Did you hear about the new pirate movie coming out? It’s rated arrrrrr. Have a happy Talk Like A Pirate Day! Last year I was able to order grog at my local bar. This year I’m going to try for some bumboo, in order to avoid scurvy.
Back in April regular readers of this blog probably noted a decrease in the posting regularity here. I didn’t say much about it, but I became the president of a theater company in Madison, WI (Strollers Theatre). Theater lighting had been a hobby of mine but with some turmoil last winter I was voted in as president, and it’s been sort of a second job for me. 🙂 I’m proud to announce that the first show of our 2008-2009 season opens tomorrow at the Bartell Theatre in Madison. It’s Doubt: A Parable by John Patrick Shanley. It’s about a Catholic nun that protects a boy from the advances of a priest, and it’s about an hour and a half long. …
“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” – Robert Louis Stevenson Bamberg, Regensburg, Salzburg, Berchtesgaden, and finally Munich were wonderful. I’m very grateful to the hundreds of folks that helped all six of us out, translated my terrible, broken German and hand waving, and generally made everything enjoyable. In 12 days I took 2718 photos with my Nikon D80 and my little Panasonic FX-01. I drank 43.5 liters of excellent beer in numerous beer gardens, usually a Helles or Pils, a MaĂź at a time. I ate like a king, probably several pigs worth of pork, a bunch of roasted chickens a half at a time, roasted fish, pretzels, and those amazing huge radishes, …
Matt’s post over at Standalone Sysadmin about flash drives as archival media made me remember conversations I used to have with coworkers about the bandwidth of the U.S. Postal Service, a colleague’s pickup truck loaded with tapes, etc. Sometimes the fastest way to get data to a location is to mail it, even now. The late Jim Gray had a fantastic interview in ACM Queue back in 2003 where he talked about disk access times vs. capacity vs. Moore’s Law, and especially how he was mailing computers and disks to people. His price comparisons are a little dated now, but the rest is a good use of ten minutes, if you ask me. (and you didn’t, I know). 🙂
With all my coworkers getting iPhones there’s a shortage of unique ringtones around here. As such, my previous post with iPhone ringtones has some new stuff on it now, namely the Star Trek TNG door, “incoming subspace message” by request for Harry Kanasa, a Star Wars blaster sound, green tree frogs chirping, and cows mooing. Enjoy.
I have a hunch that the hardware clock is off on this host… …but by 134 years into the future? I didn’t actually get to see what it was set to, as the machine fixed itself via NTP shortly afterwards. I suspect the last mount time is some sort of unsigned integer that overflowed. Of course, on the subsequent reboot it needed to check the filesystems yet again, putting the last checked time back to normal.
“Going to” means you know. ‘Should’ means you know nothing. “Those servers should come up cleanly after a reboot.” “That storage array upgrade should not cause an outage.” “The customer should be fine with this.” Right. If you can’t say “going to” then you need to do more work. Update: if you think I’m wrong don’t take it personally, join the comments where the beatdown is already happening. Please, no nails in the 2x4s, though. 🙂
I just bought a Nikon D80. I’ve wanted a digital SLR for ages, and with the help of my good friend Jon I finally sucked it up and bought one. Now I just have to figure out how to use it. Which means that, for a while, I’m going to take a photo of everything I see. Lesson here: autofocus doesn’t work very well on fires.
I had to laugh when it was recently pointed out to me that: 1. South African Breweries buys/merges with Miller. 2. InBev buys Anheuser-Busch. 3. Pabst, with no brewing capacity of their own, is left as the largest American brewer. Go PBR! What strange times we live in. The silver lining when Miller succumbed was that ballparks serving Miller products started carrying other beers, too, providing relief for those who aren’t Miller Lite fans. I suspect that’ll be the case with Anheuser-Busch parks, too. I wonder who is the largest, wholly-American brewer WITH brewing capacity…
Joe Brancatelli’s recent article entitled “Southwest Airlines’ Seven Secrets for Success” points out one of Southwest’s biggest cost saving practices: flying one type of plane. Unlike the network carriers and their commuter surrogates, which operate all manner of regional jets, turboprops, and narrow-body and wide-body aircraft, Southwest flies just one plane type, the Boeing 737 series. That saves Southwest millions in maintenance costs—spare-parts inventories, mechanic training and other nuts-and-bolts airline issues. It also gives the airline unique flexibility to move its 527 aircraft throughout the route network without costly disruptions and reconfigurations. Standardization of server hardware pays off for organizations, too. In the somewhat distant past each member of my team was responsible for specifying and ordering servers for their …