1. What did you do in 2006 that you’d never done before?

2. Did you keep your new years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

Seeing as how I didn’t make any, Yes. Nope, once again I will not make any.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

Jess, Shelby

4. Did anyone close to you die?

Yes, Dave

5. What countries did you visit?

If you count via faire, England and France…

6. What would you like to have in 2007 that you lacked in 2006?

Peace, and a place where I feel comfortable enough to relax.

7. What date from 2006 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

April 11th. The last time I saw Dave before the accident.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Getting up the courage to attend counseling.

9. What was your biggest failure?

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

The flu bug that went around. (we referred to it as the plague)

11. What was the best thing you bought?

Either my iPod or my MDA phone. Considering the reasons, the MDA.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

Karl

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

My Mother, My Aunt, My Cousin, My Cousins Kids, The Administration at the College

14. Where did most of your money go?

Probably the majority to fast food… A lot goes to the house too.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

I got really really really excited about something? I don’t think so, not this year.

16. What song will always remind you of 2006?

Bristlecone Pine

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:

i. happier or sadder? sadder
ii. thinner or fatter? A little thinner I think
iii. richer or poorer? poorer

18. What do you wish you’d done more of?

Excercise

19. What do you wish you’d done less of?

Eating, and crying

20. How will you be spending Christmas?

Trying not to get too upset with my family

22. Did you fall in love in 2006?

No

23. How many one-night stands?

HA!

24. What was your favorite TV program?

Heroes

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

I don’t generally hate people.

26. What was the best book you read?

best book? Uh… well most of my reading has been technical

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?

Starboard Watch

28. What did you want and get?

iPod

29. What did you want and not get?

Freedom

30. What was your favorite film of this year?

Flushed Away comes to mind.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?

My actuall 30th birthday? Not to much. For my birthday? Durty Nellies recording, and Thai Food.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

See number 4….

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2006?

It fits? It doesn’t smell? Wear it… Oh and a UtiliKilt

34. What kept you sane?

I’m sane? Friends, counseling

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

None come to mind

36. What political issue stirred you the most?

The continued erosion of our rights. GW’s sneaky alteration granting him the ability to declare martial law at will.

37. Who did you miss?

Dave, as if there was any question?

38. Who was the best new person you met?

Cindy

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2006:

There’s always more tears

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

….. i cant think of one…. go figure….

Just a reminder to me for the next time I go wandering through my posts.  Lower the bar.

Saturday morning I went to the post office to pick up the mail. (No, we do not get home delivery in Somonauk, you have to go get the mail at the post office.) When I walked out of the post office to get back in my car I recognized two people.  The first person I recognized was the old superintendent of schools for Somonauk schools.  The second person was my Jr High history teacher.   They both recognized me immediately and made with the standard pleasantries.    Then the former superintendent said something that rather shocked me.  He turned to the former teacher and said, “You know, this is one of the brightest minds ever to come out of Somonauk High school.”  The teacher wholeheartedly agreed.   I blushed, and said, “Thank you, you’re too kind.”   The history teacher then responded, “No, we mean it.  You know I’m not one to sugar coat anything.” She’s right, she never did…

Huh, wild…

I’m so pleased to announce that I have, with some help from the guy I goto when things look bleak, completely recovered my home automation / file server.

Everything is back to normal, and actually a couple of things are working better.

Thank you Zack!

How did I fix it?

booted to the SLES 9.1 boot CD, ran the recovery mode. From the console there I was able to mount the partition on the system to a temp location. Then I ran “mkinitrd /mnt/oldroot”. mkinitrd ran through the kernel on the mounted partition, and built a new initrd and dumpted it to the ramdisk /boot. I copied it form there to the boot partition on the HDD and rebooted.

Poof! up came my system. Well sorta… The ethernet interface didn’t load, but that was because I had to change out the MB which changed the mac address. A quick rename of the config file and a network services restart gave me back my ethernet connection. I rebooted once more and everything came up fine. I still ahd to do some fidgiting with the X10 controller but got that going too.

Tonight I noticed that the home automation controller computer / fileserver was acting weird. At first the behavior seemed to be just related to the serial communications to the actual powerline controller. This has happened once or twice before and wasn’t ever a real problem. It usually can be solved by power cycling the interface, and restarting the service. I tired that and had no luck. Then I noticed another service was acting odd so I decided that it might be a good idea to reboot.

What the hell was I thinking.

After about 5 minutes I still had no connectivity to the server. So I went to the basement to check on it. Turned on the monitor for the console and heard a high pitched whine, not quite high enough to hurt my ears but close. I turned it off and grumbled. So I went up and got a replacement monitor. Nothing on the display…. I looked at the power switch and noticed no light on it. I thought to myself “Ha! I did a shutdown not a reboot! DUH!”

I clicked the power switch… and heard the system power off. Thats not right…

Clicked it again, and instead of the happy glow of a green led I was greeted with the harsh and nerve wracking glow of yellow. Normally this means bad power supply. So I went and grabbed a spare power supply and put it in only to discover that, oh yeah… thats the one that blew a few months ago and its dead. So I tore apart another computer to scavanged the supply. Put it in the system plugged it all in powered it up and… was again greeted by an every so annoying yellow led… SON OF A!!!

So I went back up and got my spare computer I had been keeping just in case this exact event happened. (same model, make etc) I swapped out the power supply and hard drive from the apparently dead system and put them into the replacement system. (Yes this was the system I scavanged the power supply from)

I turned it on and was greeted with… a happy green LED. Huzzah my troubles are over.

Nope…

Not in John world…

The system got to the grub boot screen, timed out and started the boot process only to tell me ERROR 15, unable to locate file /boot/initrd on (hda0)

DAMN IT!

I tried failsafe… same thing….

At that point I turned things off and said to hell with it.

I came up reconfigured the wrt54G, and am sitting here trying to relax a few more minutes before I try to go to bed.

I’m hoping that tomorrow things will be better, and I’ll be able to discover that its something silly like a broken link to initrd on the boot partition.

That would be nice….

I have a recover CD…

I should be able to mount that partition and fix the link then….

I hope…

If it is the drive going bad… NOT AGAIN!!! I’m going to be purchasing a copy of spinrite and a new hard drive to see if I can recover the data.

There are days when I hate my life…

…but the college is so delightful.  Yes thats right folks, in the midst of all this  snow, when IDOT and other officials are saying DO NOT GO OUT, WCC is open  for business.  They show no regard for the welfare of the staff, faculty, or students.

This is ABSOLUTLY INSANE!