A day in the life

I know, I know, it's been forever since I updated. Well, sorry, life's been busy.

So...

K and I went to Colorado for a long weekend. Some of the many pictures are over on my Flickr page. Link is to the right, under "Links". Go click!

The Team in Training training has been going well, in spite of my efforts to injure myself. A near biking catastrophe has left me with painful ankles and knees for a few weeks. Recovery has been slow, but it's going well, and my last training mile was my fastest in years...12:42 and change. Walking. That puts me on pace for a 3ish hour finish to the half marathon in August. Kick ass!

Work on the yard has progressed as well. The area along the back fence was cleared and covered with landscape cloth, and I've marked out the area for the border pavers. Next up is digging the trench, laying the pavers, and applying a TON of mulch to the area. Fun times.

Um....there's other stuff, but I can't remember it right now, so it'll wait for another update.

I urge you all to check out the updates over at my TnT page. And pass along the word to everyone you know that a tax-deductible contribution to the LLS through me will not only help you save a few bucks next April, but it will also make a direct contribution to the research for a cure to blood cancers.

HELP SAVE PEOPLE!

A meme, stolen from indigojones

( clicky for memeness! )

Yup, it's true, I'm asking for cash. Your cash. I'm also asking for your help.

My wife and I joined the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Team In Training group, and are training for the Chicago Distance Classic half-marathon in August. We're running to raise money for a cure for for leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma. More than 712,000 Americans are battling these blood cancers. I am hoping that Karen's and my participation in Team In Training will help bring them hope and support. We're not just running for the cause though, we're running for a close family member who has been battling leukemia for over a decade.

Now that I've established some motivation for y'all, I'm asking you to help by making a donation to my fundraising campaign. The link is below:

http://pages.teamintraining.org/il/chcdist08/dpaton

As little as $5 helps. As much as you can give helps more. It's not about the tax deduction, it's about tossing a little cash in with everyone else, and making a HUGE difference in people's lives. TnT/LLS funds research, outreach, and patient and family care.

My personal goal is a scant $1400, due by the 26th of July. That's 3 months to make this happen. That's $15.38 a day. That's less than a large 2 topping pizza with delivery. That's less than five gallons of gas. That's 52 minutes of work at the average salary in the US (~32K/yr). It doesn't take much to make a difference.

Please donate, and please share this with a friend.

I'm +1 bike now. A frost white Surly Cross-Check loaded with Shimano RX100 components (aka 105 w/o the paint). It needs cleaning and pedals, but it's a fiiiiiine bike nonetheless. especially for what I paid.


Yay me!



EDIT: Added picture

One word answers...

1.Where is your mobile phone? pocket
2.Your significant other? city
3.Your hair? long
4.Your father? Dr
5.Your mother? student
6.Your favorite thing? wife
7.Your dream last night? unremembered
8.Your favorite drink? cola
9.Your dream/goal? happiness
10.The room you're in? office
11.Your ex? gone
12.Your fear? failure
13.Where do you want to be in 6 years? family
14.Where were you last night? hurting
15.What you're not? flexible
16.Muffins? chocolate
17.One of your wish list items? puppy
18.Where you grew up? multiple
19.The last thing you did? type
20.What are you wearing? business
21.Your TV? home
22.Your pets? imaginary
23.Your computer? craptastic
24.Your life? pending
25.Your mood? impatient
26.Missing someone? occasionally
27.Your car? dirty
28.Something you're not wearing? dolphin
29.Favorite Store? surplus
30.Your summer? moving
31.Like someone? married
32.Your favorite color? Bloo!
33.When is the last time you laughed? morning
34.Last time you cried? holidays

It looks like it'll take a while to make, but damn, this looks good:

The best French Onion soup EVER

I'll make it one of these days...

I think I'd like to get back into riding a bike. No, not that kind, the pedal kind. The downside? It's really hard to find a 60ish cm road frame or an XL mountain/cross frame that fits...for less than a grand. Craigslist has presented a few opportunities, as has eBay, but with the added burden of shipping. Someday I'll find a nice cheap big bike to get back into the swing of things on, but not this weekend. Not even a little.

After a few weeks on the market and only 2 weak nibbles, our realtor is putting on an open house this Sunday. In preperation, I spent the majority of my evening in the garage moving various and sundry shit to the curb and into better places in the garage. Unfortunately, an old door and my clumsyness met and resulted in a big fuckign dent in Dee's left shoulder. 6-7" long, near where the rear C pillar meets the roof. A completely UNACCESSABLE location for PDR, and highly visible to, well, anyone. Godforkingdamnit.

So much for having a dent free car for a whole year. One more call to Erich to see if he wants to take a stab at it. Grumble...there's $100 I'll probably never see again. Grr.

...and it may have been realized.I was sent some full resolution pictures taken with a D300, and I'm convinced now, I can go mostly digital. All I need is the money and the time. I still plan on shooting Kodachrome, especially for special things that I want to last forever, but for 90% of my work I think a digiSLR will do the job.

Ken's online version of the shot that convinced me: LINKY

Now if only I had the spare cash for a body and a grip.

Or something like that. In 1978 Paul Krugman (economist, NYT author, etc) wrote an article about interstellar economic trade. Someone dug it up recently, and though I haven't finished reading it (work is busy) I did get a few minutes to peruse it, and it looks simultaneously interesting and hilarious. Abstract (thanks to Slashdot):

Abstract: This paper extends interplanetary trade theory to an interstellar setting. It is chiefly concerned with the following question: how should interest rates on goods in transit be computed when the goods travel at close to the speed of light? This is a problem because the time taken in transit will appear less to an observer traveling with the goods than to a stationary observer. A solution is derived from economic theory, and two useless but true theorems are proved... This paper, then, is a serious analysis of a ridiculous subject, which is of course the opposite of what is usual in economics."

http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf

Your Quirk Factor: 60%

You're a pretty quirky person, but you're just normal enough to hide it. Congratulations - you've fooled other people into thinking you're just like them!

God damn it's cold outside. I got up this morning at 8, took a shower, and crawled back under the covers because K is sick and I'm not feeling the best. I flipped on my computer to check on some things and saw the image you see below.
Holy crap. Bright sunny weather....and freaking 6 below. Not cool.


The computer related lookups were for the express purpose of obtaining a framing project that has been completed (aka, checking the Sunday hours of the provider), and obtaining the phone number for the carpet cleaners that came yesterday. They did a wonderful job of restoring a place that had HEAVY traffic damage, and pulling a small spot from the entryway carpet, and mostly removing a spot from Christmas.

I say mostly, because the spot (caused by a leaking tree stand and a slab of wet plywood) is still about 50% there, and the crew that came out yesterday to do the cleaning said it came out "no problem", which left me less than pleased this morning when I discovered it still present. A quick google search for the problem says it's hard to fix, but definitely possible. Time to make sure it happens.

There's precious little other news. It's cold, we're home. That is all.

So. Much. Snow.

Seriously.

I just finished snowblowing the driveway. That's got to be some of the heaviest snow I've ever moved in the last 21+ years in the midwest. The snowblower didn't help...it's got a bug in the fuel system, and ran so rich a few times it died on me. Running the motor through a few dozen times with the ignition off and the choke open seemed to clear it, but it needs service before the next blizzard.

The roads are a mess, and will be for a few days I think. The weather report isn't encouraging, with snow for the next 4 days in the forecast.

I love winter, until I have to shovel it.

Last Thursday, the day I left for Rochester, my car didn't start. She's usually a little flaky in after being parked outside with 1/4 tank of gas in subzero weather for a few days, but this was new. I left her while I traveled, but started in on the problem once I got back. In the course of my attempted repairs, I traced the problem to the distributor. After that, the factory service manual diagnosed a bad ICM (ignition control module). I swapped in another I had, still not starting. I bought a third. Still not starting. I pulled the coil and checked it. The resistance on the secondary side was a little low, so I swapped it with a spare I had that measured fine. Still not starting. I checked rechecked, posted online, tried everything I could think of, and checked again. Still not starting. So about 9am I gave up on the project, called AAA, and had them tow my car to the stealership. Yes, I mean stealership. For a tick over $300, they told me I had a bad coil. The one I bought new from them a year ago. The one that was still in the plastic bag I bought it in on Monday morning when I swapped it in. They also charged me for an hour and a half of labor at $110 an hour. To replace something I can get to in less than 5 minutes with a philips screwdriver. Keep in mind, that was after they waived the hour of diagnostic time. I had it out with the parts manager over the coil that was bad out of the proverbial box (a plastic bag actually). He basically told me the only way the coil could have failed was if I broke it. 2lbs of copper and steal that was still shiny...broken by an electrical engineer with 15 years of Honda wrenching experience (more than most of the techs in the shop). I was somewhat close to livid. I asked him about testing electronic parts. He claimed some bullshit about it voiding the warranty (which they don't offer). I left more mad then I've been in a while, but calmed down to a normal level by the time I got home.

I told the story on a few boards I'm on (Hybrids, Honda-Tech, Honda-Acura, and a few other places) with a combined total of about 4M visitors a day. Hopefully the dick behind the parts counter will hear about it from other folks who were equally screwed (there are apparently more than a few).

The upshot is that my car is fixed, and I have 2 spare ICMs to sell or use. Yay transportation.

Home from NY.

Flight back SUCKED. UAL needs t dump anyone who still flies RJ145s from their partner roster. Those planes are a fucking nightmare for anyone over 5'9". Seriously.

Client meeting was OK. Nothing special.

It was warmer in Rochester this morning than it was at home. By 40 degrees (-10F, +30F). Go figure.

Not much to report...glad to be home.

Yup, I'm in NY tonight. And it kinda sucks.

The flight was suprisingly good. I was expecting an Embraer RJ145, but when I checked in, I got an option to upgrade to Economy Plus (we flew United...that's another story entirely), which meant we were on something else. Happily, it was a 737-500, left over from the day when smoking was allowed. Still, it was a helluva lot better than an RJ145, which is a soda straw that holds 45 people. Economy Plus is a really good thing, and I think American needs to offer it on all their flights. Really.

The hotel...meh. We're in a Fairfield Inn that's on the property at KROC. it's not bad, but it's kind of noisy, and holy shit, does their in room business class broadband blow. There are bursts of the promised 2MB/s speeds, but the rest of the time it's timeouts, network resets, and general suckyness. The tech support techs on the other end of the 1-800 number posted on the jack were helpless and hopeless. So I'm stuck in some kind of broadband hell, but at least I can kinda connect.

Dinner was at a place called Bazil, which was pretty cool. I recommend it.

Tomorrow will be an all-day business meeting, and then a flight home. Hopefully sometime the following day my car will unfreeze, and I can start it again. My day started with a frozen battery and frozen fuel lines, courtesy of the -12F actual temp at mi casa, which was, well...disappointing to say the least.

The continual massive failure of my computers has me down...I've done my damndest on data recovery, and most has come back, but I'm not too comfortable with my current backup solution, especially since it only applies to one machine. I'd eventually like to have a backup server that has a multi-drive RAID array, but that costs both time and money, neither of which I can devote to the project right now. Ideally it would run Leopard Server, have a RAID6 array of BIG drives, and be in some kind of non-Apple case, with provisions for reliable cooling of all related components. I'd also like to have a couple of other boxen, one for serving my website, blog, and wiki from home, and one for acting as a firewall, router, and general internet gateway. The two noot concerned backup would be smaller, but still have redundant drives and good cooling. 2U shallow racks come to mind. Just a thought, but a good one I think. Minis can only go so far.

Well, after almost 2 weeks of drive hell, my backup power supply bit the dust, and left carnage. The supply is gone, the RAID card is gone, 4 drives are potentially hosed, my gigabit NIC is toast, my favorite video card is gone, and I think I lost a gig of RAM. Oh yeah, there's a big black spot on the motherboard.

Shit.

I'm down to one working desktop, one barely adequate laptop, and one Mini running my backup drive, since it's not powerful enough to do anything else.

I've also got about 1.4TB to stuff 2TB of data in, assuming I can find a way to recover the data from the RAID set.

Grumble.

Stayed home from work today. Some odd combination of random symptoms colluded to make me feel terrible for about 10 hours today. As I type this though, I feel pretty good. It's probably because my wife is back home after 3 days in Dallas, including the day that marks my 29th trip around the sun.

My adventures with failing hard drives appear to be coming to a close. As of Monday, every single drive more than 2 years old has failed completely. I've managed to recover about 80% of my data from the dying disks, but I'm out roughly one metric fuckton of storage. Some of that was mitigated by a generous gift from my parents for my birthday, a big WD Mybook (which has assumed Time Machine target duty for all my Leopard machines), but I'm still down a boot disk for my server, a reliable disk for my other server, and an aux drive pair for my main desktop machine. It's really a pretty sad state of affairs. I bought a few dual-layer DVDs and backed up some things with Toast, but I'm not sure it's a good solution. I've had CDs and DVDs go bad pretty quickly, even with careful storage. Spinning media is prone to failure at low price points, and tape is prohibitively expensive for the amount of data I need to back up.

And with that it's time for bed. Goodnight world.