Tag: sysadmin

Where most of my time seems to go

Catch blogging, expect more frequent updates now that the server is faster!

In honor of the new server, we’ll start out with geeky links first:

Geeky or funny — you make the call:

Now, just funny stuff:

Golf stuff (I want, but not that badly)

Interesting:

Long time coming…

they.com is now running on new hardware!

There was a happy congruence of tax refund check and Dell having a sale of 45% off servers, so the 8+ year old system (a sun netra t1 with a 900MHz ultrasparc IIi, 1G RAM and an external 30G drive) has been replaced (by a poweredge 2750, with 2 2GHz AMD processors, 8G RAM, and 6 160G drives with hardware RAID). After running for 7 hours, the new system has yet to swap memory to disk!

They have also made the switch from Debian GNU/Linux to Gentoo.

There will still be a few things to work out — for example, they have not decided whether or not to re-export the /docs/ directory (which they don’t think they will do again), and some wordpress upgrading differences have yet to be fully resolved.

For now, though, they are just glad to have made the switch, because they can now re-enable spam filtering on the server, and now have virtual mail delivery (so that there are fewer hackable login accounts).

Oh, and since it doesn’t take over a minute to make a post on wordpress anymore, you can expect more frequent posting!

Here is the new server last weekend, while they copied over the gallery images to save bandwidth:

93578

Did you know I have a superpower?

No, really — it’s true. I even use it for the forces of good!

What, I hear you plead, could J’s superpower possibly be?

Anything you give me, I can take it and make it worse.

Many folks wonder how useful this particular superpower is. Allow me to describe:  Someone walks into our office, supposedly to get something IT-ish done.  They listen to what we are talking about, and are so appalled that they either forget what they came in for, or are driven off.  Now, that’s not using it for good, but it is useful sometimes.

To use it for good requires more effort, to wit:  We are planning something — an upgrade, perhaps.  We talk about things that could go wrong, and how we should plan for them.  I take everything that could go wrong, and make it worse.  This makes the plan more robust.

Productivity things

Well, this has been a productive holiday, now hasn’t it!

I have a way now that when I sync my palm, the shopping list gets parsed to xml, which shows up in the “Grocery list” page (which you can see at the top of this chipshot theme).

And, since I can never remember what I actually want for gifts when people ask (Hi, Mom!), I’ve started using the “masterwish” plugin to wordpress.  I’ve done some preliminary wishing, FWIW.

More catchup blogging…

Once again, we start with things overheard:

And continue with geeky things:

General interest:

Catching up more often, lately

Blog catchup, yet again

And a special collection of pumpkin seed roasting recipes

Catchup blogging

  1. The Right Brain vs Left Brain test | PerthNow
  2. Six Types of Words That You Should Axe in Business Writing
  3. Floatutorial: Step by step CSS float tutorial
  4. Self Improvement Tips » 10 Amazingly Simple Tricks To Turn Your Brain Into A Powerful Thinking Machine
  5. Shoot The Stupid
  6. Texas Department of Public Safety – Courtesy, Service, Protection
  7. Top 40 Demotivational Posters
  8. Twenty-five Signs You Have Grown Up : DivineCaroline
  9. Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age
  10. Hitch gets a makeover
  11. The lure of the straight razor
  12. Silver Tape – IMAGER.CC
  13. Scientific American: Searching for God in the Brain
  14. Manly Drinks – The Manliest Drinks in the World — Campus Squeeze
  15. Dynamic Periodic Table
  16. Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 Ways to Sleep Smarter and Better – Lifehacker
  17. Booting Linux from Flash – Oopsilon
  18. AlterNet: Young People Rejecting Christianity, Have Perception of Religion as Homophobic
  19. 8 Simple Ways to Enjoy Life Every Day | PickTheBrain
  20. Howstuffworks “How Car Financing Works”
  21. DRUDGE REPORT FLASH 2007®
  22. Filthiest bill ever
  23. CrunchBang ~ 465 Free Fonts for Ubuntu
  24. Flash-Based Galleries For Your Images | Graphics
  25. Neuromarketing » Tightwads, Spendthrifts, and Everyone Else
  26. TechBlog – How to: Upgrade any version of Ubuntu Desktop
  27. A Mock Columnist, Amok – New York Times
  28. Ten Plane Crashes That Changed Aviation

2blog folder catchup, yet again

That 2blog bookmark folder fills up quickly…

I’ve been ill.

So, what have I been up to?

I took the spambait on they.com, and instead of learning each one as it comes in, I now batch them up, and learn the batches once per minute.  I also snag everything that imap users put into their imap spam folder, and add that to the learning batch.  I keep the non-spambait stuff, and learn from the latest 30 of those each minute.

Did you know that they.com is getting about one spam each second?

It’s amazing how much I can get done if I stop doing work-work for a day.

I also caught up on a lot of blogging.  I’ve been using foxmarks to have one set of bookmarks across every system, and I created a folder called “2blog”.  Anything I come across that I want to blog about, I add to that folder.  I cleared about half of it out yesterday.  The really fun thing is that I can do that from anywhere, now!

We finally got a new dryer.  We’ve gone gas, this time.  It used to take 2 hours to do a load of towels — more recently, because I had to stop and untangle everything after the last baffle came out completely — but now it takes barely longer than the washer. I’m now thinking that I may want to reverse my standard method of doing laundry, and switch from starting with the whites (since I always ended up waiting on the dryer) to starting with the things done in cold water.

Bleh.  I’m blogging about laundry.  Time to go back to the 2blog folder, eh?  Here we go…