Done yesterday (20090815)

( raw notes )

I went to the Linux Picnic with Colleen this year; it was OK but a little boring. Most of my "conversations" were one-sided, listening to someone go on at great length on a subject that might have been sort of interesting when he started... I really don't know how to get out of that kind of thing gracefully. I also don't know how to meet new people, who might be more interesting. I'm basically relying on other people to notice me and start talking; this explains the one-sided conversations.

What I should have done, of course, was sit myself down with my guitar, the stuffed gnu, and a display rack of CDs. That would have attracted people, maybe gotten a few sales, maybe a few conversations, and at least kept me busy.

We left and went for a drive, checking out garage sales on the way. Bought Colleen a new foodie mystery book, and a(nother) folding walker. I figured that for $5 we could hardly go wrong -- keep it in the car, lend it out, or hack it into a stand for computer and/or music gear (which I'd been thinking of doing with the old walker, before it turned out that Colleen needed it).

Baked chicken for dinner. It turns out that Emmy doesn't like flavored rice, either; I don't know why Colleen keeps buying it. Maybe she'll stop now, and just let us make pilaf, saffron rice, etc. from real ingredients.

Tracked down lyrics for The Cutty Wren, which will make a good song for Tempered Glass after a little lyric tweaking.

Spent a few minutes noodling; this time it was pure improvisation, switching around between Am, C, and G. Every once in a while I think I ought to record some of that. Realized that it would probably be a lot of fun to jam with Callie.

The day's link sausage: Strange Horizons, a weekly SF webzine, and Filkipedia, a MediaWiki-based filk wiki.

Hardware hacking - trying not to use the axe

Upgrading the disk and memory on my file server has been on my List Of Things To Do for a long time now, so having finally assembled 4GB of RAM, 3 500GB SATA drives, and a free afternoon in the same place, I prepared to do battle.

I think it came out a draw.

After going through a goodly fraction of the combinatoric space implied by the above plus three power supplies and two ethernet cards, I finally determined that the reason it was failing to boot was...

A bad SATA cable!

Maybe a marginal power supply, too. And did I mention the hunt for the four special hard-drive mounting screws that eventually turned up on my desk.

I also determined that almost all the noise in the office is coming from the CPU fan on my router. :(

Naturally, I haven't had time to run any of the errands I had scheduled for this afternoon, let alone trying to upgrade the server to Lenny and pull out the IDE drive it's currently running with. Or take a walk. Or deal with email, or the inkjet printer (which is still waiting for the server upgrade). And did I mention that the server isn't recognizing its Gbit network card? That's waiting for the upgrade, too.

And of course the LJ posts and email that have been hanging fire for a while now...

I am a grumpy bear.