Week off: Wednesday

[solipsistnation]

- made stirred-curd cheddar, a slighly more complicated cheddar than the farmhouse cheddar from the other day. It's pressing now, and I'm about to go and turn it over and swap 40 pounds of weights for 50. Then I leave it for 24 hours. Then I take it out, let it dry for a couple of days, and wax it. Tomorrow I wax the wheel from the other day. It's drying nicely and is very cute. I will be embedding little bits of paper in the wax that say things like "Do not open until 1 March 2005" and so on. Tomorrow I will also make another batch of mozzarella and give most of it away to people. I might make a batch of traditional cheddar, but dang, it's complicated. Lots of cooking and drying and pressing and so on.

- began filtering out junk from the last couple of stacks of boxes kicking around the living room. Unfortunately, this is a "gets worse before it gets better" sort of thing.

- made a big mess, got in stophittinyrslf's way a bit, but was also helpful (washed her dishes too!) and got to have a delicious fake-chicken-pot-pie kind of thing she made for our dinner. Tasty!

- continued to read The System of the World, enjoying it greatly. I kind of want to go back and read the first book again now, since I've finally managed to wrap my head around all the damn names and titles and places and so on that populate these mighty tomes. On the other hand, I have a new Terry Pratchett book lined up, and I feel a great need to clear the palate.

- practiced the guitar. I can play a bunch of songs now, yay! Of note: a fingerpicked version of "Mad World" (Tears for Fears, making it sound like Iron & Wine had played it on the Donnie Darko soundtrack rather than the guy with the piano who actually did), a more complicated and pretty way to play "Under the Milky Way," which is more or less my generic warmup fingering exercise now, Sufjan Steven's "Romulus," and the ever-exciting "Golden Boy" ("There are no pan-Asian supermarkets down in hell, so you can't buy Golden Boy peanuts there." Thank you Mister Darnielle.) I currently have flatwound 010-gauge strings on the tele, but they're too heavy and annoy me. Back to old-fashioned roundwound 009's before too long, I think. I also find I am not fond of how high the action on the Fake Tele is set. Not sure I can lower it, though. I was going to replace the bridge, so maybe I'll see if I can find something super-low.

- Yesterday, watched first two episodes of the Neverwhere BBC TV series (from the Neil Gaiman book, opening titles by Dave McKean, music by Brian Eno-- it's like some kind of "People I like" project including British girls with silly 80's gothy hair and the usual BBC production values. Croup and Vandemar are pleasantly creepy, though. Ideally, we will watch the next episode or two this evening.

I am getting just about to the point where having all my time free is getting boring. Not quite, I have to say, but I think that after a week of doing all my own projects and things I'll be glad to be back to work. Since that was the whole point of this exercise, I think it very much worthwhile. Perhaps I will be on less of a hair trigger and be less inclined to be horrible to people for no obvious reason.

Among other things, when I get back I will call Dell and say "Hi, your PERC 3/di RAID controllers are broken by design. Are you smoking crack? Give us something that works now." Not like I'm planning on buying more high-end Dell hardware for the next round of servers, since Dell seems to be refusing to admit that AMD64 CPUs exist.

So, yeah. Unbearable excitement here at the House of Me. I'm currently listening to a bootleg of David Bowie being really goofy and playing twangy acoustic versions of a bunch of his own songs and doing things like claiming he and Johnny Cash co-wrote "Scary Monsters" while in prison together. Sure thing, Davo.

Comments

[stophittinyrslf.livejournal.com]

there never is an end to the excitement at the house of we. but i think that the medal awarded for most exciting moment today goes to the part where we thought the beef-o-meter had been destroyed.

[zonereyrie.livejournal.com]

Yummy AMD64. Opteron Prime!

[booniesjen.livejournal.com]

Let me know if you ever make smoked gouda. (I think I spelled that right) Yumm!!

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Gouda doesn't look too tough. Smoking would be slightly more difficult. I might be able to provide gouda if you want to provide the smoking. 8)

[stophittinyrslf.livejournal.com]

actually, we could probably do smoking. (i read the section on it the other day.) the only thing we'd need in addition to what we already have is, uh, a box of some sort. like, a wooden box, probably. and that's probably doable.

(so, yeah, i vote for smoked gouda as well. mmmm. smokey cheese.)

[booniesjen.livejournal.com]

mmmmm. YUMMMMM!!! If I knew how to make smoked cheese I would happily volunteer, of course Bill would probably have a blast experimenting with smoking cheese. :)

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

He'd probably dig making the cheese, too. It's pretty entertaining. 8)

Do you guys have cows yet? (I say "yet" because it seems like the logical next step from your current situation. 8)

[booniesjen.livejournal.com]

He probably would have fun making cheese. :)

Ah, no cows in the forseeable future. I think that is one of those "next steps" that we will not take. I don't think of our place as a farm as much as a good sized plot of land that happens to have a horse living on it. :)

[donnerjack.livejournal.com]

What's wrong with the PERC 3/di? We use tons of them at work and have rarely had any problems. There was one small matter, a nasty combination of crappy drivers, a bad firmware revision, and the interaction with hyper-threading that used to cause EXT3 to shit itself randomly and panic the box, but we sorted that.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

We're having battery problems with ours. We have them set up so they only write-cache when battery protection is active. The system in question is heavily-used enough that if write-caching is disabled, it becomes unusably slow (since it's our mail server). I've had two entirely different systems where the controller will disable the battery, and thus the cache, about once a week in order to recharge the battery. Unfortunately, this means that write cache is disabled and the systems become unusable.

I called support about this twice. The first person said "Oh, that means your battery is bad. We'll send you a new one." This failed to fix the problem. The second said, "Oh, that's how it's supposed to work. They just do that every once in a while. Can't you just run write-caching without battery protection?"

Well, sure, we can, but it's a bad idea. If we lose power, we lose data and potentially corrupt the file system.

Have you ever seen this behavior? Look in the syslogs for kernel messages about the aacraid drivers saying something like "battery low" and "battery charged."

[donnerjack.livejournal.com]

Huh. No, I don't think I've ever seen that behavior on that card, it's certainly not one of the things we've run into serious problems with. Is the firmware up to date on them? The latest firmware revision, 3092, fixed a lot of the PERC issues we'd been having. Other than that, I don't really know offhand. I'll poke around on a couple of the boxes here, see if I find anything similar.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

I did upgrade the firmware to the most recent of what Dell has on their FTP site...

Hm, that's this:

Component Revisions
-------------------
CLI: 4.1-0 (Build #7420)
API: 4.1-0 (Build #7420)
Miniport Driver: 1.1-5 (Build #2361)
Controller Software: 2.7-1 (Build #3170)
Controller BIOS: 2.7-1 (Build #3170)
Controller Firmware: (Build #3170)

Where did you get 3092?

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Oh, hang on. That was the un-bios-upgraded system. The latest version says this:

Component Revisions
-------------------
CLI: 4.1-0 (Build #7420)
API: 4.1-0 (Build #7420)
Miniport Driver: 2.8-0 (Build #6092)
Controller Software: 2.8-0 (Build #6092)
Controller BIOS: 2.8-0 (Build #6092)
Controller Firmware: (Build #6092)

[etherealfionna.livejournal.com]

I can't read your entries without getting hungry now. Mmmm, cheeeeeese.

btw, Neverwhere the book is from the TV series, not the other way round.

[solipsistnation.livejournal.com]

Oh, is it? Okay... It's been a while since I read the book...