CoffeeMan's rant...

CentOS default workstation install is a far better operating system than windows 2000.

That is all.

Since I have had almost no time to update this thing...

• Wedding plans are coming well... We're almost down to two weeks now before the big day... Argh.
• The new position rocks, it's more fun than I would have thought it would be.  I still have no title yet, or paperwork from HR, but I'm playing with things that interest me all day.  I'm such a geek.  That said, I'm not the one getting paged... yet :)  My excitement is most likely fleeting.
  
• Sold the old car, and it's now on the street awaiting pickup.  Also we got rid of the huge rust stain and got the holes patched.
• Since 90% of what I do is OS independant and I have recently given up Warcraft, I installed CentOS since it's the closest to RHEL whis we're using at work.  It's now been 4 days since this machine booted windows :)  I just wish I could get the ATI drivers to allow me to drag windows between screens, and choose the workspace that each one is using.  Probably possible once I look at aticonfig, but I just installed that today :)
  

Speaking of that final point, any experiences with using VMWare to run windows apps when you really don't feel like rebooting into windows?  Had any wierd/bad/good experiences with the free client?  We've got a test box at work that I'm going to be using shortly, but I'd like to try at home too.

It's true, I AM white and nerdy.

Thanks Kevin for showing it to me at work.

Look at what the US could have done with all that money instead of having a war in Iraq.

Consider it another use for all the teenagers entering the military.

Things tonight have varied between insanely busy (yay patching!) and slow-as-heck. With that in mind, I've actually managed to run out of things to surf, at least for today at work.

My question is, what entertains you at work when you've got nothing else to do? My usual vices are generally news sites (google news) or occasionally youtube clips.

I was bored at work (imagine that) and found a really good video on google videos of Robert Newman who has an alternative view on the war in Iraq, and sadly it makes more sense than WMD. It runs about 45 min, but is worth it.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7374585792978336967

I was working on writing a script to startup djbdns (what I'm using for a DNS server instead of BIND) at startup because it doesn't look like the install from ports installed one, or at least one that works.

Unfortunately it looks like somewhere along the line it broke my startup at home, and the server is now hung... Being remote to servers sucks when you're rebooting them, but I suppose this wasn't the best idea to begin with :)

As an aside, other than getting a server with an iLO or RIB or purchasing something expensive like an IP KVM, is there a way to recover from such sillyness on my part while I'm remote to the server?

The worst part of working nights is that if you don't bring something to eat you're stuck eating something vile like McDonalds. Or in the case of tonight, if you don't bring enough to eat then you're stuck eating something vile.

*twitch*

I have no access to my home network right now, since for some reason SAK isn't responding to ssh, and rebooting it didn't solve the issue (yay for Allison!). Anyway the point of this is I am very dependant on it to have something to do at work which isn't work.

Maybe I need to re-consider what I do in my "down time" at work... Posting on my blog here I come I suppose :)

Crazy security deal at work...

http://www.nuvo.com/news/2006/2006-04-10.pdf

We're going to Disney World!

Or at least that makes a good headline.

We ended up going to the big wedding show last weekend here in Ottawa, and one of the things that we put our name in for was a free trip, or so we thought. Anyway, we were contacted last week from that balot to go on a "discount trip to Florida and the Carribean". We ended up taking it, despite what I saw as a high pressure sales pitch, but as part of it we now have a week in Florida (Orlando), a week with a car, a 3 day cruise to Nassau (Carribbean) for a decently low price for two people. Needless to say we're going to use this as our honeymoon :) Now we just have to decide if we're going to be flying down or taking a car.

Some people would see going to Florida/The Carribbean as a stupid thing to do on your honeymoon if it's during hurricane season. I just see it as an "adventure honeymoon". Besides, maybe they'll upgrade our rooms and all that for free :)

On top of that we've got 3 nights stays in: Cancun, Las Vagas, Mississipi (I forget where) and Virgina. I think we're going to try and knock off as many of these as we can, as well as the two weekend passes that we got as part of a vaccuum cleaner demonstration a couple weeks ago. Hurray for travel, now I just need to take some time to do it :)

If you're reading this the odds are that you spend far too many hours in front of a computer, like I do.

With the overtime and everything else that's been going on lately, I've been getting a really sore feeling in my right (mousing) wrist, and found a good reference online regarding ergonomics, I just hope it's all correct. :)  I've adjusted my workstation here at work, and I'm hoping that it helps some.

Hopefully it can help you too.

Today's rant is at auto negotiation on switches.

Why does this seem to be the most common point of failure when set?  I can't say the number of times I've had to manually go into a switch (or router) and set the port to 100/full (or some other setting ) to fix the fact that auto negotiation failed.  Of course I don't have my console cable here to get into my Catalyst 2900 (I haven't configured vlan1 to have an IP yet), so SAK is currently running on gimp mode (10/full).  Unless you're local you're not going to notice a difference (since you are coming in on a 3 meg pipe anyway), if you are local the file server is going to be slow.  It may go down again later while I try to force it to 100/full from the server.

On that note the upgrades for today went largely as expected other than a NIC failure.  I managed to load new modules into the kernel for the on board NIC and things are happy again, the old PCI NIC is now in the pile of "possibly defective hardware".

Anyone who uses my server should already know, but it's down for an hour for maintenance + upgrades.   Should be back shortly.

Ontario released it's new budget today, and I'm highly offended.

The major announcement is that there is going to finally be big investments in infrastructure in the province.  For anyone that's actually been to Ottawa (Calring is a prime example of this), this money is sorely needed.  My father is a civil engineer and in charge of the road infrastructure for one of the largest municipalities in Ontario, and I have seen images of bridges that have holes through iron supports and decaying wooden bridges but they have no money to fix it. This is even more the case since the US put an unjust tarif on their largest employer and has been ignoring NAFTA panel decisions since.

However, of $1.2 billion in "new funding" for infrastructure, they are allocating about $800 million to the "GTA" (Greater Toronto Area) directly, or 67%.  On top of that the "majority" of the remaining money is being spent out of the GTA, which of course means some of it is going to be spent there.  Just for a nice bonus, they are also going to spend an additional $200 million to help the city out because it can't run it's existing infrastructure that it is getting the money to expand, namely the subway system.  If you include this in the total, they are spending 71% of the money on Toronto.

According to wikipedia the population of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) is only about 42% of Ontario's population.  This means that the average person in Toronto gets $145 ($181 if you include the TTC bailout) in new infrastructure where as the rest of the province gets $57.  Fair isn't it?  Especially considering 2 of the 3 seats that are coming up for a by-election are in this area.

Ahh, the dark side of democracy where you buy votes spend money in key locations leading up to an election year.  On that note I no longer consider myself a liberal, especially considering their leader isn't from Toronto (he's from Ottawa, like myself). 

So in the last two weeks I've racked up no less than 114 hours (and counting) of work time. I'm getting burnt out.

The only good news is that in theory I should have 6 hours at regular time, 24 hours at time and a half and 4 hours of banked time out of that. In otherwords I have 1/2 a day's vacation and I'm getting paid for 42 hours of "time", less what the government takes from me.

I wish we had staff to cover off the shifts when someone calls in sick so that for a change *I* wouldn't have to come in.

The down side is I've had 2 days off in the last two weeks, and most of those were spent flipping back and forth to the night shift. At least I got to spend some time with Allison when she came down this weekend :)

One of my coworkers today saw me reading my friends page, and asked if I still update my blog.

Apparently people here at work also read my ramblings.

I managed to score tickets to last night's Ottawa Senators game in the 100 level box from work. Good food, and several $7 beers later, I was feeling a bit better about the world. Thankfully the boss drove us from work so we didn't have to drive back, we just had to be able to fill a chair once we got here.

The fact that the home team won 4-3 with 5.7 seconds to go might have something to do with it too :)

The only downside was the massive industrial heating system dumping cold air on the first row of seats where I was sitting... You would think that in an arena of that size they would fix things like that (especially considering the price of the tickets).

I fell asleep at 8:30 last night, and woke up around 6:45 this morning... Best sleep ever. :)

Unfortunately we didn't finish the final installment of the Lord of the Rings extended edition that I got for Christmases (all 3 movies in a nice boxed set), however we'll probably finish them next weekend.

This weekend pookadook and I went to our first wedding show together yesterday as well, and it wasn't at all what I was thinking, amazingly it only took us a couple hours to go through.  The bad news is that she moved the Taurus into the drive way last night nose-first instead of tail-first, when it's low on gas (the gas light doesn't even have to be on) this means that all the gas runs away from the intake in the gas tank and makes it so it's out of gas.  Way to go Ford, now I'm on hold with CAA to get some gas...

Joy.

So I've registered another domain name at least for now with netfirms.ca who were offering registration services for $10 CAD/year - much bettter than the old $50 that internic.ca was charging.

I've been fighting to move the DNS servers over to my server with them for a while now, and right now it looks like all their stuff is down, meaning that I can't hit my page to work on it.

I find it funny that my home DSL so far is proving to be more reliable than my registrar, they've been down over 6 hours now... :)