Archive for the 'personal' Category

run of bad luck

Published on 15/8/2008 in geekery and personal. 0 Comments

Terrible. Sorry, much geeking ahead and more bullet points:

  • External 1TB hard drive failed.
  • Couldn’t find the motherboard I wanted for OpenSolaris box, so got another, apparently compatible one.
  • New system would not display on my Apple monitor. Worked on my TV though.
  • OpenSolaris 2008.5 wouldn’t install (weird PBR error on boot).
  • Tried to get community edition - the website refused to let me download (too many tries apparently).
  • Searched Bittorrent, found a svn_93 image, installed fine.
  • New ZFS pool shared via NFS and Samba was too slow. 2MB/s. Other people get 50MB/s or above.
  • Tried to get community edition - using sun downloader - failed giving me filesize errors.
  • Tried community edition svn_95 - no difference, (didn’t like this version BTW).
  • Tried zeroing all the drives (was a tip that worked for someone). Took 7 hours. No difference.
  • Bought new gigabit router and cables - no difference.
  • Changed BIOS config between SATA/IDE and native and legacy settings. Install for each permutation taking about 2 hours.
  • Mac Pro video card started playing up and overheating.
  • Bought new graphics card for my Mac. It wouldn’t work. Just wouldn’t boot!
  • Took Mac to shop - got ticket from a motorbike copper for stopping on double yellows. I was there for 30 seconds.
  • Mac has kernel panicked twice lately, once before new graphics card, once after.
  • Tried Linux, to see if the problem was with the OpenSolaris SATA drivers. Used Fedora. Lovely, perfect, until:
  • Could not, for the life of me, get the Linux NFS share to work properly on my Mac via Directory Utility (spent about 3 hours on this - it worked fine for OpenSolaris). Samba works fine and gives me 50MB/s. So it’s not the drives or network. It’s the OpenSolaris SATA drivers for the ICH9 chipset.
  • Bought SATA card with different chipset. svn_93 couldn’t recognise it. Bug fixed in svn_94.
  • Found workaround, but that didn’t work. Resulted in driver misconfig error. Decided to get source code to compile but then changed mind. Toooooo far Tony.
  • Gave up, decided on using hardware RAID5 on mobo, and Fedora Linux
  • RAID setup program didn’t like my keyboard. Press left/right arrow and it crashes. Have to set to SATA in BIOS. Boot. Set to RAID. Boot. To get back into the setup program.
  • Finally, Fedora Linux cannot mount the RAID partition. “Could not stat device” error. Not many of those on Google.
  • Had a look at my Time Machine harddrive. For some reason, only had 2 days backups on! Turns out Time Machine backs up the Trash folder and I’d put a few hundered GB in there. Time Machine came along, saw it needed to back up a sheeeeet load of data, checked the space on drive and cleared down enough space! At least I think that’s what happened. And get this, I needed it. I was looking for a file I knew I had changed 3 days ago. I had 2 days of backups. FFS.
  • Bought some new trousers, first day wearing them at work, I stood up, caught the pocket on my armrest and ripped the pocket off.

 Ahhhhh! Options:

  1. Spend (on new mobo and CPU), wait (can’t get mobo until tomorrow), rebuild, reinstall, hope.
  2. Go with sotware RAID5 on a Fedora 9 linux install.
  3. No RAID, just go with ext3 in a big LVM on a Fedora 9 linux install.

  I’m going to try option 1. Big thanks to Simon. He’s been very helpful!

walkalator

Published on 10/9/2007 in peregrine and personal. 2 Comments

Soooooooo, the van we hired broke down, and we didn’t make it to Tagaytay. After waiting for two hours for the guy’s friend to arrive, I could no longer be bothered. Instead, we went shopping. Well, wandering around malls and supermarkets.

They love a bit of Spam:

dsc00218.JPG

Not what’s in this, I think it’s just some sort of mushroom shit:

dsc00217.JPG

Yes yes, I know.

To get from the supermarket to the car park, you had to take the Walkalator! It was a pretty steep slope and I was thinking how it was a recipe for disaster …. However, it’s magnetised. Awesome.

dsc00219.JPG

Oh, I bought Doris a web cam for a bit of BBC action.

so yeah at the grammies i went ultra travolta
yeah that tuxedo mighta been a little gweedo
but with my ego ,i can stand there in a speedo
and be looked at like a fuckin hero

— Kanye West - The Glory

taal

Published on 7/9/2007 in peregrine and personal. 0 Comments

Hopefully heading to Taal Lake tomorrow, if Private Dancer Doris has sorted it all out properly.

taal_volcano_satellite_image.gif

From the wiki:

Vulcan point, which lies within Crater Lake, is the world’s largest island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island.

Got to see that.

So, I’ve got my new camerae in my new camerae bag … ehhhh heeee. Kiss my bad self, cha’mone!

Umm, staying at Private Dancer Doris’s house. Last time I met her sister and brother, this time, erm, her two kids. Call me Tito Shaky.

n.a.d.d.

Published on 2/9/2007 in geekery and personal. 1 Comment

Yeah, I’m afflicted.

img_0066small.jpg

I’ve got some form of N.A.D.D - Nerd Attention Deficiency Disorder:

Folks, I’m a nerd. I need rapid fire content delivery in short, clever, punch phrases. Give me Coupland, give me Calvin ’n’ Hobbes, give me Asimov, give me The Watchmen. I need this type of content because I’m horribly afflicted with NADD.

—-8< ----8<----

Stop reading right now and take a look at your desktop. How many things are you doing right now in addition to reading this column?

Me, I’ve got Adium open, chatting to a few friends, Junior Senior playing, Lightroom is fired up for a bit of photo organising, Photoshop for a bit of editing, Transmit, er, transmitting updates to Wordpress and Gallery to my family website, Terminal SSH’d in to the same server to perform the updates. Safari is open, with about 10 tabs of Metacritic for new music, TV and movies. iTunes, as well as playing music, for organising my movies and TV shows for my Apple TV. VisualHub, encoding the same TV/music. Azureus is toiling away, zeros and ones inbound. Oh, and outbound, remember, be a good seeder!

The presence of NADD in your life is directly related to how you’ve dealt with the media deluge of the new millennium. You’ve likely gone one of three ways:

1) You’ve checked out… you don’t own a TV and it’s unlikely you’re even reading this column.

2) You enjoy your media/content in moderation. When I asked you to count how many windows were open on your desktop you either said, “One, my browser for which to read this article” or you made yourself a note to yourself to check this AFTER completing this column. In a previous age, you were the type of person who kept their pencils very sharpened.

3) You enjoy the content fire hose. Give me tabbed browsing, tabbed instant messaging, music all the time, and TIVO TIVO TIVO. Welcome to NADD.

I guess I’m a 3. No TIVO though, just torrent torrent torrent.

There are several downsides.

First, it’s a lot of work to figure out your personal program of digesting the world and, sorry, you are going to miss things. This will annoy you, but it will also drive you to incessantly look for the NEXT COOL THING.

There’s the rub. I actually stress myself worrying about not having read my RSS feeds, watched the latest episode of Entourage, Rescue Me or Flight Of The Conchords, checked out popurls or read a few pages of some books (I have a bit of a backlog!). Then there is work. Then there are my constant questions that I have to write down to look up later:

What exactly is in Yorkshire Pudding?
What’s new in the Canon 40D? Reckon I need a new camera bag too - what’s good?
What is glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase again?
What’s a free electron again?
Jeez, I’m forgetting stuff. There’s a learning curve, is there a forgetting curve? There only is!

I need to know everything. Spike has this too I reckon, but I think he handles it better than me. It’s simply not possible. I need to switch off, chill out, go on holiday. But as soon as I start thinking about a holiday, I start thinking about what books to take and what TV/movies I need on my iPod. I take the piss out of Gunther for packing three days before he goes on a trip, but I’m just as bad when it comes to music/books/movies.

Right, I gotta go finish taking notes on Managing Humans (in one sentence: don’t be a prick) and watch This Is England.

give me strength

Published on 14/5/2007 in hong kong and personal. 2 Comments

I have a team member who is clearly intelligent, very diligent and hard-working. However, this person needs a lot of management. Every decision they make requires input from me, not just work-wise:

Them: Is it OK if I go to McDonalds at 10am each morning?
Me: Sure.
Them: But don’t you think other people will think I am unhealthy?
Me: Who cares?! If you’re going, get me a sausage and egg McMuffin!

They also tell me a bit tooooooo much sometimes:

Them: is it OK if I go home now? (at 4pm)
Me: Sure. Everything OK?
Them: little bit diarrhoea

Also, common sense or thinking before asking a question is not one of their strengths:

09:44:58 Mon <Someone (Office)> say.. when it the earliest time for trader to trade?
09:44:58 Mon <Someone (Office)> thanks
09:45:12 Mon <Me> around 7am
09:45:15 Mon <Me> I think
09:45:24 Mon <Me> 7am is when Oz opens I think
09:45:39 Mon <Someone (Office)> oz <- office?
09:46:15 Mon <Me> no
09:46:25 Mon <Me> you never heard the place Oz before?
09:46:32 Mon <Me> think context …..
09:46:39 Mon <Me> trading …
09:46:42 Mon <Me> so markets …
09:46:47 Mon <Me> so Oz must be a market …
09:46:54 Mon <Me> which market opens early in this region?
09:47:40 Mon <Someone (Office)> japan
09:48:37 Mon <Me> how would you get Oz from Japan?
09:49:36 Mon <Me> Japan - 1 hour ahead
09:50:13 Mon <Me> Oz - 2
09:53:33 Mon <Someone (Office)> select * from ExchangeLookup where ( countryCode LIKE "OZ" or mdExch LIKE "oz" )
09:53:40 Mon <Someone (Office)> show nothing
09:53:42 Mon <Me> yes
09:53:48 Mon <Me> it’s slang ….
09:54:30 Mon <Someone (Office)> Bhutan? Bangladesh?
09:54:44 Mon <Me> OZ!!
[in head: FFS!!!!]
09:54:50 Mon <Me> what does it sound like?
09:55:40 Mon <Someone (Office)> don’t know
09:56:07 Mon <Me> Ozzzzzz ….. stralia ….

all good?

Published on 9/5/2007 in personal. 12 Comments

I’ve been going through a bit of a rough patch with Private Dancer Doris, lots of misunderstandings leading to arguments and moods. I was about to say “fook it I shouldn’t have to work this hard” and call it all off the other night. I told a couple of the lads, so they both sent me a text message asking “All good?”. My reply:

“Is it all good? Well, Doris is wearing schoolgirl pigtails and we are watching pr0n. So, I really can’t say, but yes”

pussy clouds

Published on 25/4/2007 in personal. 14 Comments

Yo Hemlock! Still no sign!

Why? Cos I’ve started to get entangled with totally the wrong woman.

Half the time I’m wrangling with my reason, thinking WTF am I doing?! The other half I’m just buzzed. She totally punches my ticket.

On one side, she’s smart, funny, full of life, passionate, stubborn, dusky and super horny. Plus, she gets my jokes.

On the other, she doesn’t live in HK, she’s an ex bar-girl, been married once and has two kids. Oh yeah, and she’s only 21.

There’s the frickin rub.

Gone all Shakespearean on you there.

His counsel now might do me golden service;
For though my soul disputes well with my sense,
That this may be some error, but no madness,
Yet doth this accident and flood of fortune
So far exceed all instance, all discourse,
That I am ready to distrust mine eyes
And wrangle with my reason that persuades me
To any other trust but that I am mad

Twelfth Night, SCENE III. OLIVIA’s garden.

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;


Hamlet, ACT III. A room in the castle.

One from a tragedy, one from a comedy.

I need to get my head out of the pussy clouds before this changes from a comedy to a tragedy!


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