• Computers Suck

    Posted on July 25th, 2010

    Written by Howard Young

    Related Posts

    Gin and Tonic

    When combined, Gin and tonic makes a highball cocktail where right now I think I could use a stiff one. I never resort to numbness but it’s been too long a day to find that your Linux server crashed and doesn’t reboot and fsck fails.

    For some reason the x-server died when starting up Evolution. I had to kill the email client twice and eventually reboot the server. The reboot hung will one of the CPUs “got stuck” so the power had to be yanked.

    The last time the server rebooted was about 4 months ago when we had a power failure at three in the morning and the time between reboots triggered a forced fsck.

    I sorta hold my breath when I reboot servers or even my workstation. You never know when it the computer may not come up clean so I just leave them running 24/7. But this time, the server did not come up clean.

    When fsck fails in the bootup script you simply run fsck on the device in question, or /dev/sda1 and the problem goes away after the scan finishes and corrects the errors.

    Somehow fsck kept failing over and over which brings me to the title of this post “Gin and Tonic.”

    At work we have two servers “gin” and of course “tonic”.  Tonic’s been a very reliable server but for some reason we have to reboot it several times a week.  In our geekiness, gin was the next server we added to support software development.

    But all I could think after all these reboots of my dedicated server was poor old tonic and it’s root problem which has yet been located.  I digress.

    After a few more reboots and a fsck on “/” instead of /dev/sda1 seemed to resolve the problem. Who knows.  I just hope my server doesn’t become a Gin and Tonic problem.

    • Uncategorized

      Posted on June 17th, 2010

      Written by Howard Young

      Related Posts

      Tour of Holy Trinity (VIDEO)

      Just fooling around with Windows 7 Movie Maker.  It came pre-installed on the 64-bit version I purchased for my new laptop.    This video of Holy Trinity took about 1/2 hour to put together after I downloaded some of the photos on Flickr.

      • Vacation

        Posted on June 9th, 2010

        Written by Howard Young

        Related Posts

        Vacation 2010

        Sometimes the best vacation is the one where you don’t go anywhere. Just stay home and do nothing. Play a few computer games piddle around the house or whatever you feel like.

        The first week off is usually the hardest. I don’t know how many times I checked my email at work to see if I missed anything. I really didn’t miss much and I have the pleasure to know that my box is going to be empty next Monday when I get back into the office.

        But between checking emails, I did manage to work on Mustfindit and was able to get it up and running using the Web2py framework. It was sort of interesting trying to integrate OpenId with it using RPX. I’m not sure if this is the final login configuration or if I’m going to use Web2py’s authorization system.

        I got tired of the old Mustfindit logo so I decided to do something new and pleasant:

        Figure 1: The Official Mustfindit Logo

        When you’re home for a couple of weeks, your Dachshunds will drive you crazy. It wasn’t so bad when we had one Dachshund, but with three, they just seem to drive you nuts. I’m sure they’ll be happy when we go back to work where they can sleep all day long. Molly seemed to enjoy Vacation where she could go outside during lunchtime and sunbathe with me while I worked on my tan.

        Figure 2: The Official Dachshund of Vacation

        The main point of the vacation was to relax and just do something different. In my case, it was working on the house. Neglected repairs that need attention throughout the year got postponed due to lack of weekend time. Painting the ceiling where the air conditioner leaked was the number one objective. The drywall repair was completed months ago but I never had two or three days to finish up the painting.

        The painting was really a pain-in-the-neck. Some areas were difficult to reach even with a 12 foot pole, but I managed to get it done. The really hard part was trying to paint around the base of a chandelier. I could reach it with a 6 foot pole but it took many careful passes to prevent any mistakes.

        Figure 3: Official Troika SAN Command Knife

        There were so many jobs completed and yet to complete, but the handy Troika knife I got from work a few years ago won a badge of excellence! It played a part in every job and I couldn’t have done it any other way. We used to hand out those knifes at Storage Networking shows, but I think after 9/11, all the business travelers stopped carrying pocket knives so the sales people handed them out to the engineers.

        I’ll probably put another coat of paint on something before the vacation is over. The sad thing is that we didn’t get to use any of our discount Disney tickets this week since our annual passes expire next week. But we can always renew them for next year.

        • Gardening

          Posted on May 18th, 2010

          Written by Howard Young

          Related Posts

          May Showers Brings June Veggies

          It is unusually cold and wet this May and I don’t think it ever rained (in Southern California) on my Birthday but I believe this is the closest it ever is going to get if the drizzles continue until Friday.

          My starter seeds failed again this season producing week and limp shoots that died like Vampires when exposed to the direct sunlight.  Probably too much Vitamin-D.  I will never use seed starter kits again and should have taken my own advice from last year’s results.

          But, somehow the Lima beans were sturdy enough to survive a for a week and hopefully we will have a few fresh beans later this summer if it ever warms up.  The two planters I bought at the Do-it Center were just enough for the 12 bean stalks.

          Lima Beans from my Garden

          We picked up another 4 planters at the Green Thumb in Ventura which should yield some nice veggies once the seeds get planted.  The Green Thumb is a great Nursery which has a mini-hardware store that rivals Lowes and Home Depot.   The even have dog toys there where we pick up a few balls for our Dachshunds.

          The windowsill planters are replacing the 2′x3′ clear plastic shoe storage boxes littering our backyard which our dogs and neighborhood cats love to potty in.  After a year exposed to the elements, they became brittle and broke into plastic shards.  Hopefully the thicker windowsill boxes will last longer…

          • Piss and Moan, Websites

            Posted on April 21st, 2010

            Written by Howard Young

            Related Posts

            I Suck at Wordpress Theme Design

            Basically I hate designing themes.  I usually end up spending days and days tweaking the CSS to get the columns floating over to the correct place and only find it doesn’t work on a different browser (i.e. IE).  The process starts over again until I get it working for all browsers.

            Like I said, it takes days to develop a new design even  when I start with a proven baseline.  So I stopped.  My time is too valuable to do something which I can outsource or pick up a professional looking theme from Woo Themes.

            But sometimes I get an idea for starting a new niche and dream about what theme to use even before I’ve worked on developing the content.  I  know that it is going to take a couple of months to get ranked in the SERPS and the only ones really looking at the sites are bots.   Anyway the dreaming lasts for a few wasted hours causing nothing but grief when I could have done productive work.

            After the content on the site is aged, I install one of my canned themes I use for Adsense or eBay depending on the type of niche the market falls into.

            Lately, I’ve been looking (dreaming?) into updating my canned niche themes using Thesis. I just need a simple design that I can baseline without spending days reinventing the wheel again every time Wordpress comes out with a new version.

            However after just reading Lis’ Frugal Theme Review, there may be another platform other than Thesis which you can quickly customize including:

            1. Frugal’s ability to have unique pages layouts with either no sidebars or sidebars unique to that page. In fact you can develop an entire business website using WordPress pages only with these options.
            2. Frugal Theme’s easy use of images which uses WordPress’s native support for thumbnails which means associating a thumbnail with a post’s extract as simple as clicking one button.
            3. Frugal’s ability for you to choose colors for your text and backgrounds by either using a color picker tool or by typing in the hexadecimal code (much easier to get a number of different elements exactly the same color by typing in the code).
            4. Frugal Theme’s code is very efficient – that means its fast loading on your website – a factor which Google is taking more and more into consideration.
            5. There is fantastic support for Frugal from the detailed step by step videos from the developer to an active support forum where questions are answered quickly.

            While I’m more familiar with Thesis, I’m going to have to take a second look at Frugal.  It looks like you can produce some really professional looking sites that I can create that are basic and simple for my niche sites.

            • Piss and Moan

              Posted on March 16th, 2010

              Written by Howard Young

              Related Posts

              God of War III

              I was thinking yesterday that the only thing I was enjoying about “Daylight Savings” was that I could pick up GOW III an hour earlier.  But with the time change, the exhaustion of getting up earlier set in about 9:00 PM and I promptly fell asleep on the couch.

              I woke up at 11:55 all prepared to drive over to GameStop to pick up the game I paid for on my lunch hour 12 hours ago; however, the deep sleep prevented my tired bones from leaving the couch.

              So today — if they still have my copy — I’ll pick it up but I can only wait until tonight to see if GOW III is worth the time and money to play.

              • Research

                Posted on February 24th, 2010

                Written by Howard Young

                Related Posts

                Featured User on Business Exchange

                I received an interesting email from BusinessWeek.com:

                I wanted to let you know that based upon your valuable contributions to BX you will be the Featured User on Business Exchange (http://bx.businessweek.com) starting tomorrow, February 25th at approximately 9:15 AM ET and lasting for 24 hours.

                It is a nice gesture considering I only joined a few weeks ago.

                But, BX is a fantastic tool for keeping notes. When researching a topic, I just pop in the URL and add a note or two.  Sometimes the page description of the URL is sufficient so I don’t have to add anything.

                After I get enough information, I’ll go back and write a blog post, article, or use the events as possible use cases for new products.   It’s a great site for keeping current on business events.

                • Piss and Moan

                  Posted on February 23rd, 2010

                  Written by Howard Young

                  Related Posts

                  Test from Wordpress Droid Application

                  Yesterday I installed the Wordpress Droid App. that allows you to interface directly to your blog; hence, this is a test of the application interfacing with this blog.

                  I’ve been struggling using 3rd party solutions to post whereby many simply don’t work very well.  My biggest complaint is that when you take a picture and want to post it to your blog, it doesn’t show up there.

                  For example, if you use PixelPipe to post to your blog, the photo is hosted on their server instead of on hosting account.  Here, WP accels by uploading your photo directly to your site.

                  Take this photo below.  It’s not interesting, other than I took the backside of the DVR to get the serial number since Time Warner wanted to know what it was when I tried to activate the box.

                  image

                  Backside of the Time Warner DVR

                  I don’t know why they would ask the information other than I have two cable boxes in the house and they need to isolate which one to activate.  (The simple solution would be to activate both boxes at once and not have the customer unrack the cable box just to get the s/n on the bottom of the box.)

                  Anyway, the WP Droid Application is incredible if you like to blog from your phone.  I don’t care to plog other than uploading photos to my digital photos site.  Now if there only was someway to plog using dictation …

                  • Books to Read

                    Posted on February 15th, 2010

                    Written by Howard Young

                    Related Posts

                    Power of Vitamin D Book Review

                    In my recent blood work for my annual physical, my Vitamin D, 25-Hydroxy test was measured at 17.3 or an insufficient level.  Probably not enough sun during the winter; still, even with all the supplements I’ve been taking I managed to avert influenza and colds this season.  Knock on wood!

                    I was very diligent in taking 5000 mg of  D-3  everyday yet my levels were somewhat surprisingly low.  Perhaps it was the vitamin manufacture because you can never know which Vitamin Company you can trust to provide the best product.  I’ve switched over to GNC … perhaps that will help.

                    Anyway, I’m always interested in local Thousand Oaks authors and Doctor Zaidi recently published the Power of Vitamin D.  I heard about him from a fellow Choir member who recommended reading his books.

                    It’s not like I’m new to the vitamin and I’ve been a big fan of Vitamin D ever since seeing Dr. John Cannell’s video and how he found a relationship between influenza and Vitamin D deficiency.

                    While Dr. Cannell has a good overview of what the vitamin can do for your, Dr. Zaidi’s book fills in all the information on how much you should be taking to supplement your diet and what levels should be found in your blood.

                    I enjoyed his level of writing where it wasn’t too technical and very easy to understand.  His conclusions of why we are having an deficiency epidemic: modern lifestyle, sun phobia and obesity is somewhat obvious other than obesity, but he gives good examples of the cause of the problem.

                    Is this book for you?  If Dr. Cannell’s video excites you about the power of vitamins, then you should pick it up and read it.  I’m fairly certain that you or someone you know can benefit from the Power of Vitamin D.

                    • Computers Suck

                      Posted on February 13th, 2010

                      Written by Howard Young

                      Related Posts

                      I’m Loving my new Under Desk Keyboard Tray

                      Computers don’t suck after all!  I claim this after working comfortably for most of the day without much pain in right wrist due to my keyboard adjusted at a lower level after I installed a keyboard tray underneath my desk.

                      Decades of an unergonomic work environment really caused severe tenosynovitis in my wrists and right shoulder. For whatever reason, the inflammation reared it’s ugly head with such intensity that work was nearly impossible.  Ten days after giving blood, the pain was bad enough to seek medical help because the 1600 mg of Advil a day just wasn’t reducing the inflammation anymore.

                      I guess my mind was playing tricks on my, but with the bluish-yellow bruise from the blood donation, my only thought was that it was infected and the source of the pain.  Just tenderness and slightest touch in the area was magnified 10 fold due to the tenosynovitis.

                      Luckily, there was no infection or blood clot.  Just continue on the anti-imflammatories until the pain subsides.  Some physical therapy to boot.

                      Sorry, I digressed, but to make the point clear, an ergonomic environment really reduces this type of injury and makes it easier to recover while continue working.

                      I splurged and installed an HumanScale keyboard tray because in my honest opinion the best that I’ve ever used.  This is the second one I installed in the house.

                      An Ergonomic Work Environment

                      My original plan was to install keyboard trays underneath the built-in desks in our home office.  But I never got around to it because I liked the keyboard on top of the desk even though it was awkward and never quite the right height and position.

                      I took about an hour to install.  I’m sure that anyone else could have done it faster.  It just took me about 15 minutes to find the tools that I’ve left scattered all about the house.   The 1″ thick desktop is dense and even after drilling starter holes, I had trouble attaching the base plate while laying on my back.

                      With base plate screwed to the bottom of the desktop, you then add the back rubber stoppers, insert the sliding adjustable keyboard mechanism and then the front stopper.   The tray comes with cable attachments so your mouse and keyboard wires are kept out of the way.  I use the wireless Microsoft Natural Mouse so there is no mouse wires to worry about.

                      An additional  feature about having a under desk keyboard tray is that you get an extra 2 square feet of desktop that you can now use.  My desk should be nice and clean which should make me and my wife very happy!

                      • Older Posts Yeah! There are more posts, check them out.