General Rambling

This year I am celebrating Martin Luther King, Jr. Day with some ritual appliance repair. I just pulled the Shards of Narsil from the pump intake on my dishwasher. Or at least it seemed that way. Two big hunks of glass that I don’t recognize from anything, and some chunks of plastic. They may have been in there since I’ve owned the place. Mad props to the Samurai Appliance Repair Man over at applianceguru.com. Without the forum posts and the photos there I would have had to call someone. A repair call for my KitchenAid dish washer would have been what, $100 for the trip fee, another $100 for an hour of repair? It wouldn’t have taken four hours, but …

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Okay, so do you think this entry at last.fm is legit or wishful thinking? The Coachella Valley Music Festival web site doesn’t have a lineup yet for 2007, just dates. If it’s legit I guess that’s the end of the rumor about the Police getting back together for a tour. I’m already excited about Coachella, and it’s still three months away. Update: Yeah, I’m a moron, as some folks have pointed out Elvis, The Beatles, Michael Jackson, and 2Pac aren’t going to be there this year. So, I guess we’ve concluded “Goof.”

Last night it was email. If I don’t read it I don’t want it touching my email. I don’t want to scan it for spam, download it, or otherwise have it near me. This afternoon it is RSS feeds. If I don’t read it it has to go. If it isn’t active anymore it’s outta here. Last, if it doesn’t have a full content feed it’s going, too. I’d rather have ads in the feed than have to switch out to a browser. 80 feeds in. 57 out. I reneged and left Vinography in even though it isn’t a full feed. So I like wine. Nothing wrong with that. 🙂 While I was sitting here I also realized that with …

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I think ~stevenf sums it up quite nicely: AAAAAHHH AAAAHHH AAAAAHHH AAAAHHH AAAHHBB GGG LL AAAAA All I have to say is that I wish it were cheaper and available now. And I hope they don’t have supply problems. And I’m still not sure I’ll get one, but I want one real bad. Apple TV looks boring. I wish it did non-iTunes things. 802.11n was inevitable. Nice that you can share a USB disk now. I wish you could share both a disk and a printer… Maybe if you connect a hub…

Ugh, sorry folks, I’ve been totally out of the game for the last couple of days with some Norwalk-like virus thing. It manifested itself several hours after I’d been out drinking, meaning that I was pre-dehydrated, and it got a little scary when I wasn’t able to put any more liquids in me. I’d discovered a long time ago that the way to get my stomach to not reject everything is to coax it with little amounts of sweet liquid, and fruit punch Powerade seemed to do the trick. Of course, it sucks drinking the same thing for 36 hours, but hey, I’ll take that over dehydration any time. I read that you get Norwalk viruses from the stool of …

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40_liberty002us, originally uploaded by michael_hughes.

I spent part of the day patching my VMware servers. My suggestion: if you have more than one VMware ESX Server get a patch depot. Don’t argue with me, just do it. It requires a web server and about 28 seconds of time to read pages 5 and 6 of the VMware “Patch Management for ESX 3” guide. It beats the snot out of copying all those files around. Then you can use whole strings of: esxupdate -noreboot -r http://web.server.you.have.com/esx/ESX-1111111 update esxupdate -noreboot -r http://web.server.you.have.com/esx/ESX-2222222 update esxupdate -noreboot -r http://web.server.you.have.com/esx/ESX-3333333 update reboot Oh, so nice. I chose to apply the patches in chronological order. Plus, I can’t even think of a reason your patch depot couldn’t be a VM, as …

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For the last three weeks I’ve been at home and at work for three days. I’m not complaining, as San Francisco, New Orleans, and the Twin Cities were great. It’s sure nice to be home, though, to sleep in my own bed. One thing I have noticed, though, is I feel dumber. I try to think about things, like spam filtering today, and I find myself drawing blanks, starting over. I hope I didn’t kill too many brain cells while I was off. 🙂 I’ll tell you, though, I am relaxed. It’s nice. Start the timer until it goes away. 🙂 On tap for this week: a nice rousing bout of VMware patching, porting our build process to Red Hat …

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It’s the eve of Christmas Eve, and when I returned from running a couple of errands this afternoon my mother noted that while the thermostat was set to 68 the temperature was 60. Um, hmm. “Well, it’s 2:30, call someone right now,” I said. The burners in the furnace would light but no main blower activity. A skinny guy named Red rolled up in his van and took a look at it. He mucked with it a bit and it started working fine. “I don’t know why I’m even here,” he said. “It’s all working fine.” I explained what I’d done before he got there, that I could see the burners come on but the fan wouldn’t go. “That makes …

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