The Mandelbear's Musings

Well. I seem to have spent almost the whole day with pain in my right shoulder and the right side of my neck, finishing up the file transfer from my old, flaky backup drive to the nice shiny new one. Finally got it right.

Anyway, my history (back to 2007) has been preserved, and I have the new one installed on nova in a nice new quick-swap rack.

And I still have a pain in the neck. Not for too long, hopefully.

Only two links, but they're good ones. Go look in the notes.

If anyone out there has any idea how to make a computer running Windows 7 print to CUPS running on Debian Squeeze, please help. I'm baffled. It used to work fine with XP.

Right now the only viable fallback plan is to buy the YD a printer.

Sort of a meh day at work, except for a new coworker ("Dr. Bob") taking me out to lunch -- I had worked with his brother at Zilog, back before Kat was born. Gave him a copy of CC&S.

My backup drive flaked again. This has happened before; I think it's some kind of USB driver timeout issue. But after putting it back on a SATA connection I'll probably still go out looking for a new drive. It's not like 2TB drives are expensive this year.

A couple of links.

Colleen and I went shopping; the nominal reason being to get some packing cubes for my new suitcase. The Container Store, in nearby Santana Row, was still having its "organized traveler" sale, so that was our first destination. We also added absorbant drink coasters to the shopping list when I found Colleen's phone sitting atop a thin film of water condensed off her iced tea glass.

I got an Eagle Creek "complete organizer"; basically a cube and two half-cubes that zip together and are able to hang up when unzipped. That plus my toiletry/med kit fill Chami pretty completely, suggesting that she's not quite big enough for a weekend trip unless I take the CPAP in its own case.

We also stopped, as we always do, at Sur La Table, where we were both instantly attracted to the Miyabi Birchwood series knives - you'll find them at the end of this post. Curly birch handles and Damascene blades. OMG gorgeous. We succumbed and bought the 3.5" paring knife. But they didn't have coasters.

We got the Thirstystone coasters -- which we've been admiring for years -- at Bed, Bath, & Beyond. It ended up being a long, tiring, but delightful afternoon. I think I got my walking in, though it was mostly too slow to be aerobic.

I used the new knife to make dinner -- it is indeed a joy to use. The handle is slightly asymmetrical, but not enough for using it left-handed to be problem. The blade is double-edged, and sharper than our ceramic knives (though of course it will require occasional sharpening to stay that way).

I also installed the new power strip. It's a Prime "Energy Saver" -- three of the outlets are controlled by the state of a "master outlet", which I put my desktop computer on. The slave outlets have the monitor and the speakers. Works perfectly. I also discovered that the WAP was not on the UPS, which explains why it went out immediately when the power went out a couple of weeks ago. Oops.

On the whole a very nice day.

Yesterday's main event, besides getting the shell script that I've been working on working, was a power outage at home. Wherein I discovered that the external disk on the router was what kept it from coming back promptly when the power finally came back.

It's less obvious why the net connection went out immediately instead of waiting for the UPS to time out; I suspect that a power strip isn't on the UPS that I think it's on. Growf.

An amusing link: How long until Internet Explorer falls below 50 percent?

Want to bet that, a year from now, IE has dipped well below 50 percent, and Chrome (including native Android browsing) sits around 20 percent, with Apple products not too far behind? I'd even venture a guess that IE6 will still be gunning at 10 percent or more. Old habits -- and old proprietary systems -- die hard.

In all, a pretty good day. Even managed a short walk.

So it wasn't a terrible day, just kinda blah, with no walk, my weight still up, and a main dish for dinner that didn't work at all (though at least it was edible and not a total loss).

But I got the healthcare receipts filed! And the 2010 box up to the attic! And some other decluttering done around the house. That's a major accomplishment. And it did feel good, and I noticed that (which is probably even more of an accomplishment). And I got the 1900x1080 monitor and USB-powered optical drive I've been wanting for months.

So maybe it's just a King Gama kind of morning.

For the woodworkers out there, here's a 100% Wooden Bike.

The high point of the day was a nice st/roll with Colleen. The sky was overcast and the air cool; just right for brisk walking. Colleen, of course, needed her cape because she wasn't walking.

The wireless access point seems to have gotten its configuration corrupted; that's the second time this has happened after a power failure. Grump. (Reset-to-defaults fixed it this morning, but still.) I'm glad I decided not to use the thing as my main router! Grump anyway; I could use the power saving.

I tried the gluten-free matzoh-like objects Colleen got (a whole lot of) at Lunardi's (FKA Cosentino's). Meh. The taste is slightly off, and the texture (thin, dense, and brittle) is very off. Grump.

Dinner, boiled artichokes and rib-eye steaks pan-broiled with caramelized onions, was delightful. The artichokes were the first of the season, slightly small but very tasty. Colleen got the idea from some of her food porn shows of putting a lemon and some fresh thyme in the water; that worked very well.

I started getting sleepy around 8:15; getting up, walking around, and doing some dishes helped.

The day's most amusing link, by far, was the tale of Amazons $23,698,655.93 book about flies. I, for one, welcome our new algorithmic overlords -- as a filker, anyway.

The two things on the schedule yesterday were working on taxes, and acquiring a new UPS to replace the one whose battery died on Friday. The taxes aren't done yet, but I did get most of it entered. At this point only dividends and deductions remain. The Schedules C were easier than I expected, thanks to better tagging during the data-entry phase. I'm still running late, though.

I picked up the UPS, an APC BX1500G, at Fry's on the way home from taking the YD to her modeling class. It's taller and narrower than the older 1500's; I put it in the bedroom because it has an explicit mute button; it also has more outlets, which allowed me to replace the old power strip as well. It just barely fits on the shelf, though; I may want to move it to the floor. It also has a master-slave arrangement that allows something like a computer to control power to other devices like monitors. I'd really like that for the desktop, at some point.

The fileserver now has 170min of runtime, up from 11. Whee!

I appear to have no more serial-port UPSs in service; even the little 320VA unit by the phones is USB connected.

How to be Happy (the free e-book from 17000 Days that I finished yesterday) has a section on flow, starting p. 51. It points out that happiness comes after the flow state; while you're in flow you're totally absorbed in what you're doing. Wow, does that ever resonate! Especially with this last week at work. C.f. "The Little Computing Machine".

Several excellent links up there in the notes.

There was a power outage yesterday evening at the Starport; no harm done, but it triggered some thoughts. Here's the raw data:

  : UPS battery life on nova is under 15min.  That's miserable.  
    stargate:  107min,  5.0% of 865W = 44W  (includes DSL router, switches) 
    nova:       13min, 16.9% of 260W = 44W  Oh.  (varies down to 33)
    trantor:	70min,  9.0% of 780W = 70W
    CPAP rated at 48W, but hopefully uses less -> 30 open; 6 idle  Eeep!  
      That's maybe 3h on its XS1500 UPS.  The alarm had better wake me up!

Ok, so there are two obvious problems here. The first is that Nova, the fileserver, has a miserable uptime. That's not so bad, since the network is perfectly usable without it as long as all you want to do is surf. The other is that my CPAP, which is on the same kind of UPS as stargate (the router) has a much higher power consumption than I thought. The battery wouldn't last the night. Which means that I would probably die in my sleep if the power went out. Not so good.

There are two less obvious problems: Nova's disk took over an hour to fsck. That's a long time to boot, but not not too bad because, as I mentioned, the file server isn't all that essential in the short term. What's more of a problem is the backup drive on stargate. I really don't want my router taking half an hour to boot.

I also discovered that my wireless phone base station is on its own UPS, a 500VA APC that beeps when the power goes out. One of the thing I really like about the XS series is that you can turn the power-fail alarm off. Great in the office. Not so great for the CPAP!

So the current plan is to move the bedroom UPS into the office for Nova, and for the short term move Nova's SmartUPS 420 into the bedroom. Because it beeps. Eventually I'll want something bigger.

I also want to put the big partitions on a once-a-week unmount / fsck / remount routine. Easy. Along with that I want to move the router to a 2.25" drive (which I just happen to have sitting around) for lower power consumption. (I'd rather move the router to a solid-state drive and make the laptop drive external. But that will have to wait.)

ETA: I just found a stack of unpaid bills including this month's energy bill -- 28.2KWh/day, as opposed to 35.1 last year, so a little under a 20% improvement. (The gas bill was 63% more, but we won't go into that. yet.)

ETA: (0403) Actual measurement on the CPAP shows that it uses between 6 and 12 W in normal operation, so the XS1500 will keep it running all night, barely. That's encouraging. May keep things as they are for a while.

Sunday was good. Not productive, but good -- Colleen and I went up to San Francisco for the Lamplighters' production of Trial By Jury and a condensed version of Gilbert's play Engaged. Trial was unmitigated fun -- pure musical fluff. Engaged was... mostly amusing, but my vicarious embarrassment kicked in at a couple of points. It was raining hard on the way home, and I had a nasty skid coming down the offramp onto Woodside Road -- we had dinner at Buck's.

Oh, yeah; Sunday was my 64^th birthday. I didn't notice any hill.

Monday was also very unproductive, without most of the good part; I slept late, and spent the day at work mostly catching up. Some progress, but not as much as I needed. And there was a power failure at home that, for some weird reason, knocked out our WiFi router. Which had also been serving as the gigabit switch, ever since my 8-port switch croaked last year. Fortunately, all the router needed was a very hard (30-30-30) reset to factory settings and a reconfigure.

I think I'll abandon my idea of making the Netgear our main router -- I want the power saving, but not at the expense of an hour's worth of fiddling every time the power goes out. The routers stayed up for 50 minutes on UPS; that's pretty good. The fileserver only stayed up for 30 (it's on a separate, smaller UPS); that's probably ok.

Links, as usual, under the cut.

(Note: I started this one last night, but either got distracted or fell asleep before writing more than the first paragraph. So...)

I started the day discovering that resetting the broadband connection only got me about an hour's worth of good connection. Rebooting the router, OTOH, seems to have done the trick. Next time I'll start there and save myself the aggravation of navigating through AT&T's site to find the link that connects me via IM to some guy in India.

Went to Trader Joe's to stock up on lunch items for my desk. Apples, dried apricots, chocolate (1lb 72% - yum), trail mix (candied ginger, macadamias, almonds, dried cranberries - YUM!). One serving of tofu spring rolls.

Work was busy, as I'm gradually settling in to my new project.

A lot of links. Most, this time, are on the subject of rape, "date rape", and consent. To quote this article, "I always argue that anything short of an authentic, honest, uncoerced, aroused and sober Hell, yes! is, in the end, just a no in another form." That.

I'm not sure what they're teaching kids these days. Probably, now that sex education has been eviscerated by budget cuts and the Religious Right, not a whole lot more than I got in the early '60s from my parents' bookshelf. (I seem to have missed the Sexual Revolution, between the Pill and AIDS, almost completely, but attitudes were very different then.)

Just to clarify, kids, not only does "no" mean no, but no answer means no, "maybe" means no, "oh, ok" means no, and alcohol means Hell No! One party under 18 means "Hell no! and we'll talk about this again when you're old enough to know better." "Right ****ing now!" means "let's talk about it afterwards, and by the way what's our safeword?"

Go look under the cut -- there are more of them.

The main thing was the YD signing a 3-year modeling contract. She gets a couple of months of training, which costs just south of $3k, but is one-time and includes free photo shoots. After that... it turns out there are a lot of modeling jobs in San Francisco.

I also picked up an Epson Artisan 50 printer at Fry's, and got in a half-hour walk. The Artisan 50 prints on CDs and has very fast-drying, water-resistant ink. I installed it on my work MacBook, which runs the CD-printing software. Eventually I'll find, or make, templates for the Gimp; this was quick.

In the early afternoon I went out for a drive with Colleen -- everything was clean and beautiful after the rain. In between I did a lot of puttering, mostly in the office.

I faded out rather quickly -- by 9:30 I was falling asleep in my chair. A round of dishes woke me up enough to take a bath; I went splat around 10:30.

Aside from the printer, the only link under the cut is from MoveOn.org: Top 10 Shocking Attacks from the GOP's War on Women.

So... a good day. It wasn't quite enough to lift me out of my current mild depression for more than a few hours, but I'll take what I can get.

The year's second utility bill wasn't quite as impressive as the first in terms of gas, but electricity usage continued to improve. I am now under 300% of baseline, which puts my marginal rate at $0.28, down from $0.40.

    Gas:  this year: 4.3 therms/day	  last year: 4.9
    Elec: this year: 24.5 KWh/day	  last year: 33.7

So on the whole I'm still pretty happy about the household's power consumption.

Yesterday was mostly pretty quiet, hanging around the house and eating leftovers. The entire afternoon was eaten up buying the YD a TV, as a combination Christmas present and good grade reward (which normally would have been sushi). It took two trips to Best Buy -- the first one was dead on arrival.

The best part, though, was going to bed early and snuggling until midnight when we could finally wish one another a happy 35^th anniversary. Hard to believe we've been together that long.

The GaFilk video that peteralway posted includes a clip of me performing "Uncle Ernie's", which made kind of a nice anniversary present.

This business of not going out for walks really has to stop. I -- wisely, I think -- decided not to go out in the Black Friday crowds and traffic; I spent the entire day sitting at home, watching mystery videos with Colleen and Chaos, puttering occasionally, and collecting a goodly number of links. I also warmed up some leftover turkey and stuffing for dinner, and made broccoli with cheese sauce. There was some of everything left, so I'm assuming that people were satisfied.

In the evening I attempted to bring up Dorsai, my old desktop system, only to be reminded that one partition of its disk is bad, and that the ethernet card has been cannibalized. I still want to get some software off it, so I'll mount the drive externally, which is what I determined was needed back when I retired the system in the first place.

I've been sleeping late. Apparently I need about 7 hours; I do not like this, but probably shouldn't try to do anything about it beyond trying to get to bed by 11:30.

My latest power bill is $100 less than it was in August. Of course, some of that reduction is due to the switch from air conditioning to gas heating. The more significant number is the comparison to October of last year: 747 KWH vs, 1080 last year, 26.7 KWH/day vs. 38.6. Only 62KWH were charged at the top rate of $.40.

This may still be partly illusory -- it's possible that my meter gets read only every other month, which would mean that this is partly compensating for an overestimate in September. We'll see how it settles out. But it's still significant.

62KWH at the top rate is a full-time load of 8.6W. One hard drive 86W. *eyes the router/gateway server dubiously*

If only all my problems were so easy to solve! Audio going away after I upgraded my desktop? It's because user "steve" wasn't in the audio group. Duh.

I did, finally, get the backup drive onto the fileserver in an external box; it seems to be taking on the order of an extra 3W when idling, so that's not bad.

Colleen and I went for a st/roll around the Rose Garden, followed by a nice drive. Followed by quesadillas for dinner, since I wasn't feeling terribly ambitious, and since I'd started by making guacamole with no tortilla chips in the house, it seemed like a reasonable thing to do.

Colleen and I now have Chrome running on our netbooks. Didn't realize it ran under Hardy Heron. Yay!

On the other hand... no scratch tracks. :(

A good day, on the whole, I think.

Some progress has been made on saving power.

Nova, the fileserver, is now using 13% of 260W = 33W, down from 54. That's about $70/year; I was hoping for more.

Trantor, the desktop, is using 9% of 708W = 63W, down from 93. That's more like it: 30W=$105/year savings. Total saving on the swap: 50W=$175/year; total spent so far, $90. Getting the new desktop configured is a non-trivial undertaking, but that part needed to be done anyway because Dorsai's disk was dying. Turning the desktop off when I'm not using it will probably save an additional 50% or so.

I measured the power usage of the living room TV: 2.2W idling, and 37W when running. It's not on full-time, either, so switching to an LCD wouldn't be worthwhile unless I can get a really good deal on one.

The LED therapy light I got used for $25 is only on for an hour or so in the morning; what it really does is free up a full-spectrum floor lamp for someplace else in the house.

Probably the biggest further savings I could make with computers would be using the wireless router as my main firewall. Actually I could probably get a lot of that by going to a solid-state disk. Hmm.

I discovered, when I went to record a vocal track, that Audacity appeared to be seriously buggy. And that I didn't have a package for Ardour. It's possible, though, that Audacity's hanging was due, not to software problems, but a bad disk. It started getting odd errors in the middle of an upgrade a little later, and the fsck on the later reboot had a bundle of them. It still booted, but things were distinctly weird.

At this point I decided to replace the fileserver, as planned, and use the old box as my new desktop. I went out for a walk and a trip to Fry's (for a missing 20-24-pin power adapter). The upgrade went smoothly except for a bad or flaky KVM switch. :( But the office is a lot quieter now -- the nearest fan is the ceiling fan in the living room. (That'll change once I get the new desktop configured, of course. For now I'm on my netbook in the living room.)

Quite a lot of puttering, too, mostly having to do with lighting. Tossed the last of the incandescents from the lighting box into a bag for recycling, except for two appliance lights and a heat lamp. Somehow I don't think they make compact fluorescent heat lamps.

Some links, as usual.

ETA: I should add that no data were lost in the the wreckage of Dorsai's disk -- all of it lives on the fileserver, and a desktop machine has nothing but its installed OS, applications, and config files. The config files had been backed up Friday evening.

Just some quick calculations. My power bill is outrageous. Thanks to California's ill-advised experiment with deregulation a few years back, and Enron's immediate exploitation thereof, my marginal rate is $.40/KWH. Eeep. I needed to have thought more about this quite a while ago.

My power consumed last month was 1086 KWH. There were 360KWH = $144 charged at the top rate; the bracket below that is $.29. Could I save as much as $144/month?

I have a bad habit of leaving lights and computers on, and even though every bulb in the house is a CFL now, and we use gas for cooking, heating, and the drier, it adds up. Fast.

There are 720 hours in a month. If I shave off 10W, that's nearly $3/month, or $35/year. That's, um... a hard drive. Or a light bulb. If I shave off 200W (full time, or the equivalent in part-time usage), that would save me my $144/month.

Nova, the fileserver, is currently consuming 21% of its 260W UPS, so that's 54W. Um... $175/year to keep my fileserver going. I don't know how much the new Atom-based board will save, but probably at least 50%. It'll pay for the $80 worth of new motherboard in the first year.

Dorsai, my desktop, is on an 708W UPS and eating 12% of it, so that's 93W. GAAK! (That includes the monitor, though.) Leaving it off while I'm at work and overnight is going to save a bundle. Swapping the CPU with Nova will help, too. Going from there to another atom board might not save me all that much.

Stargate, the router/gateway, is taking 5% of 865W (along with the cable router, the wireless access point, and the ethernet switch) -- that's 43W. But its CPU is already a fanless C7; the only way I'm going to save any power there is by using the WAP as my firewall. Somewhat less by taking the 500GB drive off and port-forwarding to Nova.

Colleen's floor lamp has 3 13-W CFLs in it, and tends to stay on 24/7 because the switch is hard to reach. That's 28KWH/month! I don't know what the standby usage of the two ancient CRT TVs is; the one downstairs is rated for 75W. I don't know their duty cycle, either.

There are probably at least 50W worth of lights in the garage and attic. They tend to stay on because it's inconvenient to reach the switches, especially when you're carrying stuff. Motion sensors?

Stay tuned. I can get 100KWH easily, at least.

I rode my bike for about an hour and a half -- well, counting a 10-20 minute rest stop. Basically the proposed commute route, taking Taylor to the Guadalupe River Trail. There's a really harrowing underpass on Taylor, and my lowest gear was barely adequate for the last underpass before the airport. At which point it turned into a dirt road, and I turned around. I'm not going to be commuting by bike any time soon, I suspect. I was pretty well wiped out the rest of the day.

I also got the new WiFi router configured, as a pure access point and 5-port switch. Not the most secure configuration, but by far the most convenient. And got the old MiniITX box back up and configured as a basic desktop, for use by guests. And made a beef chuck roast and salad for dinner.

And sang for Naomi, Colleen, and (house guest) Eileen.

Maybe it's not too surprising that I slept until 11am this morning.

Lots of good links under the cut.

A very good day -- crab and eggs for breakfast, a st/roll through the Valley Fair mall with Colleen, salmon and roasted roots for dinner, and a short bike ride. I'm long out of practice (at most a handful of rides in the last quarter century, and none in the last decade or so) and out of shape. And the knee I damaged nearly 40 years ago still hurts when I apply too much pressure with it.

Which makes me very happy that I went for 21 speeds -- I can find a gear that doesn't make my knee hurt. Hopefully that will continue.

I also found a price for the specially-designed suitcase -- it's as much as I paid for the bike. So forget that; we'll see if it fits in a large suitcase, but I'm not going to be flying with it anytime soon.

And my new wireless router actually routes; next step is reflashing it with DD-WRT.

Good article on how to crowdfund. And now... back on my head.

A pretty good day, I guess. Flew by, so it must have been. Three-mile walk along the Los Gatos Creek trail. But I noted,

3:30 have been feeling very lethargic for the last couple of hours. Like plodding through mud. Donwanna go walkies and shopping. Should anyway. Not clear why I have this resistance to doing things I know I'll enjoy once I get started, like going for a walk.

So... I don't know. I did feel better after the walk, even though my back was hurting. Gods, but I'm out of shape!

And I got a little Starport system administration done.

So why am I feeling vaguely dissatisfied, and as if there was something important that I missed?

Anyway, there are some good links up there if you feel like looking.

The YD's desktop computer died in Wednesday's power outage, which lasted about an hour and a half. So did my 8-port GigE switch, apparently, which led to another hour's worth of confusion getting the network back up when I came home in the evening. (I had cleverly turned off the fileserver and my desktop machine from work. If I'd had any sense I'd have sync'ed my to.do file first.)

The YD's Windows machine was the big one, though: it wasn't recognizing her hard drive. The older Windows box in the public area upstairs recognized it just fine, but of course all her files were private. You'd think there'd be a way for an administrator to unprotect a directory, but I'm not a Win$ expert.

What worked, yesterday evening, was putting it in my desktop Linux box and rsyncing it onto both my local hard drive and the YD's external drive. She was delighted to get her homework back.

There was a lot of stress involved in the process, of course, on all sides. I seem to have a very bad habit of saying the YD's name, at increasing volume, to get her attention when she's yelling in panic or frustration; I ought to look for a gentler alternative to shouting her down.

There was also a lot of stress during the network diagnosis and bring-up phase Wednesday evening -- nothing like a housefull of laptop-using family and guests to add pressure to an already frustrating experience.

I'd been sort of looking for an excuse to buy a 16- or 24-port switch, but... I really didn't need the extra expense this month, either.

I was feeling lazy and unproductive by late evening, but that just suggests that an underslept Bear is an unreliable reporter -- it was actually a pretty productive day. I did quite a lot of work in both the Starport's intranet and Tempered Glass's lyrics directory, and went out and explored Lowes with Colleen. And cooked dinner, of course. And ripped half a dozen or so CDs.

And the YD's report card shows remarkable improvement!! Only one C, one A -- it's about time. (And an F which is apparently due to the school's (Winblows-based) computer system dropping data from half the class.) Go YD! Of course, she also turns 18 on Thursday. I feel old.

I also tried out the SwissTech shoulder bag that I got on the cheap at Target a couple of weeks ago. It's frustratingly close to excellent. If it were an inch taller, had a detachable strap, and had double zippers it would be wonderful. Well, at least I know what I want.

Today's link, and it's a good one, is cadhla's new song, Jenny and Karen. Go read it. That's where today's userpic comes from.