didn’t like it. Why have people called it the best movie since sliced bread? Someone please illuminate me!