Done all these yesterdays... (20110725 Mo - 2729 Fr)

[mdlbear]

0725 Mo
  * up 6:50; W=198.6; drugs, nose, teeth, laundry, dishes
  @ New York marriage equality spurs on other states
  * replaced black ink cart. in WF600 printer.  Turns out there are several
    alternatives for black, and I had one of them
  % note with satisfaction that the fax machine does a good job of "screening"
    junk calls to the spare line since I turned on auto-answer.
  @ All AT&T Android Phones Released In 2011 Will Get Gingerbread
  * shuffle cars.  
  * LJ very slow and flaky this morning.  Probably another DDOS
  * lunch: New India Chaat w\ Hirsh, Jake, Dave M.
    D. went to ComiCon last weekend, had a blast
  : LJ has been flaky all day -- still can't post.
    ! very annoyed.
  : Colleen got her cast cut down today, from over-the-elbow to about 2/3 of
    her forearm.  Happy kitty. 
  @ Djembe
  @ If Corporations And The Rich Paid Taxes At The Same Level As The 1960s,
    The Debt Would Disappear | ThinkProgress @gridlore
  . reading The Power of Body Language by Tonya Reiman.
    a lot of practical info -- wonder how much of it is trustworthy.  Seems to
    have mostly very positive reviews on Amazon.
  : YD tried to upgrade her PC.  Lost everything.  No usable backups?
    I can't fix it.  I F*CKING HATE WINDOWS!!!  H8 H8 H8 H8 H8 
  & Successfully got both printers attached to her laptop; I now know how it's
    done.  You put the http URL into the "name" field.  Growf.
  : YD seems to have bounced back well; she may still have most of the
    important stuff, then.  Need a household automatic backup system, I think.
  
0728 Tu
  * up 6:30; W=199.8; drugs, nose, teeth, hair, dishes, light, laundry
  * LJ still not posting.  Other people seem to be getting in, though.  WTF?
  * install new drive in nova
    % ouch.  It's always a pain working on the floor.
    : power usage now 3%.  So saving ~1-2% = 9-17W over the old external drive
  * post worked from FF at work.  
  * partition new drive (32ext4/32ext4/16swap/*ext4) 
    Use -c to suppress cylinder warning.  sdb5 600GB bigger than sda7; there
    are several unused partitions on sda.
  * Avoid avoiding.  Forgot clipboard; improvised with a small pad.
  : so I can post to LJ from work, but not from any machine at home.  Cute.
  ~ transfer backups to new drive, re-label partitions

0727 We
  * up 6:30; W=198; drugs, nose, teeth, hair, dishes, light
  % ferocious muscle spasm in left calf.  methocarbamol, K, Mg.
  : transfer errored out; will have to finish with rsync over ethernet, I
    guess, which will be much slower than tar.  Ouch!  Apparently a USB driver
    issue, rather than the specific device.  Growf.  OTOH, could be the
    drive.  That would be unfortunate.
  : LJ appears totally hosed this morning.  Still.  DDOS, of course.
    What's surprising is that it took so long to admit to it.
  & 8ish:  old backup disk now on trantor via SATA; we'll see.  fscking.
    -> definitely the drive.  bounced trantor, rsyncing.  log to /root/foo.log
    Could be a couple of bad blocks, which could be worked around.
  * Colleen: humira
  @ Rules for Anchorites - Come One! Come All! And See the Fairyland Prequel!
  = progress tracker on nova:
    echo `ssh trantor df | tail -1`; \
    while true; do echo -ne `df /mnt | tail -1` "\r"; sleep 10; done
  = progress tracker on trantor:
    while true; do tail foo.log; echo; sleep 10; done
  : looks like some (most?) files take lots more space in ext4
    we'll see how bad it gets.
  * buy: Fry's: ink for Workforce 600 (ij); a couple of SATA hotplug trays.
  : Og will go to UBF's court hearing Friday.
  @ downrightnow - Check the status of web services and report outages

0728 Th
  * up 6:40; W=197; drugs, nose, teeth, laundry, dishes, light
  * transfer errored out in home-3
    /dev/sdb5 1349854392 512475556 768810208 40% /mnt	# old
    /dev/sdb5 1840289028 769866088 976941620 45% /mnt	# new
    ... so using ext4 _more than_ cancels out the bigger drive.  :(
    Plan B:  back to ext3.  copy home, users early to find the bugs
    * reformat new backup to ext3, mount on nova:/mnt
    . transfer starting with share, users
  x CIC summer picnic (guess I'll probably miss that one)
  * walk: a little under 2mi
  @ solarbird | Debtordammerung: Today's News
  * more transfer: home.  So far, so good; I think the problem may be timeouts
    or thermal problems rather than bad sectors
  @ Nielsen: Android Takes Top OS Spot, Apple Tops Manufacturers | TechCrunch
    39% of the smartphone market.
  @ Why Have Hackers Hit Russia's Most Popular Blogging Service? 
  @ There is no such thing as anonymous online tracking | 
    Stanford Center for Internet and Society mapping clickstreams to IDs
  : grump.  rsync -aSH doesn't make symlinks to files that have already been
    copied in a previous round.  -> ok, it fixes this up later.  Cool!
  * PAY BILLS
  : flaked on /mnt/home/steve/download/wireless/ and others.  Back after
    power-cycle, so almost certainly some kind of timing glitch.
  @ xkcd: Lanes  Ouch!!  #QV
    Trigger Warnings - a bit more detailed
  * singing for N and Colleen.  Bigger, Rosie, Times, River, October
    Country, When I Go, Toolmakers  One other, I think.
  : or maybe not.  Flaked in home-3 this time.  Something odd there.

0729 Fr
  * up 6:45; W=197; drugs, nose, teeth, dishes, light
  * mm* transferred successfully; now trying home again.
  @ solarbird | Commentary on Commentary on Debtordammerung
  * moving home-3 to lost+found seems to be working so far.
    also moved pc-* and local-*, because there seem to be problems there too.
    Started the final (everything but /lost+found) rsync
  @ Annie's Lover by Dave Carter and Tracy Grammer - YouTube
  : Hmm.  Wonder whether the space usage in the new drive will go down after
    the rsync finishes and fixes up the links.  Otherwise, switching from ext4
    to ext3 won't have fixed anything.
    /dev/sda5 1349854392 512475556 768810208 40% /mnt
    /dev/sdb5 1840289028 602784324 1144023384 35% /mnt 
  * UBF's trial?  hearing?  1:30 Dept 28 
    -> restraining order: 300y from victim's house.  We're slightly closer.
  ~ cook dinner - YD will be going out with UBF and J.  -> pizza w. Liz & Og
  : I'm sure the transfer would have been a lot faster if I'd done [a-z]*
    first.  Next time...
  * 15min: took out trash and recycling from office
  * print business cards - the size needs adjusting, and ooffice is broken
  * load ss business cards into Minnie (card case)
    will probably have to print more; can't find the bundles.

... so what was I doing while LJ was down? Mostly system administration, I suspect. Between making the YD's Windows 7 computers print on our home network, and backing up the failing backup drive, it's been a long week. Oh, and replacing ink cartridges and cleaning print heads.

I went to Fry's and got a couple of hot-swap holders for SATA drives; I'll use one of those for the backup drive. Once I get it loaded. It would have gone a heck of a lot faster if I'd figured out that I needed to transfer the monthly incrementals last if I wanted to restore hard links correctly. *sigh*

Meanwhile, the good news is that the UBF had a hearing yesterday and got slapped with a restraining order keeping him out of a 300yd zone that just happens to include our house. So he won't be staying over any more.

Just one walk, on Thursday. This was partly due to getting a severe leg cramp last Sunday. But I did get in some singing, which was good.

And a lot of puttering in the office. A pretty good week, modulo the pain.

Lots of links in the notes. xkcd: Lanes is the one to go to; may be triggery if you have cancer. The debt limit fiasco continues to be top news; solarbird has been writing it up. Go look.

Comments

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Far from finding that xkcd strip "triggering", I found it encouraging, in a weird way - that's why I posted the whole thing to my own journals. And it appeared on the morning of my follow-up exam... as my brother likes to say, "nothing synchs like synchronicity" ;-)

And I'll see your djembe, and raise you a cajón (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cajon) - an Afro-Hispanic percussion instrument you can build yourself, out of plywood. (Really.) A percussion-loving friend of mine points out that it doubles as a seat for a musician, reducing the number of bulky objects you have to try to stuff into your car ;-)

[mdlbear]

Thanks. I've considered getting or making a cajón, but don't need another instrument and would probably find it uncomfortable to sit on at my age.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

Alas, I think trying to put a cushion on top of a cajón would impair the sound. But I did see some construction plans that call for rounding off all the edges and corners so it's not quite as uncomfortable to sit on.

(I'd like to play those rhythms, but I don't have the cajónes...)

[mdlbear]

In my case it's more the lack of back support, though if I were building one I might make the top/seat slightly concave for comfort.

[acelightning.livejournal.com]

You can buy molded plywood chair seats, steam-formed into a shape that's meant to accommodate the human buttocks. Perhaps there's a way to use one of those for the top of a cajón.

[mdlbear]

Hmm. Yeah, that could work.