ehowton: (Default)
Crawled in bed last night after my shower and the wife was laying in bed reading. I just, watched her. Thinking of how lucky I was to have her, and then of all the women that just weren't right in the months leading up to our getting together. I started grinning a stupid grin, not being able to imagine myself with anyone else, and wondering what I had done right to get her. She drops her book in a huff, turns to me and says, "How long are you going to fucking stare at me?"

What a sweetheart...

Saw a Season Two commercial for Battlestar Galactica yesterday at the movies. I was quite excited. Apparently, they're going to show all of Season One back-to-back tomorrow on Sci-Fi, and NBC is going to broadcast three episodes in High-Definition this month. Season Two starts the 15th.

Drove to Wichita Friday after work, the beginning of the holiday weekend. Had I been able to come up with anything to do whatsoever, I would have used that as an excuse to not drive to Wichita, as traffic was horrendous! It took me two and a half hours to get to the Oklahoma State Line, traveling I-35 the entire way. My normally 5-hour trip took seven. Well, at least I didn't feel rushed. I just put some good tunes on, sucked on some moist smokeless tobacco, and set the cruise at 69. (Usually I set it at 74, but Oklahoma State Troopers were out in force!)

Mostly rode three wheelers as DETAILED HERE.



The absolute best part of a three-day weekend is usually the 4-day work week which follows. Alas, in IT we usually end up working 5-days worth of work in 4-days, which doesn't make it any more pleasant.

Wife wanted to see Episode III again while it was still in theaters, so took her to see it yesterday while folks enjoyed the children. Dinner at Zio's (I had the cheese ravioli on a bed of linguine, half covered in alfredo, half in marinara), followed by a clandestine meeting with MADDOG. You see, I have acquired a mac mini in a game of chance. This mac mini has already had a memory upgrade more impressive than even you could imagine! And David Roberston at work has overclocked his CPU to 1.5GHz (his research turned up that both the 1.25 and 1.42 model use the 1.5 CPU, which is disabled by a single solder-point). The only thing lacking is a decent harddrive. As neither myself, nor my friends deal in IDE, this has been an arduous task. My minimum requirements were 8MB cache and 7200rpm. Well, MADDDOG found a brand new 80GB Maxtor, out the door at Office Depot, for $40. What a pal! Now I'm tracking down an external firewire-400 enclosure. Sure a Hitachi Travelstar laptop drive would have been easier, but at $185, my implementation will work equally well at one-third the cost!

Just got off the phone with a client. "My laptop went into hibernation, AND I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO!"
"Push the power button." I offered.
"I did - nothing happened!"
"Is it plugged in?" I ask.
"I think so."
"Can you check it?"
"Sure."
"Oh, that's it, it's working now!"
"Fantastic."

*sigh*

The Higgliosaurus Corner:
HIGGS! Has returned from vacation this week!

BlackLadyInPhilly: I have a job interview in MO.
EricHowton: Where in Missouri?
BlackLadyInPhilly: Kansas City.
EricHowton: Sweet! You can drive to Wichita on the weekends and we can visit.
BlackLadyInPhilly: Are there even black people in Kansas?
EricHowton: I think I saw one once.
BlackLadyInPhilly: Oh, you got jokes!
EricHowton: Seriously, it's a metropolitan area, of course there are!
BlackLadyInPhilly: I don't want to move into KKK land or something.
EricHowton: Geez!
ehowton: (Default)
It was a beautiful spring morning. Tony was still at work from working overnight when I arrived at the office. We went to the caff and had Richard make us some fantastic omlettes, came back to our desk, Tony put on a little Ella, I was dancing in my chair. This stunted prick 7 cubes down races to Tony's cube and loudly announces, "DON'T YOU HAVE HEADPHONES?"

What Tony said: "Uh....yeah."

Leave a comment of what Tony would have liked to have said!

Yesterday morning I grabbed the 2.2 litre polycarbonate water bottle my wife gave me to ensure I drink plenty of water at work and began my trek to one of the further water fountains, as it is the coolest, and has the highest arc - required for filling bottles! As I was 3/4 done this largish woman stands behind me with an empty glass in her hand. I say, "2.2 liters, 70 second to fill, and I'm 75% done." She replies, "You know, there is a sink down the hall."

What I said: "Thank you."

Leave a comment of what I should have said!

There was an accident in Fort Worth at approximately 2200 last night. The driver apparently hit, or caused to be knocked down, a pole. This particular pole was a power pole and knocked power out of more than a block. Our building lost power. Our generator kicked in as it was supposed to, but the battery the generator feeds, failed. Every server went down. I've been bringing them up one at a time. I got here late today, even. My boss had most of the important ones up bright and early. "Monitor every box we back up!" He tells me. So....some workstations on users desks are powered off and they're gone for the holiday weekend and the doors are locked. You're thinking, "Brilliant," right? What a pain in my balls this is:

Added bb start script to v480e, launched blade11, couldn't get access to blade1 so removed it from monitoring, fixed blade31, fixed callie, fsck'd blade9, fixed top on ncgcasm01, added bb startup to blade2502, updated vmewdevweb's bb start script...

Leaving for Kansas in three hours. It looks like a stormfront is going to cover I-35 from Dallas to Wichita. Fantastic.

Updated every package on my primary Solaris box at the ADC, quark.xirr.com <-- this took forever too!

docs.sun.com: If a system fails power-on diagnostics, then auto-boot? is ignored and the system does not boot unless the user does it manually. This behavior is obviously not acceptable for a degraded boot scenario, so the Enterprise 250 OBP provides a second NVRAM‐controlled switch called auto-boot-on-error?. This switch controls whether the system will attempt a degraded boot when a subsystem failure is detected. Both the auto-boot? and auto-boot-on-error? switches must be set to true to enable a degraded boot.

So on my last system, a v100, I get the error, "bad inode number 0 to ginode" when I fsck. Same error when I do a superblock fsck. Sun says, "Contact your service provider or another qualified person." WTF? It appears irreparably damaged. So I call a qualified person, Steve Price who, after laughing, explains that I have to low-level format this ATA drive, replace the standard Sun cable with an 80-pin, and restore the data. Fortunately, it's mirrored, so after I pull the drive to format it, I'll whing-ding the sync and may still get outta here on time! Thanks Steve. Still, I don't understand if its a missing inode on a mirrored filesystem, which drive do I pull...and how is resyncing going to fix it? I think I'll just start pulling drives.

Grrrrr.
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