Ness’ Outpost

Yesterday I got an email from HR here at GE about the employee benefit of bringing in nurses to administer on site flu shots. I have to admit that I have yet to get a flu shot when they have been available ever since University.

Today I read this CBC article titled Canadians urged to get flu shots despite problems.

I think I’ll continue the trend and not get a flu shot again this year. If I was interacting with older people or newborns more often then I might. But I’m not convinced it does more good than bad. I’ll just let nature take it’s course and roll the dice.

This from a complete health care idiot.

I took a step back from all the convinces of modern day life and bought a fountain pen.

Not that I’m giving up electricity and computing or anything but this pen is somewhere in the middle. It uses a medium nib (the tip part) and ink cartridges instead of filling a well in the body of the pen from an eye drop dispenser. I can buy a well adapter if I ever wanted to use scented ink or blood to “seal a deal” — but I don’t see that happening in the near future.

I did a little research on introductory pens and found a site that recommended a Lamy Al-Star pen as a great starter pen that is rugged for daily use and the ink writes really well on moleskin paper - which is my notebook of choice.

So far I’m happy with it — when I opened the pen and punctured the cartridge I got ink on my fingers.

I’ve been working on a hardware upgrade for nesser.org over the holidays. I’ve almost migrated all the things that I use from the old machine to the new.

I’m running a RAID 1 array of hard drives. This allows me to mirror all the data from one hard drive onto the other in case one of them physically fails. I will be able to recover my data from the other and rebuild the array once a new hard drive is inserted.

Lots of software upgrades have taken place and I’m finally running a current Linux operating system again. The hardware is power efficient running a VIA Esther processor at 1500MHz and the CPU runs fanless, but of course the power supply does not. This makes it nice and quiet as well.

RAM has been bumped up to 512 from 128 in the old machine with a massive 80Gig hard drive.

It just shows that you don’t need a huge power sucking work horse to do basic things like web serving, email, and data base work. That is unless you are serving for a site like Digg or Slashdot. I have a feeling that my network pipe would be the bottle neck and not my hardware in case I ever get swamped with traffic. But I haven’t left it to chance either, my firewall ensures that only a trickle gets through and not a tsunami of network traffic.

All that is left to do now is the following services. I’d like to get them finished up before new years eve so I can decommission the old machine to the dumpster for the new year.

• SVN
• Trac
• munin

Good ol’ Bobby Tables. A good giggle from XKCD.

This one had a few of us rolling on the floor laughing at work today.

I found out today that my typing wasn’t as bad as I thought.
I kept trying to log into my banking web site to pay some bills and was told my username/password was incorrect on Friday night. I gave it a day or two since I thought all my wrong attempts might have locked up the account for some amount of time. I tried again and no dice. So I attempted to reset my password with my security questions. No dice there either and the web page told me to call the help desk.

Turns out my card was canclled by the bank because it was flagged as either tamppered with or copied by someone in a police investigation. Now I am without banking abilities since that card number is tied to online banking. Therefore until I can get my new card activated I can’t do any banking.

Too bad I was trying to log on to pay a bill. Hopefully the card will be mailed to me before my mastercard is due. Otherwise I’ll have to call them and tell them my sob story looking for an extension.

Just this past week I updated the OS on my laptop from Fedora Core 5 to 6. Even though 6 was released on the 24th of October it just took me a while to motivate myself to upgrade. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. So I broke it. ;)

Actually the upgrade went fine. Usually I do a fresh install of OS major version bumps since I’ve partitoned my laptops HD into /, /home, etc. I just keep the home partion unchanged and we’re off to the races. This time I did an OS upgrade to the new version and everything went grate until a day later I ran yum to try and upgrade the packages that must have been outdated by now.

The OS upgrade left a FC 5 mono package lying around on my machine. I removed that by hand after wondering why my yum upgrade commands were failing. After that yum did a nice job upgrading my OS’s packages and going through all the dependencies. Or so I thought.

Of course I expected a new kernel to be installed and one was. When I booted up my laptop the GUI informed me that CPU frequency scaling was disabled because it wasn’t supported by my hardware - that was a red flag that something was up. When I ran uname -a after the upgrade everything looked fine so I started searching the web and found that I had the i586 kernel installed on my machine. This kernel is for machines pre Pentium II. I have a P4m chip in this laptop!

To get the right kernel on your machine run check out this page which explains how to diagnose the problem and fix it. Then life should be consuming less power for you again durning the noop’s.

Penelope was due for her 95k oil change service and I had noticed some “chirping” noises in the wheels since I need to roll down my window to access the magnetic key fabs for my building. I had been ignoring that for quite a few weeks now because some days my 2002 Chevy Cavalier is a symphony of groans and squeaks.

That “chirping” noise was the front brake pad warnings - I should have known better since it went away when the brakes were applied. Apparently when they inspected the pads on the lift I had 3mm left therefore a brake job was in my future as well. I knew my rotors were warped since the car bounced around pretty well when braking was taking place so I had to bite the bullet and make the decision on the spot.

When I bought the car the dealer did a brake job for me at 65k so those pads only lasted me 30,000 km - which I found out from Scott at Richardson Chevrolet is near the norm depending on the parts used.

The rotors were already warped, having only 3mm of pads I didn’t want to drive it around since I could etch the rotors with the calipers if those 3mm wear out, I don’t have a jack, stands or a garage to do the work in myself. I was stuck, so I had the guys at Richardson do the work.
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It’s been quite a while since I’ve written here but I have been plenty busy with packing, moving, unpacking plus the daily grind on top of that.

But all work and no play makes me a dull boy — that’s where the Wii helps. I was in a race with Chris at work to see who could accumulate > 2000 points in Wii Tennis. On Sunday night I won a game which put me at 2011 points. Just enough to edge Chris out before he could get there, but he’ll stick to his story that he had tennis elbow and couldn’t play as often as I could.

On Tuesday this week Lauren and I picked up a vacuum cleaner from Canadian Tire. It’s a Roomba Discovery created by iRobot. iRobot is a robotics company that just happens to have a hugely successful robotic vacuum. From the outside it looks like a pretty neat company with some very interesting software challenges.

Now for the neat part. You can control the roomba’s motors and read the sensors through the serial port. There is a published serial port (hardware) hack that puts a Bluetooth radio onboard the device which allows the radio to connect to any other Bluetooth device that can talk the serial port protocol. Now I need to build some hardware so I can write some software.

http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2006/02/how_to_roomba_bluetooth_interf.html