Jenny’s food blog
Jenny started a new food blog. There will be much food porn there.
Hey wow, it’s 2010 now. Happy new year.
I’m probably not going to post here a whole lot anymore. It just never quite worked right as a way for me to communicate. I am still very active online, though.
Here is where I’ve gone:
I’ve started keeping a blog at work, but it’s not on the public internet so I can’t link to that. It seems like topical blogging (my technical projects at work, jenny’s recipe/cooking blog) works much better than the vague free-writing type of blog that I thought this was going to be. I’ve never felt particularly inclined write publicly about emotional subjects, and that seems to be what the personal blog format is best for, so I haven’t had a whole lot to say here.
I may still post technical stuff from time to time. We’ll see what happens.
Jenny started a new food blog. There will be much food porn there.
After seeing this essay about shaving make the rounds for the 3rd or 4th time, I decided that I should actually try it. So, this morning I tried shaving with nothing more than hot water and a fresh blade. Much to my amazement, it seems to have worked just fine. Who knew? I’ll see what happens if I attempt that method several times in a row. I fully expect my skin to get more irritated than normal.
… so of course they pick that time to break. My backups server at home (wakko), which is a mac mini, decided to melt its internal hard drive on about Dec 31. Sadly it took me until Jan 4 to notice, because I don’t have ironclad enterprise-grade monitoring of my home network. (Of course, what I do for a living is maintain an enterprise-grade monitoring system. Irony!)
It took about 30 minutes for the recovery process to turn into this scenario, as such things always do. Internal disk in mini dies. Of course there’s no serial port on the mini, nor is there a monitor in the closet where it lives, so I take it out and attach it to the tv in the bedroom, where I discover that there’s rampant filesystem corruption, which isn’t fixable because of I/O errors on the internal disk. OK, call it a loss - let’s attach its external disks (which are in USB+Firewire enclosures) to an older Thinkpad that conveneintly also has Linux installed. Wait, what? What are all these USB timeout errors? These things worked perfectly with the mini! Oh, it turns out these enclosures work great when attached via Firewire, and not so well via USB. Actually it turns out one of them is fine, but the other one own’t work at all via USB. Oh wait, the fine one isn’t so fine - its fan has siezed up and the disk is about to catch fire. Thankfully, I have a spare disk enclosure to replace that one. Still only one working disk out of two required to get my backup pool mounted, though. Hmmm… aha, I have another spare disk enclosure, but it’s the one I don’t like because it traps heat. Let’s try it anyway. Yay, it works! Now to get LVM started. WTF, device mapper not working? Hm … manually load the kernel modules. Try again. Woo, lvm works now. Filesystem mounted!
Now what? Um … I dunno. I guess I should get backuppc installed on this new machine so backups start working again. At least I didn’t actually lose data to this. In theory even if the backup pool was lost I wouldn’t be losing data, becuase hey, it’s backups!
I think the lesson here is that even my backups server wants to have redundant storage so I don’t have to waste a day fixing it every time it throws a disk.
Oh, and some monitoring stuff wouldn’t hurt. What do people use for monitoring their stuff? Nagios seems to be miserable - is there something nicer out there that’s free?
I can’t sleep. It sucks. I’ve been having pretty goddamn strange dreams lately, too. What to do? Blog about it, obviously.
p.s. mom, you’re not allowed to scold me for being awake at 4:30AM until after I’ve gone back to Boston.
Jenny has posted her Sweet Potato Casserole recipe. Enjoy! This is a completely fantastic thing, as long as you don’t screw up and boil the sweet potatoes like I did the first time I tried to make it.
Thanksgiving feasts 1 through 3 are now complete. A friend here decided it would be awesome to throw a pre-thanksgiving celebration party, such that we could get together and cook up a storm without any of the family politics and ritual involved in the more traditional Thanksgiving gatherings that will happen later this week. It was fantastic, and I think we’ll be making this an annual thing from now on. For those keeping track at home, the feasts so far have been:
… and there’s still a veritable mountain of turkey and stuffing left after all that. I think we might have cooked too much. But it’s awesome.
BTW, I moved the previously-posted recipe links around into a wiki-like format, and added some new ones.
I’ll be posting some more recipes soon, starting with that sweet potato casserole that everybody loved so much. These are all Jenny’s creations of course, so she gets full credit for their success.
Have you ever heard what happens when a cat jumps onto a running record player?
I just did. It’s pretty awesome.
My new apartment is to the point where I’m not entirely ashamed of its appearance anymore. It’s still a mess of moving boxes, and we don’t have a couch, but I took some pictures anyway. Click through for photos. (Read the article)
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