Category: Geekery

Eerily accurate


Are you Addicted to the Internet?

78%

Hardcore Junkie (61% – 80%)
While you do get a bit of sleep every night and sometimes leave the house, you spend as much time as you can online. You usually have a browser, chat clients, server consoles, and your email on auto check open at all times. Phone? What’s that? You plan your social events by contacting your friends online. Just be careful you don’t get a repetitive wrist injury…



The Are you Addicted to the Internet? Quiz at Quiz Me!

Man, Taco Bell is getting tougher

This job ad seems pretty typical for a fast food restaurant manager, until you get to the requirements section:

Minimum Requirements:

    * Aircraft is a Challenger 601-3A.
    * Minimum of two years college or equivalent technical training.
    * Must hold a valid Airline Transport Pilot certificate
    * Hold a valid FAA First Class medical certificate
    * Have a minimum of 2,500 hours total pilot time.
    * Minimum of 250 hours multiengine.
    * Have a minimum of five years aviation experience, some transport category experience preferred.
    * Have no violations recorded with the FAA and be able to demonstrate his/her piloting ability to a high standard
    * Be a leader and confident in decision making.
    * Bilingual is a plus.

In other news, my test last night without the CD-ROM didn’t help – it still failed accessing /dev/hdc4. And my Knoppix disk was pooched so I couldn’t boot a non-Fedora 2.6 system to test it.

So how *does* one de-upgrade a computer?

After last night’s hang, I resolved to do some testing to see if I need a new motherboard or something.

I booted my computer with a non-smp kernel into single user mode. This would eliminate most “distractions” or other causes for the error. Mounted /dev/hdc1, which is an ext3 file system. I did a simple tar of some of the files on /dev/hdc1, and after about 30 seconds it froze up.

So then I booted with a Mandrake Move CD, which has a 2.4 kernel. I mounted /dev/hdc1 again, and did the tar and it worked. Then I mounted /dev/hdc4, my mp3 collection, and did something that’s frozen up my computer every time since I upgraded:


find . -type f -print | sort > /tmp/mp3.files

It didn’t freeze. Not only that, but my mp3s appear to still be there (although the presence of large numbers of files in /mp3s/lost+found makes me think that some of them will be pooched.)

So now my question becomes – how do I get back to a 2.4 (or maybe a 2.6 non-Fedora) system without incurring another 2 days of downtime and headaches? I won’t be around this weekend, and I don’t particularly want to risk this happening every night for two weeks.