Yeah, so I’m sick. It started promptly Saturday morning with a sneeze as I woke up. That didn’t signal much to me at the time. I figured that the allergies would run their course, and it wouldn’t be that bad. And it wasn’t until Monday that I ran into serious trouble. I woke up

Screw it. I’m sick. Everyday the symptoms seem to change. That makes everyday a new adventure in feeling crappy.

This is a conversation from the first part of last December that Ben thought he was having with me, but he was unknowingly talking to Nancy. Yay for friends who will go along with whatever the crap you throw at them.

(15:02:38) bigbrother0074: is the scheduler up?
(15:03:17) bigbrother0074: *operation timed out when attempting to connect to tamuwesley.dyndns.org*
(15:05:07) thomas536m: I love you so much
(15:05:12) bigbrother0074: ;)
(15:05:23) thomas536m: let’s run away together, ben
(15:05:32) thomas536m: leave it all behind
(15:05:33) bigbrother0074: now?
(15:05:43) thomas536m: sure!
(15:05:46) thomas536m: how’s vegas sound?
(15:05:49) bigbrother0074: umm….okay
(15:05:50) bigbrother0074: sure
(15:05:59) bigbrother0074: wait, aren’t your parent’s going to be in vegas?
(15:06:03) bigbrother0074: would that be a good idea?
(15:06:04) thomas536m: uh-oh
(15:06:08) thomas536m: san francisco, then
(15:06:13) bigbrother0074: fine for me
(15:06:32) thomas536m: there we won’t won’t have to hide our sweet gay love
(15:06:54) bigbrother0074: that’s what i’ve always dreamed about
(15:07:25) bigbrother0074: well, that and how to get that urine smell out of the carpet
(15:09:29) thomas536m: well, now you’re one for two
(15:09:34) bigbrother0074: YESSSSSS
(15:09:44) thomas536m: you need never think about that carpet ever again, sweetcakes
(15:10:01) thomas536m: we’ll have new carpet
(15:11:00) bigbrother0074: you’re so romantic
(15:11:06) bigbrother0074: i think i’ll make a sandwich
(15:12:36) thomas536m: I’ll even let you pick the color if you agree to be the woman
(15:12:48) thomas536m: at least 65% of the time
(15:15:04) thomas536m: where’d you go?
(15:15:08) thomas536m: did that last one scare you off?
(15:15:15) thomas536m: nooooooooooooooo! my sweet benjamin
(15:15:20) thomas536m: come back darling
(15:18:58) bigbrother0074: no, i was making a sandwich
(15:19:01) bigbrother0074: like i said
(15:19:10) bigbrother0074: i get to pick the hair color?
(15:19:18) bigbrother0074: yipeeeeeee
(15:19:54) thomas536m: no, carpet color
(15:20:00) thomas536m: tell no one of this
(15:20:05) thomas536m: it’ll be out little secret
(15:20:08) thomas536m: I gotta go, snoogums
(15:20:14) bigbrother0074: ok
(15:20:19) bigbrother0074: bye sweetie pie

Update: Apparently Marc had something to do with this as well… which takes some of the funny-ness away… but it’s still pretty funny.

Hey guys, I really appreciate all of my friends noticing that I WASN’T AT WESLEY AT ALL YESTERDAY!

…are hell.

I’m not sure what’s worse, this feeling like I’m about to puke because of sinus drainage, or not being able to breathe out of my nostrils resulting in labored breathing out my mouth…

So I’ve been considering getting LPI Certified. Essentially it would pretty much be telling me that I know what I already know. Which of course is no surprise to me, but to everyone else that doesn’t know me, it would prove that I know what I already knew that I know.

I have always considered certifications to be somewhat of a cop out. I’ve always viewed them as a way for somebody who doesn’t really know much to tell employers that they know more than they really do. I’m just worried that if I do get a bunch of certifications, that it will look like I’m trying to cover up the fact that I don’t know anything… but I really do… but employers don’t know that, and I can’t prove to them without the certifications.

So, what am I to do?

So, Chris and I wound up watching 10 episodes of The West Wing on Saturday…

Yeah, I got nothin’

Well, today, I think that I proved yet again how big a huge nerd that I am. Not only did I finally figure out how to let everyone delete print jobs at Wesley while they are still printing (yay for paper saving!), but I spent a good few hours editing several scripts and config files to add UPS monitoring to the plethora of things monitored by my wonderful installation of Cricket. Now, I’m going to go home to wind down and watch as much of The West Wing as I can, because I think that I’ve been sitting here for too long, and both my back and neck hurt some…

This is a little scatterbrained, but for what it’s worth, here it is…

Well, if you read my last post, then you should know that I am in somewhat of a data crunch. If only I had been paying better (read any) attention to Mr. keystonelogic on Ebay. If I had, I might have been able to pick up an entire Fibre Channel array, including 10 36.4 IBM drives for anywhere between $195 and $255, plus shipping. THAT IS A STEAL! Although there is a Mr. retreadbdp that is selling a very similar product, but his start at $275.

Anyway, I meant to try and do a decent cost and feasibilty analysis of possible data storage solutions for myself. I figured that this would be a decent medium through which to do this…

Now, if I were to seriously get into video editing, which is why I need the extra storage, then I would also wind up getting another powerful machine just to do Premiere and Photoshop on. With this in mind, I then need to have data sharing between machines. This can be accomplished several ways:

1. Firewire
2. Fibre Channel
3. Samba over TCP/IP

Firewire and Fibre Channel would be the most appropriate, since they speak directly to the hardware, instead of an intermediary of a host as would occur with the use of Samba, or NFS for that matter. Plus both Firewire and Fibre Channel have their own media over which to transmit data, whereas Samba would be over Ethernet (GigE, I would presume).

The speed of 1394a is 400Mb/s; the speed of 1394b is 800Mb/s; the speed of FC is 1.0625Gb/s (100MB/s); the speed of GigE is 1Gb/s, obviously…

Any Fibre Channel enclosure that I would buy would not only have hot-swap capability for the drives, but also redundant power supplies and dual communication loops to each and every drive.

We will assume that RAID will be done in software, rendering all of the disks as simply JBOD.

Internal SATA would be cheapest, but does not scale, because adding another drive requires adding another controller.

Fibre Channel requires smaller individual drives due to cost. After 36GB drives, the prices increase dramatically above what I consider to be acceptable, or $0.50 per GB.

Apparently it would cost $299 + $49 to get a SATA to 1394b enclosure from these guys. Then you still have to get the drive, which costs approx. $180, and that assumes that you could buy one 360GB SATA drive. That’s $528, and it’s not that scalable. You can’t buy a 360GB drive to get up to our supposed goal of a 360GB array. You could buy two drives to get to that 360GB goal, but then you eat up your scalability, as you can’t remove a drive that already has data on it. So, if you buy a 300GB drive for $189, and you leave room for the other future drive, then you just spent $537. And I’m not even sure that you really needed to buy that extra $49 SATA drive tray! I would like to go with SATA for their speed and hot swap capability, but I’m not exactly sure in this case how it would truly be that beneficial. Sure, if there were one encloure with, say, only 5 drive bays, as SATA drives are much cheaper in larger drive sizes than FC, and

1. Hot Swap Drives
2. Redundant Power
3. Scalability
4. Price

AMD Athlon 64 2800+: $109.00
EPoX “EP-8KDA3+”: $110.50
Corsair 512MBx2 DDR PC-3200: $133.50
Seagate 7200.8 400GB 7200RPM SATA NCQ: $369.99 * 5 = $1,849.95
Thermaltake SILENT BOOST A1838: $28.99

Grand Total: $2,231.94
Price per GB: $1.12
2TB and a screaming, 64bit machine: $Priceless

AMD Athlon 64 2800+: $109.00
EPoX “EP-8KDA3+”: $110.50
Corsair 512MBx2 DDR PC-3200: $133.50
Seagate 7200.8 200GB 7200RPM SATA NCQ: $135.00 * 5 = $675.00
Thermaltake SILENT BOOST A1838: $28.99

Grand Total: $1056.99
Price per GB: $1.06
1TB and a screaming, 64bit machine: $Priceless

So, I figure that I am offically addicted to The West Wing, now. Not only did I have to rent The West Wing: The Complete Season 2: Disc 1 from Hastings because I finished the DVD that I had from NetFlix on Friday or Saturday, I watched 7 episodes yesterday, Sunday. I finished off the last one today, and then returned it! Which is quite a feat, if I do say so myself. Roughly 5.25 hours of The West Wing… Plus, since I returned the DVD the next day, I get a dollar back next time that I rent a movie from Hastings… Way to go me!