Friday, September 30, 2005

Well, we survived the hurricane evacuation, and I survived the nearly-as-harrowing re-powering on of our server environment. Folks, believe me when I tell you this--NEVER SHUT DOWN ALL OF YOUR SERVERS AT WORK. Inevitably, a significant fraction of them won't come back on.

Those curious about our evacuation route from Hurricane Rita and who also have Google Earth installed can view the path The Wife and I took to escape by clicking here. Our exodus involved a twenty-four hour trip to Tyler, TX, which is normally a three and a half hour drive. If misery could be bottled and sold, that car ride was the equivalent of drinking a case of it, throwing it up, and then drinking it again. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can still see lines of tail lights, spreading out into infinity before me.

Posted by Keeper @ 01:33 PM CST [Link]

Tuesday, September 20, 2005

When I went to bed on Sunday night, I had no idea I'd be fleeing town Wednesday morning to escape a hurricane. Yet here I am, barely forty-eight hours later, and I've got plywood up on the windows, a full tank of gas, and a fistfull of evacuation checklists. We will be fleeing to Tyler, TX, where I have made arrangements to put us up in a hotel room until Hurricane Rita blows past.

Currently, the National Hurricane Center projects an impact a hundred or so miles south of Galveston along the coast, but we're still far enough out for there to be a significant margin of error. We're not willing to take the risk, though, so we've gathered all the valuables, taken pictures of the whole house, filled out sheets and sheets of paper on home contents, verified insurance coverage, and all the other things one must do when facing a natural disaster. I am dead fucking tired.

We wake up tomorrow and head northeast. With any luck, the storm will blow over with only minimal damage to the community in which I live, and we'll be back Saturday night or Sunday morning. We can but hope.

See you all on the other side.

Posted by Keeper @ 10:58 PM CST [Link]

Sunday, September 18, 2005

Okay. I don't normally read bash.org, but this quote caught my eye and now I am giggling like an idiot.

SparTacus (rulimbaww@3B942731.dsl.stlsmo.swbell.net) has joined #santcuary
*SparTacus is now known as Betty_Guns
wacko Jacko (lbeedy@1C57684.dsl.stlsmo.swbell.net) has joined #santcuary
[wacko_Jacko] ok spartacus just came n here i know it. which one of you is that loser?
[hunney] I am spartacus
[ji_pper] no im spartacus
[Betty_Guns] I am spartacus
[mistr andersn] I’m spartacus
[wacko_Jacko] ur all freaks thats what u r

Posted by Keeper @ 05:58 PM CST [Link]

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Every person maintains a list of things they would like to see. The list can be full of things that have never been and will never be, or it can consist only of mundane but unappreciated aspects of daily life, but everybody has that list--that list of things where when you consider them, you think, "Damn, I'd like to see something like that."

At the top of my list is the launch of a Saturn V rocket. Though the STS stack generates more thrust at lift-off, there's something primal about the videos of the Saturn V lifting from the pad, like a gleaming spear, longer and taller than anything else we've ever lofted into space, and the five F1 engines standing atop pillars of pure combustion. The ground would shake for miles around, as if God himself were kicking the earth, and the most amazing part of it all would be knowing that sitting at the very top of the spear, balanced there as the monster flew ever higher, were three men who were going to the moon.

I might one day be lucky enough to witness the launch of a manned flight to the moon or to Mars, but it will likely be atop a shuttle-derived launch vehicle, re-using parts from the STS, both for reasons political and technical. Plus, it would be a two-launch deal; one to loft the heavy equipment, and the other to launch the crew, with a rendezvous in LEO before moving on to the mission's destination. Never again will the world shake with the power of so much thrust and purpose in a single vehicle.

It's kind of sad.

Posted by Keeper @ 01:30 PM CST [Link]

Thursday, September 8, 2005

After talking to the F&SN Critic, I've realized I'm an idiot. Zor's birthday is today, not tomorrow. D'oh.

I know EXACTLY what to get him, though!

Posted by Keeper @ 08:39 AM CST [Link]

Wednesday, September 7, 2005

Active Directory is a weird and scary beast.

We're having issues right now with a strange error that pops up when trying to assign permissions to a set of folders off the root of a share on one of our NAS-served disks. As happens so often, the actual error given has very little to do with the problem at hand, and calling support is a difficult prospect at best because of the complexity of our environment. On one hand, crazy problems like this are great fun to squash; on the other, squashing crazy problems like this can sometimes take for-freaking-ever.

It's Zor's birthday on Friday! He's a great friend--he got me a pair of awesome games for my birthday, and I need to find something to return the favor. Knowing that his interests lie along the lines of things that he can experience, I'm leaning toward a music or DVD purchase. Will have to stop at Fry's and see what's available. My original plan was to RMA my 160GB Seagate Barracuda 7200RPM SATA drive, but in spite of its massive data loss click-fest last month, the freaking thing refuses to fail ANY diagnostics I throw at it, including Seagate's own drive torture test. So, I haven't RMA'd it because it won't fail. Apparently, failure is reserved for situations involving actual useful operation, not testing. Stupid hard drive.

Am getting quite good at making complicated Visio diagrams that do not actually solve problems, but DO provide proof that I am not wasting away my entire day browsing the web.

Am also glad I am not a refugee from New Orleans.

Posted by Keeper @ 09:01 AM CST [Link]