morrowlife

Here’s Loyal Reader Number Fifteen helping get ready for the wedding the other day. The one in Las Vegas, that is. She didn’t make it to last week’s Manteca wedding.

Wonders of Blogger. Reason is in following paragraphs.

See Loyal Reader Number One’s comment on Thursday’s post. Frank is temporarily dead – his brains got fried. We’re bidding on a new brain on eBay now (so far we’re the high bid at $.01 with about 21 hours to go!) and will probably have him fixed within a few days. In the meantime, Moe’s old brain continues to function. Mostly.

He gave us quite a scare last night, though. I put Frank’s memory stick in him and tried bumping up the memory’s speed, and Moe freaked out. Set the speed back to its nominal, slow value and that cleared up, fortunately. I ended up taking Frank’s memory back out.

Tried installing FreeNAS on Moe. It would think it was going to install and would start to format the disks, but it would fail, leaving the disks unformatted. Messed around with that for quite a while until I gave up and reinstalled Ubuntu Server. I’m assuming FreeNAS didn’t like Moe’s older hardware. Or something.

Anyway. Got Moe back up and running under Ubuntu server on its 40GB drive. Tried formatting and mounting its 100GB and 200GB drives. They seemed to work but be a little flaky, so I rebooted. Got a kernel panic, from which I never recovered. So I went to bed. Very late.

Hence, no post yesterday.

So far today, I’ve gotten Moe back up and running yet again and I’m trying to figure out what to do with the big disks. We’ll get it figured out. Probably about the time we get a replacement CPU and cooler for Moe II and do a motherboardectomy. Then it’s back to FreeNAS. Which I like very much.

Anyway. Last night’s baptism went very well. Then we went to Modesto Junior College for LRN1’s honors recital. Found out the recital wasn’t actually at MJC. Pushed on further south to CSU Stanislaus, where we found the hall. We were there in plenty of time. LRN1 wasn’t as happy with his performance as he would like to be, but it went fine and it was a nice recital. And I like the hall at Stanislaus much more than the one at MJC.

Lots to do today – need to clean the pool filters while it’s nice and sunny, finish setting up Moe and get him put back away in the game room, finish the taxes and get them ready to mail, and probably do a whole bunch of other things I can’t think of right now. Loyal Readers Numbers Five and Twelve are here too, so there’s some mucking about with the granddaughter to do also.

Life’s good. See you on Monday.

Here’s a computer I put together on the loft’s coffee table this evening, using a motherboard given to me by my colleague Dick and a bunch of other parts I had stored in a box in the garage, in the electronics closet, and/or lying around. It’s three times faster than Moe, so it’s very likely its motherboard will become Moe’s new heart. It appears that its PS2 keyboard connector isn’t working, but that’s not a problem, since Moe has no keyboard, mouse, or monitor and won’t need one in its new role as a FreeNAS server. Note the Swiss Army power button over there between the keyboard and the motherboard. Nothing but the best at this house!

The monitor there shows an in-progress installation of Ubuntu Server, which worked perfectly. I’ve since installed FreeNAS on it just to get a feel for how to work it. It’s not extremely obvious, but the interface is very nice and the documentation is quite good, considering it was written by people for whom English is not a first language.

Update: With Loyal Reader Number One’s help, we now have Frank running a Samba server, to which Curly is currently connected. Cool. I’m leaving it turned on all night to burn in a little, and tomorrow Frank becomes Moe. Incidentally, LRN1 and I did a little transfer speed comparison between Moe and Frank, and Frank is about 40% faster. That’s significant for a file server.

Normal work day. Normal commute day (on the train). Watched a few TV shows, read about 60 pages in my new book (it’s a management book – details tomorrow, perhaps), listened to nearly four chapters in my current audio book (Three Men In a Boat). Also worked.

It’s late. See you tomorrow.

Here’s Loyal Pet Number One in her Personal, Private sleeping area in the trailer. Taken in her earlier, healthier years. She’s still camping, though. She’ll be with us at Big Sur the week after next.

As Loyal Reader Number One mentioned, there was no post yesterday. I was at work until about 9:00 in the evening and didn’t get home until after ten. Great traffic, though! Another longish day today. Fortunately, the meeting schedule for Thursday and Friday is very light.

Stayed only about an hour late tonight. Oddly, the traffic was almost as good as last night. I have no idea why.

Had lunch with my friend Al today. He’s on leave from the company and I’m hoping he’ll come back. Regardless of how that turns out, we had a nice lunch together. I had sausage and mashed potatoes and enjoyed them. Thanks for asking.

The progress on getting Larry in shape as the web server continues. He’s in the right room and three of the four websites are up and running. He’s not serving them on the actual internet yet – need to wait for Waterlogged for that. We’re hoping to have everything in place by later tonight.

I abandoned the Einstein book. The author just couldn’t leave his own moonbat politics alone long enough to write a book about somebody else’s work. I recommend a pass on this one. Sigh. I have plenty of other reading material.

I’ve been working on the program for this Friday afternoon’s baptism of my friends Ashley and Brett. They’re the nice young couple whose wedding we attended last Thursday. It looks like things on the program are coming together nicely. The one possible problem is that we need to be in Modesto no later than 7:30 Friday night for LRN1’s honors piano recital. Since the baptism is scheduled to start at 6:00, that’s going to be tight. We’re making arrangements to leave early if necessary, which will be slightly awkward, since I’m conducting the service and Loyal Readers Numbers One and Four are providing the music. Backup plans are in place. Incidentally, Loyal Reader Number Two will be snow camping Friday night. Sounds like fun.

Time to do other things. See you tomorrow.

Here’s yet another in my famous statue series. This is one of my weaker entries. Still, I believe the Loyal Reader will have to admit that it’s old and nasty-looking enough to qualify as Great Art. Found at the Governor’s Mansion, of course.

I’ve been busy working on the computers again. Or still, depending on your point of view. Last night, I finally got the Mongrel cluster working properly on Waterlogged. So we’re at last ready to convert Larry to the web server. To that end, I moved all its files over to Curly last night and took Larry apart this evening. I removed the 100GB drive, which I’m planning to put into Moe when it becomes the sole web server, and moved Larry into the game room to live next to Moe. Right now, I’m running SpinRite on Larry’s 80GB drive in preparation for installation of Ubuntu Server. It’s been finding errors (makes sense – I got that drive from my non-Loyal-Reader brother-in-law Ken after it died in his machine and we replaced it, but it’s been successfully serving files in Larry for quite some time), so SpinRite will probably take some time to finish. The worst case is that the boot sector is unrecoverable, so we’ll have to put it back to work as a data drive only. I’m hoping it survives – 80GB seems like a pretty good size to serve my four websites and I’d like to reserve my larger disks for Moe to serve files to the network.

Anyway. Drove the Miata in open-air mode on the way home tonight. I arrived slightly chilly but not uncomfortable. The heater was on but the windows remained down. Morning was a different story – it was about 36 degrees when I left. The top stayed up. It was beautiful all day today, by the way, and it’s going to be nice for next few days. They’re predicting sunshine and temperatures in the high 60s/low 70s.

It’s already late due to Home Evening-related activities, so I’m off to bed. See you tomorrow.