Rants and Revelations

I don’t think my employer keeps the heat on during the weekend. And because of that, I’m sitting here at my desk with my winter coat on, but my fingers are stiff from cold. It’s not just annoying, it’s destroying my productivity.

I think I’m going to go home and work there and hope and pray that the office will be warmer tomorrow. But there’s no guarantee. The last time it was this cold in the office it didn’t get comfortable until it had warmed up considerably outside.

Every now and then, especially when I’m facing my own computer problems, I think “why don’t I just give it up and get a Livejournal. And then today every Livejournal page is showing the same text:

Our data center (Internap) lost all its power, including redundant backup power, for some unknown reason. (unknown to me, at least) We’re currently dealing with bringing our 100+ servers back online. Not fun. We’re not happy about this. Sorry… :-/ More details later.

If there’s going to be a massive screwup making my blog unavailable, I want it to be *my* screwup, dammit.

Pair arrested after telling lawyer jokes

But while that rib and several others on barristers got some giggles from the crowd, the attorney standing in line about five people ahead wasn’t laughing.

” ‘Shut up,’ the man shouted,” Lanzisera said. “‘I’m a lawyer.’”

They should have said “In that case, we’ll speak more slowly”.

…the appeal of J-Pop bands like Shonen Knife? Looked at objectively, it appears they sing the most cloying and inane pop lyrics known to man, and combine it with that English as a second language vibe and accents. Oh, and they’ve not very good playing thier instruments either. So what’s the appeal?

And I should point out, I’m not asking why other people listen to it, I’m asking why I keep finding myself compelled to listen to it?

I think I need a 4 hour Pogues marathon to get my edge back.

In the middle of a media-fueled hyped up scare about people pointing lasers at the cockpits of planes and the danger to the pilots and the flights, NORAD announced a new security system WHICH INVOLVES SHINING LASERS AT THE COCKPITS OF PLANES!

Furrfu.

I booted with the Western Digital Diagnostics floppy that I keep handy, and when I did a quick scan it said it found a problem and asked me if I wanted it to fix it. I did. Then I did the full scan, and it didn’t find any problems. So I booted into Linux single user mode. Couldn’t figure out how to fsck the drives that way, so I booted with the rescue disk. It wouldn’t let me unmount the drives that way, so I booted back into single user mode so I could do a “shutdown -rF now”, which forced it to do a fsck when it booted again. It didn’t find any problems. So now I’m continuing to run my backup process every two hours, and keeping an eye on it. 36 hours later, still no more disk errors.

After today’s “State of the Project” meeting, I was looking for a sentence to describe it, and I settled on “It looks like things are progressing in a clusterfuckian direction”.
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I put one of those “HitMap dealies down in the bottom right of my main blog page. Ok, I get big blotches in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, New York City, San Francisco, etc. But WTF is with that big blob in what looks like Churchill Manitoba? Do I really have a cadre of loyal readers in the frozen wastelands?

Email in my inbox this morning:

The following warning/error was logged by the smartd daemon:

You can also use the smartctl utility for further investigation.
No additional email messages about this problem will be sent.

Looked in /var/log/messages, and I find:

Jan 11 04:10:19 allhats kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0×51 { DriveReady SeekCompl
ete Error }
Jan 11 04:10:19 allhats kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0×40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=105859162, sector=105859101
Jan 11 04:10:19 allhats kernel: ide: failed opcode was: unknown
Jan 11 04:10:19 allhats kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 105859101
Jan 11 04:10:22 allhats kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0×51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Jan 11 04:10:22 allhats kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0×40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=105859162, sector=105859109
Jan 11 04:10:22 allhats kernel: ide: failed opcode was: unknown

Ok, 4:10 am was about when yum was installing new software, or maybe it was when the nightly backup was running, but I guess something was hitting a part of the disk that hasn’t been hit in a while.

I’ve started running the nightly backup every 2 hours. When I get home tonight I’m going to have to try the WDC diagnostics, and fsck to see if that will fix it. If it doesn’t, I’ve got a 180Gb drive on the shelf. That’s the one that didn’t get along well with Fedora Core 3. It passed the WDC diagnostics, so it was probably just an artifact of the way it was partitioned, so hopefully partitioning it and formatting it will fix whatever ailed it.

This could be a very long night.

“If there is at least one person in your life whom you consider a close friend, and whom you would not have met without the Internet, post this sentence in your journal.”

Can somebody please tell me why Word v.X, with one document open but not being actively edited, should take up 30-50% of the CPU time on this machine? All I want to do is look at the documentation for this file format, not make it dance about the screen.

Hmmm. I wonder if I could save it as html or something and look at it with a tool that wasn’t written by evil monkeys on crack?

I volunteer my time to administer the news servers at The National Capital Freenet in Ottawa, mostly because after GeoVision shut down it was my main place to read news. After the last minor crisis in the news servers (caused by the regular sysadmins adding a new modem pool and a new netblock without telling me), somebody was bitching and moaning about how the news administrator doesn’t live in Ottawa, and therefore doesn’t attend meetings and “doesn’t really know what’s going on at NCF these days”. And it was pointed out that the reason the NCF doesn’t have a news administrator who lives in Ottawa and goes to meetings is that nobody wants the job, and every time I try to quit the entire board of directors and half the members beg me to stay. So somebody asked what it would take to become a news administrator. What follows is a list I quickly wrote off the top of my head.
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In an internal design discussion document, I wrote about whether we should prevent customers from being “dumb-asses” . I only used “dumb-asses” because I originally wrote “ass hats” and was trying to think of something milder. It didn’t occur to me after I sent it that I probably should have said something more like “stupid” or “not acting in their best interests” or something. But that’s the price you pay for reading bash.org when you’re at work.

This video. Watch it.

Ok, no progress today on getting my email address and phone number listed in the corporate directory, so no internet access. But on the plus side, I can no longer log into the Lotus Notes system, so that’s one good thing that’s come out of this.