HerdingChaos

If you like sci-fi I have a movie you must watch. It’s not a SFX film that follows Star Wars, Star Trek, or any other of the more mainstream sci-fi flicks. This movie hurts your brain. You need to watch it. Once you watch it you will watch it again.

It is best served to a brain that has not seen or heard anything about the movie. Don’t even read the blurb on the back of the DVD. Watch it fresh. After you have watched it the first three times, then you can google for it as much as anyone.

Go to Best Buy or Fry’s or wherever you get your DVD’s and buy "Primer". You will find it in the sci-fi section. It is an indie and was shot for only about $7000 so do not expect any SFX or glossy finish on the film. You can expect one hell of a mind bending ride. 

We are down to the last 5G on the RAID server in the house. So I went to Fry’s today and picked up two spankin’ new SATA 160G drives and a new SATA controller.

I get home and diligently start work on the upgrade. We currently have two drives in there running RAID-1. This has worked quite well for us and I plan to just add these other drives and bring up another raid set also running RAID-1. I install the card and then realize there is no way I can get four drives into this case. What the was I thinking?

No big deal. I get another excuse to run to Fry’s and buy something. I need a new case. They have already closed for the night so I button up the case with the SATA controller installed, put the machine back in the server room, and flip it back on. I will add the drives when I have a proper case tomorrow.

Just to make sure it’s up I start pinging it from my mac. It doesn’t answer.

Kind of a PITA since I don’t have a monitor in the server room. I pick it up and move it in next to walter (my windows box). I steal walter’s keyboard mouse and monitor and boot up the server.

Hurm. Getting stuck at boot with a corrupted GRUB. Probably a problem with grub getting confused due to the new IDE controller.

I pop the IDE controller back out of the box. I will reinstall it and figure this all out when I get the new case.

Boot without the SATA controller. No dice. Still hung at GRUB.

Uhm… This is the RAID-1 server with everything important on it. Why will it not boot?

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Last weekend we took the RV to Llano County. Took a little under 2 hours to make the drive out to some land our friends own. The kids made mudpies while the adults told stories and caught up. Beck and I had not spent time with Jim and Tracey for a while. It was good to catch up. 

We made plans to do the same thing this weekend with friends of mine and their families. Yesterday I took the RV out of storage and loaded a few things. Today I went into work planning to depart around 2pm and come home so we could be on the road by 3 or 4. Becky called at around noon. The school called and Andrew was sick.

Poor Andrew. He threw up shortly after Becky picked him up from school. We are going to wait and see if he feels better tomorrow morning. I am not holding my breath.

Since Becky was home taking care of a sick Andrew and a fussy Loren, I had to pick up Tracy. This was the first time I have ever picked up Tracy by herself. I have picked up both kids before, but never Tracy alone. The trip was special for me.

Seems silly that little things like that are what is special now. Nice to get some one-on-one dad to daughter time.  The ride home was the first time she rode in a booster chair and it was in the back of the convertible with the top down. Maybe it was special for her too. She laughed that the wind was too strong and told it to go away.

Andrew is coughing up a lung in the other room. Gotta go… 

Becky won a free family pack to the rodeo this year from one of the local TV station web sites. We received four wristbands for the carnival, four tickets to the rodeo, and the sweetest VIP parking pass ever. We decided to go to the carnival on Friday morning, and then come back Saturday for the rodeo and concert.

Friday we arrive at around 10:30am. The wind is gusting and there is a slight chill in the air. Our plan is to let the kids ride as many rides as they want until they get tired.

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I had to go to a doctor appointment this morning. The timing was perfect and I was able to take my son Andrew to school. I left the top down when I parked the car last night. I asked Andrew if he wanted to go to school with the top up or down. The weather told me "up." Andrew said "down." Since we are less than a mile from the school and a little drizzle in never hurt anyone I left the top down.

We arrive at school and Andrew asks if I will be leaving the top down. I said, "No, I am going to put it up because it looks like it might rain." Andrew then said, "Yeah! If you put it up then Murphy’s law says that it will not rain today!" and jumped out of the car. 

He is five.

• Law of Thermodynamics: no
• Conservation of Energy: no
• …
• Murphy’s Law: YES

We seem to have fixed the server problems with some different hardware. So now we need to diagnose the old busted hardware and fix it.

I do plan on catching up on posts. I have quite a few in my head that I just need to sit down and put to bits and bytes.

While getting ready to post this I noticed that as of a couple of days ago, herdingchaos.net is one year old.