journaling: enabled

Normally Mondays don’t bother me. They’re the start of the week. I could almost say I look at them as an opportunity for a fresh start to a good week. I hope the rest of the week isn’t like today though. I think I kept busy but I didn’t feel very productive. I did manage to get a sheet of paper off my desk that has been there for several months. It was a reminder of some “customer service” related items that I wanted to make note of that we should do. I also puzzled a bit about the NTP issue that I’ve been having in one of the labs and discovered it actually shows up in more than one. If I use the campus ntp server, it sets the time to random erroneous times (seems to jump forward several weeks at a time). If I use any other time server, it sets the time correctly. Anyway, I updated our lab settings to point at UW-Madison’s public ntp server. We should see how that goes tomorrow.

This afternoon I helped with a voice-over recording for “The Diary of Anne Frank” that University Theatre is presenting soon. Not real exciting but as it turns out, it was the only time I got out of the building today between coming into work and leaving from work. I also got to install some more RAM in my workstation this afternoon so I’m up to 2GB there. That should help noticeably when I start digging into the web redesign project more. I also started working on getting my head around our task tracking software. I don’t think it’s a good idea to have 14 system administrators for the same software product, particularly when in most cases, making them project administrators should be sufficient. We’re using Footprints if anybody is curious. I’m looking to upgrade to the current version, but I need to know who will be affected first … which means tracking down who “owns” each of the 20 or so projects we have set up in the software. Most are straight-forward but there are a few unknowns.

Anyway, I hope the rest of the week is more positive than today, even if it is forecasted to snow. I’m really ready for the cold, wet weather to go away. I want to drive with the windows down and the radio thumpin’.

This past weekend was pretty uneventful. I had hoped to get some work done on my server. I would like to update to PHP5 and MySQL 5. However, I think it makes sense to upgrade to FreeBSD 6.2 since I want to do that as well. Apparently my gettext is out-of-date too and upgrading that will require me to rebuild most of the software packages on the server. To complicate matters further, the partition all this gets built on is 83% full … so I’d like to figure out a way to expand it. My thought is to move my home directories from /home (ad0s1g) to my data volume (ad2s1d – 160GB drive that’s 30% full or so) and redo /usr (ad0s1f) to include a few more gigs that were formerly occupied by /home. Anybody out there ever resized a FreeBSD partition? (if partition is even the right word here?)

Anybody know of a good LiveJournal client for Linux? I’m trying out drivel here. This weekend Liz and I are over visiting friends in Appleton … probably the last time we’ll be over here for a while, since the weekends between now and June are getting pretty booked and we don’t want to do a lot of traveling in June for some strange reason.

Work this week has been pretty productive. My “active tasks” list has dropped from 75+ issues down to 62 or so. Thanks to Liz, my office now actually resembles a productive and organized work space as opposed to the chaos that resulted from moving offices on short notice. On the home side of things, my MythTV system is now recording correctly after a snafu with the video4linux drivers (had to roll back to a version from last fall). Yay! No more chipmunk voices in recordings (though watching a whole episode of MythBusters that way is rather amusing). Now I can move on to updating my FreeBSD server to 6.2 (and probably MySQL to v5 and PHP to v5)

Well, I haven’t updated in a while… I’ll start off with the results of the “nerdiness” quiz I just took … the results are somewhat disturbing…

In other news, I got a new cell phone number today. Email me or leave a comment if you want it. I suppose you could call my land-line too if you know it.

A little work update … projects have been going well lately. I’ve also been productive on getting some of our new computers out of our workroom where they are configured.

There is some network wiring and some software upgrades in my future.

liz4jc4ever and I were laying in bed this morning and she commented that one side of her tummy was more firm than the other. So I decided to poke and feel. Someone on the inside poked back! YAY! I can actually feel Thumper now and share in the fun that is “thumper is awake”.

So we have this nice new powdery snow outside. Since I haven’t “hot-dogged” in my truck since last winter, I decided to have a little fun on the way to the grocery store tonight. Oops… a little too much fun. Put it in the ditch less than 2 minutes after leaving the house. Oops the ditch is just a little too steep for me to get out, even with 4WD (almost, but not quite). Oops I happened to pick the side of the road that doesn’t have any driveways for at least a 1/2 mile. Oops I found some too-deep snow before I could get out.

Thankfully, we have neighbors who were kind enough to provide some assistance with their truck.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve posted (just over a month I guess). Work has been challenging. I still need to put the finishing touches on my project dealing with our task management software, namely finish writing up a doc or two clarifying some usage elements.

I’m in the thick of another project relating to email. We use squirrelmail for webmail at work and I’ve got the lovely task of upgrading it to a current version (= one we can actually find compatible plugins for and actually supports sessions without hacks). As part of the upgrade we’re moving this application to its own load-balanced pair of servers, which should greatly help performance. One of the changes we made to make load-balancing easier was to move preferences and addressbooks to LDAP. I didn’t think this would be as much work as it has turned out to be. I’ve probably spent a total of 25-30 hours on the addressbook conversion alone. There will be more work on this project this weekend, since other staff have the responsibility of getting me a second server and getting load-balancing working.

On the home front, Liz is definitely starting to look pregnant. This makes me happy. It’s hard to describe the sort of happiness that this part of our lives brings to me. She’s really looking forward to seeing me hold our child (we aren’t going to find out gender ahead of time). She claims I like to hold the Peaches in my arm to practice. Maybe that’s true.

A few weeks ago I got to give the gig NIC in the MythTV box a workout and transferred some video to my G5 for editing. I managed somewhere around 330 Mbps. W00t! And that’s using Cat5e cable. Though I don’t expect using Cat6 would offer much improvement, since I’m probably approaching the limits of what the disks will do. This does mean I’ll probably end up doing network jacks with Cat5e rather than Cat6. Not sure when I’ll start that, but I expect to do it before the baby arrives since it’s been recommended that we put a TV jack in the nursery and I’d like to put in a network jack at the same time.

Well, I think it’s time for bed. This post was brought to you by an army of millipedes and the letter Zzzzzzzzzzzz…….

Tonight we ate at AppleBee’s. It was yummy. It will be yummy tomorrow too (mmm … leftovers). Afterwords we went light-seeing (kinda like site-seeing, only we more or less knew where we were and it involved lights). It was decided that Golfview Drive in River Falls has some very nice lights (which of course adorn some rather nice and $$$$$$ houses). There were firetrucks at Rodli. We don’t know why. Perhaps something in the freezer got old enough to finally become self-aware and committed suicide by throwing itself on the grill?

There are lots of updates waiting for the MythTV box. One of them is the kernel. I don’t think I’ll do it yet ‘cuz I know it will break things and I just don’t feel like fixing them right now. Plus, it would probably decrease the wife-approval-factor.

This stream of consciousness post was brought to you by a flock of rabid penguins and the letter Q.

Upgraded mythtv system to Fedora Core 6 today. It wasn’t too bad. Had some issues to fix after install but it’s up and running … have tested both recording and playback. Experimented a bit with MythDora but elected not to use it since I was rather concerned about retaining my recording data. It does look like a pretty reasonable tool for getting a “fresh start” up and going.
Tried cloning the OS drive before upgrading to see if I could get it onto an 80GB (currently on a 40) but without success. Oh … and a bonus and a big reason for upgrade was the fact that it now supports the gigabit NIC.

Been a while since I’ve posted. Guess I haven’t really had much to post about. I’ve been trying to build a new MythTV box, but the Dell Precision 8100 I have won’t boot with the kernel that’s currently out for Fedora Core 6; of course, that’s what all the current drivers require. I might try MythDora to see if that works reasonably.

Work has been busy as usual. My manager seemed a bit surprised about the spike in service calls recently (fairly typical end-of-semester). I think I’ve been pretty good about juggling projects but I really need to push and get my current major one done.

I think the house is as decorated as it’s going to get for Christmas. We didn’t have to secure the tree with fishing line this year! Amazing what a level floor will do, eh? I noted that one of the side effects of the house layout is that our tree isn’t visible through windows from the road side of the house. Oh well. Maybe we’ll have lights in windows next year for people to look at. We finished up our Christmas shopping on Wednesday. liz4jc4ever is of course curious what I got her and I’m really looking forward to her opening it.
My brother-in-law John is up visiting this weekend so we can try and get his new computer up and running. It’s a custom machine that started with a barebones kit. I *think* I’ve figured out what’s been giving him grief. The first part was apparently the Windows installers didn’t like having two gigabit NICs and sound cards (one each on-board and in PCI slots). After pulling the “extra” cards, the Windows installer got slightly farther, but I suspect it can’t deal with his fancy video card (nVidia 7600), so we’re going to go into work today and borrow a PCI video card since I don’t have any of those laying around to try. Hopefully that resolves things.

Yup … I get to start tagging posts with ‘baby’!! I’d post pictures but that would defeat the purpose of having built a web page for this subject, so without further delay …

http://www.digitalsilk.net/baby/

w00t!