Favorite song of the day

"I hate everything about you." Not really, but it's catchy don't you think? Just imagine wandering the halls at working singing that under your breath. In my case I think I'd have a visit from SWAT rather soon.

So, funny story. My kids like to go to jail. Or well, "the jail." Why you ask? Have I been a frequent visitor? No, well, not in the sense that one might think. And no, it doesn't have anything to do with me wandering the halls hating people and muttering "redrum." The long of it (we passed short a long time ago, laying on the side of the road beaten and bloody). The long of it is you see, well actually you don't, but you read. So, the long if it is that visitors of the jail in Ontario sometimes need to work for their room and board and they do so in various and sundry manners including wood gathering for humble patrons such as myself. The wood, although of dubious quality at times, is inexpensive and if I stop by at convenient times I can have current visitors help me load the wood while they insult the size of my truck. I usually avoid the latter as my schedule usually doesn't mesh with theirs. Anywho, so for my kids the jail isn't a bad place. that's a bad thing. I know that. I need to call it something other than "the jail." Maybe the center for the delinquent and naughty adult people. my kids would be abbreviating that to "the center" in no time at all.

Another mildly amusing story for dweeby techy people out there (are we all dweebs just because we can bend electronic things to our will by hacking phones, routers, video consoles (let alone computers) that mere mortals can barely operate?).

So, our beefy server that I mentioned on Sunday... What? What do you mean you didn't read it? Oh, so you read it but you didn't understand it? sigh. what am i going to do with you. Anyway, that's not important right now. What's important is that I have your attention now! Ok, so back to the story. So, we had a server and it needed a new processor/memory board which was on a daughter card (no jokes about son or grand-daughter cards please). Unfortunately, HP decided to save a buck and send us one without a processor so we had to move ours into it. Not a huge deal except it needed thermal paste reapplied. Well, suffice it to say that anything with paste and techies isn't going to end up well. Three men (well, two men and one techie chick) entered and the smart one (me) backed away from the thermal paste. The other two spent about twenty minutes trying to spread a thick and unfriendly good evenly over the processor. After awhile they called it good. I ignored them and read my e-mail. Then they kept asking me questions until I was forced to respond with a gentle "I hate everything about you." Then the story gets boring as we put aside our differences and installed the card with no major burnage. We'll see how long the processor lasts before it melts a whole through the server causing thermonuclear detonation.

I still need new speakers for my entertainment system.

Favorite quote of the day

"Know how to listen, and you will profit even from those who talk badly. "
Plutarch

Long day

I try to avoid working on most sundays. but it can be pretty dang hard when that's the official maintenance window. Even so, it's not usually that big a deal. But today we needed to add some tier 3 storage to our SAN. Man is that stuff expensive. Our tier 1 probably costs about $30k per TB. I could be high there, but we paid that much for 10 GB of tier 2 which is crappy SATA vs. fiber drives on our tier1. So, since we need space but cash is king, queen, jack, ace, 10, 9, 8, 7, 5 (but not 6), 4 & 2 (nope. 3 neither) we added our own disk array to our virtual storage software. Slower and more complicated, but much much cheaper. Only $10k for 12TB. We could've possibly done it for about 4k if we wanted to build it ourselves. But, by the time you factor in things like carrying spare parts and downtime it starts to not look like a good idea. We actually tried a Drobo Pro quasi-SAN, but it couldn't produce IDE speeds. Our needs were modest but it failed abysmally in that area. And we had that thing loaded too. It had 8 2TB drives for a total of 16TB raw. pretty impressive for a little unit. We got all that for $3500. Unfortunately, it didn't do that job so that was that. Working on enterprise systems is so weird because the premiums for this stuff is insane. But the industry works on supply and demand so the price is high. Yeah, i know this is boring. It wouldn't have taken so long but our system was configured oddly (at best) and so when we hooked the array to it, Windows wouldn't see it. After much trial and error my cohorts in crime figured out that the setting was configured incorrectly (a setting that they inherited when they took over the system). Once they figured that out, we were golden. Well, brass at least. I wasn't actively involved (thankfully) with that ordeal, but I had to shut down the virtual environment. 60+ servers on 6 hosts don't go down (or up) quickly. But, thanks to the beauty of technology (vmware), about all I had to do was Ctrl-A (select all) and right click and tell them to shut down and then watch watch watch them. Then we moved some stuff around and when we were about all done we powered up one of our beefiest servers (32 GB of RAM w/ 4 dual core procs) and it blue screened in a way I had never seen before. Unfortunately, this server was purely physical so no leveraging the server onto other hardware without pain pain pain. And this was the second most important server in our enterprise. We have one whole division that screams bloody murder if they can't get their reports every few hours. A day or two outage would be brutal. So, we are all looking at each other thinking expletives in our mind. And we're all of one mind wishing that this had happened a year later. But, time stops for no company and the economy be damned the server was almost four years old. Of course, having a piece of hardware that costs $20k minimum to replace is hard to justify when blood is being spilled in the trenches. So, the only clue we have is a red light on the front of the server. After doing some troubleshooting, we figure out that it might be the RAM that's bad. Well, to be honest, I pulled the server out a little and it had pretty yellow lights on DIMMs 5 & 6. It was kind of cool on the inside. Every proc had its own cell board complete w/ RAM and more pretty yellow lights signifying bad things. Unfortunately, swapping the RAM around only proved nothing. Oddly enough, yanking the RAM for the entire board allowed the server to boot. So, the server is up and running with a lowly 24GB of RAM. oh well, HP's gonna love us demanding the send us a new board. We paid about $800 for the warranty. Good investment me thinks.

ok, if you actually read this post pat yourself on the back. If you read it without falling asleep (nodding off is ok), then you may have a piece of chocolate. If you read it, stayed awake, and understood what I was talking about then you might consider getting a life. I hear e-bay is a good place to start.

dagnabit

Just found out that Forrest has bad eyesight (probably from my side of the family) and is color blind (most likely from Rebekah's side). I guess being color blind passes down through the female side and afflicts boys most often. Although his vision is poor it's not so bad they want to put him in glasses. I mean, I haven't seen him walk into too many walls. But, they'll check it again in a year or whenever he starts getting beat up too much (by the heretofore mentioned wall, not me or any adult types).

It's so quiet

I woke up this morning feeling a bit better and even (for a moment) considered going with my wife on the outing with the kids. It's so hard to do things with as many kids as we have that we have started to find the events that are fun for kids and parents and inexpensive as well. Our two favorite events (well, my two) are the Military swap meet (4 miles from my house complete with rides for the kiddies and a car crushing) and the Ontario Air Faire (10 miles away) which has aerobatics and lots of cool military planes. The best thing about these events is that they are free and not oozing with masses of humanity like the carnivals. Rebekah took the four oldest this morning (leaving the babies with Keren) and will be home in a bit. She said that they were all really good and nobody even got in trouble. That's a medium sized miracle and a a testament to how interesting it is for the kids. I regretted missing it but I would've taken my disease riddled body and gone if Rebekah hadn't done it. But my symptoms have improved after taking a dramatic turn for the worse yesterday. I came home at 3pm and slept until 8. then I went to bed about 11pm and slept until 8am. Then I took a nap this morning. I'd probably still be sleeping but my stupid calves have been so restless. That's the ones on my legs not the the ones in the pasture next door. Actually, I'm not sure if there are any veal on four legs over there or not. I know that there are cows and a bull. I could get up and look, but well, I'm just not that motivated. You see, first I'd have to set my laptop down somewhere. Then, I'd have to stand up. Next, I'd have to lean over and pull the blinds. And the final straw is moving my eyeballs. And it might be all for naught since a calf could be laying down in the grass and I might not see it anyway. All this cow talk is making me hungry. Watching the "Life of Brian" right now. I think God has a sense of humor. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go find a massager/vibrator thingy and see if that makes my non-veal calves feel better.

Kids are expensive

duh! But I was assuming we were talking about food, clothing, medical care, etc. What I didn't fully appreciate was how much damage that they would do to property. Just yesterday my sound system damaged probably 5 speakers because Serenity turned the volume on my amplifier to maximum. I put in a movie which autoplayed and ya know the roaring lion? Yeah well, it was so loud that all my kids were crying and I was yelling because I was so surprised and mad. <sigh>

I spose it was time for my girls to do some major damage. They've been pretty limited thus far. I spose I shouldn't feel bad, my friend Kelly has had his youngest do thousands of dollars in damage. He flooded an upstairs bathroom.

So, hear I sit watching the episode of Buffy where she kills herself to save humanity and blogging while desperately ignoring the static everytime the background music plays.

BTW, thanks to whomever (or whomsever) gave us the generous donation. I'm thinking about starting a telethon. Man did I hate those when I was a kid. I swear, that was the only time there was anything good on PBS. I remember watching the "Flight of the Phoenix" and it took forever due to all those stupid smiling people with their ringy ding telephones. I didn't really like the movie anyway. Who can like a movie where Jimmy Stewart is a model plan bigot. sheesh.

This week has been rough. I first had a bad cold that put me in bed for a day and then today my boss sent me home from work (what a nice boss) because I looked so bad. I'm feeling decent now so I'm hoping a decent nights sleep will help me end this week on a more positive note.

Forrest also got really sick with some stomach bug about a day before my last bout. It's hard to hear your wee ones kissing porcelain. Clell is doing a bit better but I still call him snuffy. So far the rest of the family is mostly healthy and I'm praying they stay that way.

btw, what's decoupage anyway?

Sweet! a movie called Zombieland

It's as if they read my mind. or my blog. or something. check out http://zombieland.com

Ever wonder how many different iterations of transformers there are/were? Yeah, me neither. But apparently there's a few. Our boys like transformers and I heard Titus singing the theme song "Transformers, more than meets the eye. Transformers, Robots in disguise!" this morning. Anyway, the toys in the stores are either from the movie or the movie or possibly the original. But you can also buy animal transformers which seems odd to me. At least my kids seem happy as long as there are big robots fighting. As I sit here now, Optimus Prime and Soundwave are apparently having a battle of the "lead guitar."

So, it appears that my fly vacuum isn't that original a thought. However, I submit that mine is unique simply because of the pure vitriol backing the destruction. Most of the alternatives use electricity or simply trap the insects. And yes, they do work with spiders. Maybe I could mix and match a vacuum with some sort of spring loaded frog's tongue (synthetic of course) for added range.

Well, Rebekah has been potty training Serenity the past few days. It's been going much better this time. Doing one at a time makes it a wee bit less stressful I think. As cruel as it may seem I think it's healthy to split the girls up a little bit more. We met a nurse in the NICU who was a twin and she was really resentful because everything she did for most of her life was merely one half of the infamous "twins."

I'm desperately trying to get ready for winter. Yeah, seems a bit premature but I have to get at least 3 cords of wood, put on the storm door, put in 2 windows in our bedroom, install the new pellet stove upstairs, buy a ton of pellets, and I'm sure I'm forgetting something.

Clell is still sick. He snuffles a lot. Rebekah took him back to doctor (the one I said we weren't going to anymore) and the Dr. was fairly indifferent but gave her a prescription for amoxycillin. I think after this experience Rebekah will agree with me to switch.

And can someone tell me why clubbing midgets is wrong when it feels so good?

Favorite song title

For A Pessimist I'm Pretty Optimistic