All too true

This xkcd strip is almost certainly all too true for me. Probably for a lot of people reading this.

Done yesterday (20090927)

( raw notes )

Sunday was something of an emotional roller-coaster.

The day started out (late, because I slept in for once) with a fun bit of IM role-playing involving a moving box and a gruel-eating grue. Apparently that kind of role-playing doesn't bother me; I'm wondering where the dividing line is, and why.

Then a little later I overloaded when the YD tried to talk to Colleen while I was concentrating on fixing something on Colleen's computer. All I could get out was "please... please..."; the YD left in a huff, and Colleen burst into tears. :( Apologies weren't terribly effective.

So I need to develop another automatic response macro, something like "Just-a-minute-I'm-in-the-middle-of-something-I'll-talk-to-you-when-I'm-done" to use in that situation. The other one that I already use with some success is "Just-a-minute-I-can't-hear-you-I'll-be-there-shortly", when I think someone is trying to talk to me from another room or when my back is turned.

My walk by Los Gatos Creek was spent talking to myself about the upcoming Nova (fileserver) upgrade. Emotionally a blank. After that I went shopping, with moderate success (although Bed, Bath, and Beyond came out much more expensive than I expected, and I decided not to get the pair of Roland studio monitors I was lusting after at Guitar Showcase.)

I got two "like your shirt" comments (I was wearing the "Virtual Reality" shirt that Colleen and Marty made for me a couple of years ago). The first was shouted at me by a cyclist, but the second was an employee at BB&B; I could probably have turned that into a conversation if I'd been quick-witted enough. She was cute.

My blood sugar was, apparently, very low by the time I got home. I was snappish again, and the fact that the steaks I'd put in the fridge to thaw were still partly frozen proved an insurmountable obstacle; Colleen and I ended up with caprese salad and tamales, and the YD made herself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwitch.

I think Colleen was disappointed with me, or maybe just concerned for my health.

But the day ended well. Marty came by for some sewing and conversation; a little after she left Colleen said, "That's what I needed... a talk with my sister... Now I understand." I think she does, and that she'll be more comfortable about the time I spend with my sister-of-choice in the future.

After that it was back to decluttering the office. I took out three bags of old magazines -- let's face it: if I haven't had time to look at them in the last five years, I'm not going to do it in the next five, either. I saved only the American Scientist, National Geographic, and Fine Woodworking, and read a couple of interesting-looking cover articles in Scientific American and Science. It's a start.

Shortly before going to bed I responded to the YD's second plea for an external hard drive by putting a 400GB SATA drive into an external box for her. Tonight I'll put together another one for cflute, since I was able to locate the necessary pieces.

A productive day, and parts of it were good. Can't ask for much more.

This is your brain on breakfast

It probably says something about me that one of my favorite breakfasts is three eggs over easy cooked with tabasco and soy sauce, served over a bed of re-heated brown rice.

I'm not sure I want to know what it says.

Upgrade update

So... here's an update on this post about cleaning the office, upgrading the fileserver, and fixing the Starport's email.

One out of three is,... um,... pretty bad. I'm probably going to have to go to Plan B or Plan C on the email; I simply can't make it work at Dreamhost. Worth an email to their tech support, though.

As for the fileserver, the problem is that I really "need" to have my home directory up and running for at least most of the day. And I need to have mail working, and the YD needs to have the laser printer working.

After toying with and rejecting the idea of swapping Nova's hard drive into temporary hardware temporarily (which would involve a fair amount of work), it became clear that the right thing to do would be to pull the drive, plop it into an external box, and just do the upgrade (setting up the three SATA drives in a mixed RAID configuration). If it goes quickly and smoothly, mount the old drive and start copying /home. Whee!

If it doesn't go smoothly, mount the old drive on Dorsai, the desktop. This is almost but not quite as much work as a temporary Nova, and is only possible because Dorsai is currently the only machine mounting filesystems over NFS from Nova.

Even if I'm able to bring up Nova quickly and restore /home onto it (it's "only" 15GB, which won't take long), the next thing will be to move the external box over to Dorsai, where I can mount the big partition that has all the media files and website working directories, and still use it while rsync rumbles along doing its thing.

The nice thing about that is that if NFS or NIS gives me trouble -- and those are the two most likely trouble spots, for certain -- I can mount /home on Dorsai and go my merry way while trying to fix them.

11:35 On second thought, the best thing is clearly to start by moving the old drive to Dorsai. That will (presumably) be fairly quick, and will take all the time pressure off of the upgrade.