Here are the
Top Ten reasons why you should hire me as your next entry-level Linux System Administrator:

10. I have eaten breakfast from a vending machine.
9. I have used Debian GNU/Linux for over five years, starting my freshman year of college. I liked Debian before it was cool to like Debian. I’ve even made a few Debian converts. Yes, I may be a Debian zealot, but don’t let that scare you.
8. I have administered Debian GNU/Linux for that same timeframe, including setting up my own DNS, NFS, NIS, Samba, FTP, and Web services, just to name a few.
7. I work everyday on my own Debian GNU/Linux workstation. I am comfortable with, dare I say love, VIM, the command line, and editing flat config files.
6. I graduated in 4 years with a degree in Computer Engineering from Texas A&M University.
5. I am a quick learner, a fast problem solver, and have a high attention to detail. I think that sys admin skills are sys admin skills. As such, it should be trivial to switch from one distro to another.
4. I can find just about anything on the internet, including finding solutions to problems other people can’t find and finding solutions to problems faster than most.
3. I eat, sleep, drink, and breathe Linux. I have literally found found bugs in my code in my sleep and have dreamed about kernel messages.
2. I make computers do what I tell them to do. They cower before my very presence. Many a friend has called on me to fix a problem that goes away as soon as I enter the room.
1. I am passionate about Linux and have an aptitude for its administration.

What I mean is that I think that I am a smart and hard worker and can do an awesome job. Somebody just needs to give me a chance. I know that I won’t let them down.

Men’s Retreat was glorious. We stayed up last night ’til something like 3am debating about science and Christianity. I finally figured out that I’m not so sure that everybody really can think for themselves. Yeah, I’ll agree that in an ideal world, everybody should have a thorough thought process and reasoning behind their choices, actions, and decisions… but we’re not in an ideal world. So, I would say that there are a bunch of people who don’t care and even more that really can’t grasp all of the subtleties of certain concepts. Anyway, if you have some free time, I’m sure that Jeremy would love to argu^H^H^H^Hdiscuss it with you.

So, really what I was going to post were my accomplishments for the day. Primarily, I captured the second tape of video from Crunchtime, since I finally have space now to work with, since I setup the 250GB drive. I also figured out some stuff about aspect ratios, et. al. of the video, since the video that we took is in a 16:9 format. I had exported the slideshow in 4:3 without knowing it and now know how to export in 16:9 as it should be. I also cleaned up the Crunchtime Productions video, since the backwards part was generally crappy and choppy.

The job hunt still continues, but with no feedback. Although I did finally pick a business card layout that I liked and went to Kinkos to have them print them up. Tomorrow (after 7pm) we’ll see how that comes out.

Enough for now… I’m going to watch some West Wing.

xfsdump and xfsrestore to the rescue! I tried xfs_copy just before I left last night, but when I got back today and tried to mount it, the mount failed. So, I dug around some and found a couple of programs called xfsdump and xfsrestore. One apt-get command later, I had them both, as I didn’t have them before. I used xfsdump -J - / | xfsrestore -J - /new, as found on the xfsdump man page… 51 minutes later I have the data copied. Yay! And it mounts properly! And the best part is shown below:

[tlg1466@argento tlg1466]$ df
Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2             19998656   4253776  15744880  22% /
tmpfs                   257364         0    257364   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda3            223074000  80541848 142532152  37% /home
/dev/sdb4            108998244  80562312  28435932  74% /mnt/sdb
[tlg1466@argento tlg1466]$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2              20G  4.1G   16G  22% /
tmpfs                 252M     0  252M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda3             213G   77G  136G  37% /home
/dev/sdb4             104G   77G   28G  74% /mnt/sdb4

I got my 12GB back! I’m so happy.

I am officially posting that I am moving the blog over to chobas.com.

My new Seagate 7200.8 250GB SATA drive came today! It took a trip home to grab a Molex to SATA power connector and four screws to get it properly installed. It took something like eight minutes to transfer the four Gigs of data from the old / to the new / partiton, and then another hour to transfer my data from the old /home to the new /home. It then took like four hours to figure out what exactly I needed to do to get lilo on the new drive properly. So, it’s working now (duh! from where do you think I am posting?), but I have one pretty big problem. I used the command time tar cflp - . | (cd /mnt/new_partition; tar xflp -) to copy the files. I found it some time ago from Usenet, before the bastardization of the interface by Google… :(. Anyway, check out the df:

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2             19998656   4254016  15744640  22% /
tmpfs                   257364         0    257364   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda3            223074000  93303252 129770748  42% /home
/dev/sdb4            108998244  80562312  28435932  74% /mnt/sdb4
[tlg1466@argento /]$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda2              20G  4.1G   16G  22% /
tmpfs                 252M     0  252M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/sda3             213G   89G  124G  42% /home
/dev/sdb4             104G   77G   28G  74% /mnt/sdb4

Where the crap did those extra 12GB of data come from? This greatly disturbs me…
Just for kicks, I’ll give everybody the rest of the info about my drives:

[tlg1466@argento /]$ fdisk -l
Disk /dev/sda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1         125     1004031   82  Linux swap
/dev/sda2             126        2616    20008957+  83  Linux
/dev/sda3            2617       30401   223183012+  83  Linux

Disk /dev/sdb: 122.9 GB, 122942324736 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 238216 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1        2003     1009480+  82  Linux swap
/dev/sdb3            2004       21844     9999864   83  Linux
/dev/sdb4           21845      238216   109051488   83  Linux

[tlg1466@argento /]$ sudo xfs_info /dev/sda3
meta-data=/home                  isize=256    agcount=16, agsize=3487234 blks
         =                       sectsz=512
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=55795744, imaxpct=25
         =                       sunit=0      swidth=0 blks, unwritten=1
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096
log      =internal               bsize=4096   blocks=27244, version=1
         =                       sectsz=512   sunit=0 blks
realtime =none                   extsz=65536  blocks=0, rtextents=0
[tlg1466@argento /]$ sudo xfs_info /dev/sdb4
meta-data=/mnt/sdb4              isize=256    agcount=26, agsize=1048576 blks
         =                       sectsz=512
data     =                       bsize=4096   blocks=27262872, imaxpct=25
         =                       sunit=0      swidth=0 blks, unwritten=1
naming   =version 2              bsize=4096
log      =internal               bsize=4096   blocks=13311, version=1
         =                       sectsz=512   sunit=0 blks
realtime =none                   extsz=65536  blocks=0, rtextents=0

I wrote an email to a cool guy named Robert Cringely. Who knows if I’ll hear anything back from him. I bet that he receives a HUGE amount of email, and mine was pretty long and wordy… oh well, at least I tried to sound cool… :) Here it is:

Dear Mr. Cringely,

I am an avid reader of your weekly column and appreciate your insight into the bigger picture of the technology market. While I can only imagine the mountain of email that you must receive everyday, you are the only person that I thought might answer a weighty question that I have about that bigger picture: Why is it do you think that Google has as of yet to enter the RSS Reader market?

They already possess similar technology (their Groups and Gmail interfaces) that would allow them easy entry into this market, as well as their targeted advertising and their already large collection of RSS material. It seems to me that Google is missing out on this new way for people to interact with the internet. I cannot even speculate what Ask Jeeves will do next with Bloglines (my RSS reader of choice) or why Google might not have been interested in their acquiring their. I have never seen advertising from Bloglines but might guess that it is inevitable. I know that Google has a proven record providing relevant text ads and the ability to relate web sites to one another. This would not only provide a service to the user by providing good ads, but also by suggesting content similar for the user to read.

I honestly apologize for the length of this email, as it seems to have run away from me a bit. But, I hope that the length and wordiness have not undermined my little attempt at insight and relevance.

Thank you for your time,
Thomas Garner

I applied with them today. They make awesome and cool Linux clusters. They’re in San Fran, CA, which isn’t the most ideal of things, but working for them would be awesome, I bet. Let’s see if I hear anything from them…

I wonder if I should apply with Google, too. They have some Junior to Intermediate Administrator job listings posted on their website. Those are also in Southern CA… :(

It seems to me that Southern California is looking like the place to be. Which maybe makes me wish that I hadn’t turned down that offer of relocation assistance to Southern CA.

Or maybe some federal-type job… but that would probably be on the other coast…

Let’s see how huge of a nerd I am…

Here is a graph of the cost of burning X number of episodes.

Right around the 924th episode, it becomes cheaper to have bought a nice, new Philips DVP642 DivX-Certified Progressive-Scan DVD Player from Amazon.com for $69.99, than to have used your old DVD player and transcoded all of the episodes to MPEG2.

Say, for instance you like The West Wing. They are currently in the middle of their sixth season. You can either have 12 discs of awesome DIVX-ness, or 48 discs of MPEG2-ness, that amount to the same six seasons. Personally, I would prefer to have the 12 to the 48. Plus I would rather take the 1/2 hour per season burning the DIVX than the 13.5 hours transcoding and then burning the MPEG2.

Plus, you get the “just plain cool factor” of having a really sweet DVD player that plays DIVX.

Now, if only I had an awesome HD projector, Mac Mini, and 7.1 sound system for all my audio/visual needs…

Well, since I bought into 1and1′s free hosting for six months, I figure I’d give everybody more bandwidth and stuff on their dime for a while. Unfortunately, though, URLs will change, but maybe they’ll stay this way for a considerable length of time. This is the first post, and I’ll probably announce chobas.com and feggconsulting.com officially when I feel like it, esp. after I get everything setup like I want it to be. I will be changing the theme of this, I am almost sure of, and will also bet that I won’t be importing the old posts to this site. It’s a shame that I might be changing the layout for the sake of changing the layout, and even though I am usually against such actions, this is an exceptio.

Since either one or both of my sisters mentioned my blog last time that I talked to them, here is a (semi-non-nerdy) update.

I guess that it’s good that the jobs that I’ve been applying for are running together. Apparently in the past two days I applied for:

1. Senior Computer Support Specialist on 2/22 with Center for Distance Learning Research/TAMU
2. Linux Specialist on 2/21 with IBM (location Nationwide)
3. Programmer Analyst I on 2/22 with Information Technology/Brazos County
4. PC Specialist on 2/22 with Information Technology/Brazos County (I need to mail them tomorrow)
5. Junior Software Technical Support Windows/unix Linux Solaris on 2/22 with Larson CGM Software Corp in Houston

And I applied for Information Technology Associate on 2/18 with CIS/TAMU. Hopefully that’s it. I might start logging my applications here, just to keep tabs on what I’ve been doing. I will be doing some work for Pat’s dad’s work on Thursday. I’ll drive down to Katy to see what’s up and meet with some people. I also got a pseudo-random call from a guy in Dallas who had seen my resume on Dice. He was supposed to have already sent me an email that I needed to respond to, but I haven’t gotten it, yet, which worries me. Maybe I’ll get it tomorrow and can send him my resume and he can be on the lookout for jobs for me.

Plus, as of late, I have all but finished the new brochure for Wesley. It has taken me a while, and with some help from several people, it is looking pretty good.

There are several Linux jobs at Rackspace in San Antonio that I need to apply for. And one NOC Technician position in A-town. Maybe I’ll get to them tomorrow.