GasMeister’s Bile

I had another good weekend. I got to play with my two favorite toys, computers and the Hummer.

I finally got my virtual host on the internet up and running. The BSI webpage is now being hosted from the fine Ubuntu 9.04 virtual server. I am fully liking the Ubuntu distribution because it is so easy to get it up and running. If you get stuck, there is plenty of information to be found on the internet to assist you. The new server seems to be much faster than the shared webhost I had.

Saturday, Ellen and went to Tustin for the first SoCal meeting for the Club Hummer Off Road group. It was fun to finally go hang-out with the wonderful people I have been chatting on the internet with over the last couple years.

It was cool to have two H1s parked on either side of me!

They have a wheeling event planned in two weeks, but I already promised someone else that weekend, so I won't be going. Next time . . .

Sunday, I finally broke down and joined the twenty first century and bought my first flat panel monitor. I got an HP w2408h.

I hope everyone else had a good weekend as well!

What a fun three days off! I had my 9/80 Friday added to the weekend.

Friday was spent mostly playing Bioshock. Since Ellen was a t work, I got to spend a good chink of time burring my attention into the XBox for some uninterrupted play.

Saturday led Ellen and I to Temecula for a Pontiac Solstice and Saturn Sky meet.

It was really fun meeting all the Kappa car enthusiasts that showed up. We even had a fun cruise through the local hills. Turned a few heads as we all went by!

The leader of the cruise was Tony Williams from the second season of TV reality show, Bullrun.

We had quite a group. Here is a panoramic of all of us at a regathering spot: LINKY

You can see all the pictures here: LINKY

Thanks goes out to all the wonderful people at Kappasphere for organizing a fun event!

An old high school classmate, Kevin, sent me a package of old disk platters in the mail. He saw some pics of some old DEC platters that I had posted on my webpage and asked if I would be interested in having a few more. Without hesitation, I said yes. Well, the package came in yesterday. I was not quite prepared for this. The box was 3 feet by three feet and about an inch thick.

I was amazed at the nylon cord stitching holding it together. Apparently, it was glued as well. Took a little effort to get it opened, but it was well worth it!

Two of these platters made me all giddy inside. The first was the IBM 7030 1MB platter, AKA manhole cover (yes, that is my cell phone in the middle to help show the size) :

. . . and the glass optical platter:

These are going to look awesome hanging on my wall in the computer room. I was going to make clocks for some friends out of these, but I like them too much for myself.

Thanks a bunch, Kevin. I am fully geeked-out!

Just for S&Gs, I went to take a look at the eeebuntu web page to see if any progress has happened on the latest version of the OS. Eeebuntu is a version of Ubuntu specifically made for the Asus EEE PC line of netbooks. I own an EEE PC 900 and did not like how the OS was configured. Eeebuntu gave me everything I was looking for along with all ease of use with Ubuntu.

I am still waiting for the NBR version to release next week. It has menu that makes it much easier to use.

I have been fighting some intermittent static issues the last few months in the Hummer. Every now and then, the front right speaker would have static, kinda like a loose wire. I finally decided to dig down and locate the source of the problem today. Fortunately, the static came back while I had it apart. I had everything disconnected except the Metra wire harness. That pretty much told me where the problem is since I had the stock head unit back in for a few weeks with no issues at all. I had a chat with a small stereo shop in town about the matter to make sure I wasn't just chasing my tail. He thought I might have too much of a load on the unit with both the radio and camera drawing from it. I went back home and rewired all the power, putting in a terminal strip and a relay. Now I have a separate power feed controlling everything.

Ellen cooked a wonderful steak dinner. What a way to wrap-up the day. Even the cat was exhausted! What a goof.

Had a busy day today. I got the exhaust fixed on the Hummer. I found an awesome little shop in Lomita that had some talented workers. They were able to slide up the pipes to keep the axle from hitting and fabricated some turn-down tips and tucked the up close to the bumper. If they get damaged now, I have other problems that I need to take care of!

More pics here: LINKY

I stopped by Game Stop to pick up a copy of Bioshock. I didn't have much interest in the game until I got an itch to try the demo. The storyline got me intrigued, so I had to get it. Maybe I will finish it before Bioshock 2 is released.

Since I still had time left, I took the truck to get the tire rotated and the oil changed. The only thing I need to get done now is take the Hummer to the body shop and get the dent in the rear repaired. I was going to drop it off today, but rental car prices are typically higher on holiday weekends. I will take it in later, maybe my next Friday off.

We had some damage at work from the earthquake. One of the water lines broke, flooding the 9th floor. Good new is, it didn't hit any of my areas! However, I do have an A/C unit not functioning. I am not sure if it is earthquake related or not. HVAC tech will be there at noon to take a look.

Being that I work in an eleven story building only a couple miles from the epicenter of a 4.7 earthquake, we do not have much damage.

Last Monday, I met up with Jeff (aka GodOBiscuits) in Hungry Valley for some off-roading. I finally got a some free time to sit down and get the pics and vids uploaded for your viewing pleasure.

Pics can be found here: LINKY

Vids can be found on YouTube here: LINKY

Thanks you so much Jeff for and enjoyable day!

I just bumped into a really cool article on the web for learning how to drive a manual shift vehicle:
LINKY

This is much better than how I learned. I got a job as a truck driver! Well, I had some previous experience, but I was by no means an expert. I can drive anything manual shift with all the different vehicles I have been exposed to.

Wow, it has actually been almost a month since I last made a real blog entry. let me see if I can recap . . .

Work has been a challenge. I recently moved into a new department. I am still transferring over all my duties over to another sysadmin. Unfortunately, it would be baptism by fire since I am in the middle of some major server upgrades, dealing with close to one hundred terabytes of data. I am also working some high visibility projects on top of that. Then I got my new tasks, one which is full blown project management. Yeah, who would have thought Craig would ever do management? Not me, that is for sure!

Even time at home has been tight. We saw a real estate sign go up at the same complex where we almost bought a townhouse last year. It ended up being a short sale at a ridiculously low price. By the time we got pre-approved, the seller wasn't accepting any more offers. Not sure if this is a good thing or not yet. I am really not looking forward to moving just yet.

The flu bug hit Ellen and I pretty hard. We have both been coughing and hacking for almost a week. It even knocked me out of work for a couple days (like I really needed that).

Through all the commotion, I found some time to clean-up my computer room. Since I haven't flipped on the Sun enterprise server in a while, I decided to yank it out and put it up on Craigslist. I am not sure what I want for it, just putting out the feelers right now to see if I get any interest. With the big hulk out of the way, I finally have enough room for all my other computer gear to fit. I am really getting used to running Solaris on Intel architecture, so keeping the HP/Compaq workstations makes sense.