Hippo, birdie, two ewes...

... to marythefilker!!!! Have a great one!!

Done yesterday (20111119 Sa)

A pretty good day, mostly spent puttering. Colleen needed to buy some fabric and patterns, so we went to Jo-Ann's and added a drive and a trip to Ross. I was sorely tempted by some very lightweight luggage, but had doubts about its durability. We did re-arrange Colleen's scooter bags, moving the black-and-purple shoulder bag to the front, and moving her supplies to the purple SwissGear mini-duffel in back (where they'll be much more accessible).

I also moved the folding cup-holder from her cane (where it wasn't particularly useful) to her scooter.

I spent much of the evening sitting out in the living room with Colleen, watching the news and cleaning out my netbook so I can give it to the Wolfling. I inadvertently deleted more than I intended, but no harm done: I just restored the deleted config files from git and my home directory on the fileserver.

Thinking about my experiences in junior high seems to raise my anxiety level. A lot. It wasn't exactly a geek-friendly environment. Or maybe it's anger; I got a similar reaction from Police officer pepper-sprays seated, non-violent students at UC Davis

More links down in the notes.

( raw notes )

Power: state of the Starport

Power is one of those things you don't think of much unless you're paying the bill or it suddenly isn't there. There was a power outage Friday evening, and we learned a couple of things.

The outage only lasted an hour, and the fileserver and network switch (which are on the same UPS) could easily have gone on another hour. The odd thing is that the gateway subnet (my Linux router and the UVerse "cable" router), on an identical UPS with basically the same steady-state power draw (around 25W) shut itself down after only 26 minutes.

It's pretty clear that the UVerse router is the culprit; it draws at least an extra 9W or so when there's data flowing, and sometimes as much as 20. My hunch is that it wastes a lot of power trying to reconnect to its satellite set-top boxes. Stupid.

There's not much I can do about that, except to move the DHCP server from the gateway to the fileserver, so that people with laptops can keep on working. That's basically me, since Colleen uses her netbook mostly for web browsing.

I moved DHCP this morning, with no obvious problems so far.

We also learned that it's really hard to find a bag of candles after the lights go out. Yes, we had flashlights, but those only work if what you're looking for is reasonably close to the last place anyone remembers putting it. It wasn't.