Had a great weekend up until tonight when the computers started fighting me. Mostly it's the BIOS on this new server, but aggravated by stupid installers. Enough about that, here's the fun I had:

Saturday I got up early (for a Saturday) and got to Ride West in time to be there when the parts and apparel swap opened. I just missed a rear seat for the R50, but I'm next in line if the buyer decides that he doesn't want it after all. It was in really rough shape, but priced at only $5 I could put some effort into it. I did manage to score some really nice Lee Parks gloves at about half price. I also met a few vintage bike people and chatted a whole bunch. I met up with Morgan and we chatted for a while. Just as I was about to take off cooncat and G showed up so we chatted a bit.

I took off from that and after doing a few things at home I headed to the brew store to pick up an apple crusher and ratchet press and hauled them over to ibexris and mimsy's house. It was a lot of work, but oddly enjoyable. After several hours of work we managed to turn 630 pounds of organic apples into about 34 gallons of cider. I took home 5 of that, 1 for drinking and 4 to turn into hard cider.

Sunday I returned the crusher and press and picked up a few oddments for brewing. I then visited my brother to help out with my nephew's halloween costume. He's going to be a lightning bug this year, and I'm in charge of illumination. I've got 100 yellow LEDs, I just need to figure out how to wire things up. I'll be making some little lens-like devices with the laser cutter that will hopefully diffuse the light better. It's all going to be powered by a mintyboost.

After looking over the costume and testing a few things Andrew, Jack and I went to Costco. Jack was pretty good and even let me hold him long enough that my arms got tired. He's a cute kid.

Now I'm home, waiting for this install to finally finish so I can copy a bunch of data off a failing array. It's not the way that I wanted it set up in the first place, but it's close enough that I can fix things later.

Haven't done a whole lot this weekend. At the moment the primary internet connection to home is down and I just finished fixing the secondary that I broke the other day. Turns out that I have 4 connections available to me from home, each of varying reliability and speed. I just wish I could make them automatically failover or something.

Today I did manage to get down to the garage to do the valve adjustment and throttle body sync on the Rockster. It's amazing how much that can effect how the bike runs. The valves were pretty close, only had to adjust the exhaust on both sides. The throttle bodies were way out (1/2 turn or more) and was probably the reason the milage had dropped of late.

In amusing bird related news, while tinkering with the internet connection I heard Niko call out from downstairs... only he sounded a good bit too clear to be that far away. Careful exploration found him at the top of the curtains at the bottom of the stairs. A good 8 feet from the ground. He's sitting on the top of the laptop now, he earned it!

I ordered the replacement caps from digikey the other day and today replaced the ailing ones in the power supplies. Low and behold it worked! I now have a functioning console server. Phew.

interesting bit of trivia.... if you have a 1T+ ext3 volume, you'd better have more than 512M of ram in the system if you hope to be able to run fsck on said volume.

Fortunately I had a spare 512M to go into the system.

I weighed myself this morning and I am down 40 pounds so I went shopping for clothes again. I found that I'd dropped another size. I'm down to a 30" waist according to the fine folks at Carhartt. Though there were no double fronts in the right length in stock so I bought another belt instead.

In other news:

• I'm getting my money back on the dead console server.


• I bought Metroid Prime 3 and it pretty much rocks


• micahbird pooped on Niko's head today and she was mightily pleased.


• I'm making Peach upside down cake
  

I got my second console server from ebay today. The first I can't get into because I don't have the password and there is no reset function and I failed at hacking it. Oh well. The second I bid on after checking for the password reset. All good. I got it today and it looked great up until I plugged it in and the smoke came out. Yeah. This bites.

I now have my very own 2 post rack in the garage and it's properly secured to the floor even.

post post

Are we there yet?

It's midnight and I have to be up at 4am. People in the office, please be kind to the zombie in your midst.

The power went out at about 10:20 just as I was falling to sleep. I couldn't sleep because my servers were on UPS and the beeping was doing nothing but keeping me worried. The UPS went critical at around the 1 hour mark and I shut off the web server and firewall to keep the mail server running, because I'd rather not have to boot that beast again. About 10 minutes later the power came on and I spent the next 20 getting the systems online again. Now I'm writing this post.

Now I sleep. :P