Ok, I realise this is insanly early notice, but hey this way there should be no excuses…  I just got email from Bryan Bowers regarding the concert he usually does in Warrenville at the Folk-Lore Center around Thanksgiving.  In the last email I recieved from him he told me that this year it will not be around Thanksgiving, but he would still be performing.  Todays e-mail puts the concert at Friday, January 19th.  So mark your calendars.  This is a small venue, so once the order form on thier site is updated, put your reservation in early. I have attended his performances there the past two years and have reallly enjoyed them.

Oh and if you want something more immediate to check out the venue, Kat Eggelston will be there tomorrow night.  I’ll be out of town, but I expect that to be a good show as well.

This week I ahve been working on migrating the photo gallery at work to the latest and greatest version of “gallery”. The photo gallery software I used for my home gallery.  The home gallery wasnt to big of a deal becasue I don’t really care if it doesnt look exactly like it used to. Work on the other hand is a different story.  I really want it to look as if it belongs in the library website.   I sat down and started learnign their API and started developing a theme that should mimik the site layout for the library.  While working on that I discovered I woudl also have to learn their plugin API to add in the library menu properly so that future upgrades would not be a problem.  Afer a little hair pulling and a LOT of code deciphering I succeded in adding in the library menu tree as a plugin module.  I even got a little carried away and added configuration options into the gallery site admin page.   Once that was done and I had a working menu, I discovered that the CSS is still not right and my fonts and list indents and bullets are all missing.  They are all being overridden SOMEWHERE in the gallery theme. somewhere i have yet to find.   I have the horrible feeling that i will end up spending two to three times the amount of time I spent on writing the plugin and learning to API, to debug the stupid CSS.

CSS is EVIL!!!

I post a lot of complaining, and grumbling on here.  It has occured to me that for all the complaining I do about certain aspects of my life, I very rarely ever show any gratitude on here for the good things.

To all of my friends who put up with all my griping, and are always offering me support, friendship, and love; from the bottom of my heart I thank you.
I just thought it needed to be said, I probably don’t  say it enough eitehr. I work on remidying that.

I give up… Where are you hiding at Rod Serling?  I know you are around here somewhere waiting to step out from behind a corner or something to explain how I’ve somehow entered the Twilight Zone.

Today, I wandered through the computer lab as a shortcut.  I NEVER go in the lab so noone there should have any clue who I am, or what I do.  Least of all no one should approach me for help.  That might be the case in other realities, with other people, but apparently not in my reality… As I was just walking out the door to leave the building I became aware of someone running up behind me. I turned to come face to face with a midle-aged student.

“Can I ask you a quick question?”

“Sure…”, I responded cheerfuly while wondering in my head why the heck this keeps happening everywhere I go…

A very confused look came across her face, “Uh.. Wait… You’re not an instructor or anything… never mind…”

The expression on her face turned to one of uter confusion as she turned around and walked away. I can only assume she was trying to figure out why she came running after me…  I almost went back to  her to see if I could help anyway, but I know if I open that door in the lab I’ll ruffle a number of feathers on campus.  It’s just funny to me that she picked me and not my co-worker who was standing right next to me.  I’m beginning to wonder if its the beard or something… Do I just look the part of a professor?  Do I need a tweed jacket and pipe next?

So, today around 3 pm I recieved an email from my mail server.  It seems the automated hourly backup failed.   I SSHed in, and looked and it was having trouble writing to the backup drive on the file server.  I paused to pick my heart up out of my shoe again…  I then SSHed into the fiel server, and did a drive list of the volume on the backup drive.  Everything was scrambled and unusable except the directory the mail backup had transferred to.  I checked the partition type with fdisk,and it now read FAT32.   HUH!?!?!?!?

I tried switching the type back to linux, but it was a lost cause…  I have NO idea what could have triggered it to revert to a fat32 partition type.   I swear I live on some sort of odd convergence of magnetic fields or something.   I have NEVER known anyone else to have so many bizzare HDD related issues.   I think my next “toy” is going to have to be a gauss meter.
Oh, guess how much data I lost this time…

Nothing really…  All the music files were on there, but they are ALL on my ipod and I think I can retrieve them from it w/o much effort.

Ok, library was dead…  No one here at all, hasn’t been all morning…  Its a dead week on campus anyway…  I walk out to the desk to check something in the circulation system…  45 seconds later I hear the all to fammiliar sound of someone walking through the gate… he proceded to walk to the desk… “Where is the internet?”

I mean really…  All I needed was a minute at the desk to check the status of something… Nope… I stand there they come…  My co-worker at circ just sat there shaking her head laughing…  I swear it’s some Trumanesque  thing going on in my life…  Now where are those cameras…

Well today I was again on my way home from Bristol when I looked out the window and saw another rainbow. I just chuckled to myself and grabed the camera again. I have but one word for you… GEEK!!!

This one wasn’t as pronounced, and was a lot harder to photograph, but still it’s there…

On my way home yesterday, as I pulled into town, I looked up in the sky and there was the most full, most intensly bright rainbow I have ever seen. You could see both ends and all the colors were plainly visible and absolutly vibrant.
I pulled to the side of the road and just stared at it. I finally realized when it started to fade that I had my camera with me so I snapped a few pictures, they are pretty dim but here they are.

It’s Friday… It’s almost 4:30… and it seems like there should be a post here for some reason…   So here it is, the official pointless post marking the nearing of the end of the work week.  Yep, I’m definitly nuts…

Tuesday during all of the internet connectivity problems, I noticed my e-mail server was no longer responding to much of anything.  I took a peak at the console and found it too was hung.   Weird…  I finally had to hard reboot… Not something I like to do.   As I was doing the hard reboot I noticed the HDD light was solid.  That worried me a bit but I dismissed it as paranoia.  The machine began to reboot, and slipped into PXE boot… Uh…  PXE shouldn’t hit unless there’s no drive visible…  CRAP…  Rebooted again watching closely… No HDD found.

CRAP

(more…)

It’s hard to believe it, but it’s now been two months tonight, since Dave’s accident.   I still really can’t  believe it.  I still miss him in some way shape or form every day.  With help I’ve been slowly moving forward.  It’s not easy, and I know the pain will never be gone completely.  I keep seeing things, and hearing things finding myself absent mindedly thinking, “Oh can’t wait to tell Dave… oh… crap…”

Tonight I finally went to the house with his parents.  It’s hard to believe how many things triggered so many memories. Even silly things like computer case screws laying on his desk triggered flashes of memory.  Everywhere I looked, I saw Dave; everything I touched I felt Dave.  There were so many little reminders…  Sigh…

Wow, 1st spotty internet at home…
Now a comcast fiber was cut, and no net connectivity at work.
Except to my house when it is up…

I just had the most amazing experience with technical support ever.    I finally decided to call the cable company and complain about the service problems with the cable modem.  At first when I called I expected the worst.  I was greeted by an irritating auto attendant phone tree that had me figuring that I woudl be lost forever in the bowels of phone hell.   After a few trys I managed to get to the tech support for cable modem and internet connectivity.

I was greeted by a very polite person named “Mike”.  He asked my name, and a few account details. After I told him my name, he politly asked “May I call you John, Mr Wohlers?” I was a bit shocked that he would ask 1st, and then agreed to it.   After that I explained that I was at work and didn’t have all my account info with me.  He calmly responded with “Thats ok, I think we have enough, the last peice is for security and will only be nessisary if we ned to change certain parts of your account.  Lets see what we can do for you first before we see if we need that information at all.”  I was shocked.

I calmly explained that last week we had an outage before I left for work, and that I noticed they had been working on my block when I left for work. I also explained that when I returned there was a new junction box down the street from my house, and ever since then the connection has been very spotty.  Mike then responded “Oh yes. There’s trouble in that neighborhood right now. They are working on it so thats is almost definitly the cause.” “Oh good, so they do know about it”, I responded.  “They have asked us to open tickets for everyone that calls just to get a measure of the size of the problem.” “Oh… ok thats fine.”   “It’s going to end up in July just because of the number of calls we have gotten.”  “July?…”   “Yes, well its probably not goign to even be needed but this way it is on the books.” “Oh, yeah… so bascially if they fix it for the 1st person on the list its probably going to fix it for everyone.” “I can’t offically say that, but  that would make sense.”  “Got it, ok go for it.”   “Ok John, Ihave July 7th form 8-12, hows that?”  “I guess I can take that day off.”  “Again, you probably won’t even need to, and you can call in and cancel the call any time.”  “Oh ok, great”  “All you will need is this ticket number, and there is an option on the phone tree to enter it and cancel it, or you can also speak to a service rep and tehy can do it as well.”   “Oh ok, thank you Mike, have a great day!”

I made it a point to wait on the line for the survey and gave him the highest raing they had.

I am very impressed… In fact I think I will email the company too.

I’m having verry bad intrnet connectivity at home.  I’m not certian if it is the cable company, or if it is my hardware as of yet.   If you have trouble getting ahold of me via IM, or E-Mail try the old fashioned method, the telephone.  I’ll try to post something more on here once I know what the heck is going on.

Goodbye Vern.

I guess I don’t need to decide on a smartass card to send you now… oh and by the way… there’s still some lights out up here… Get to work!

Well, one of my projects for this weekend was to replace the water faucet on the side of the house for the umteenth year in a row.   Due to the unpredictable weather fluxuations here, and other circumstances no mater how hard I have tried to keep the hose off the faucet when the weather starts turning cold, I fail.  This failure results in the first frost of the year doing fatal damage to the backflow preventer.  Once this happens you can’t use the hose w/o water spraying out all over the side of the house, and greatly reduced waterpressure in the hose.

Once again I started to replace the bib, this time when I began to cut the caulk out from around the faucet part of the anti siphon device popped off. I’ve tried in the past to dismmantle these things, becasue I know they are not very complicated devices.  Being the geek that I am, I couldn’t leave well enough alone now that I had access to the guts.  After a few seconds of tinkering I discovered that all that has been happeneing is that the frozen water has been unseating a washer, and forcing it into what appears to be a back pressure relief vent.  The process of doing that actually seizes the back flow valve into and open state and causes the valve to spew water out the relief port.

I took a small screw and used it to reseat the washer. Once I did that, the valve dropped back into place.  I then went back in and turned on the water, and to my shock no more leak.    I just wish I would have discovered this trick years ago, it would have saved me quite a lot of time, and money on repairs.