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:

• twitter - my activity stream. Twitter has largely replaced this blog.
• flickr - the photos I figure people might actually care to see
• picasaweb - more photos, but less polished than the ones I post on flickr.

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.

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?

p.s. mom, you’re not allowed to scold me for being awake at 4:30AM until after I’ve gone back to Boston.

1. The big show last Saturday.  Turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pecan pie, sweet potato casserole, gravy (obviously), and dates stuffed with blue cheese wrapped in bacon.  All home-made, of course.  Twelve people.
2. Leftovers the day after, for “breakfast”.  Two people.
3. More leftovers the day after that, in the form of awesome turkey+stuffing+extras meatloaf.  Two people.

… 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.

• All the recipes I’ve posted (bookmark this, new ones will show up there)
• newly posted: Grandma Jackson’s Pecan Pie (recipe courtesy Jenny’s grandmother. It’s so good that even the cat wants it)
• newly posted: Grandma Jackson’s Pumpkin Pie

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.

I just did. It’s pretty awesome.

(click images for captions, and again for fullsize images. This gallery arrangement isn’t quite ideal.)