Rinsefirst

So, after "hacking" Richards site this morning (which by the way is now fixed), John called me. He said I shouldn’t have done that, but with more colorful language. So I kindly warned him that he was next.

And of course, if your here, there is a good chance you came via a link on either tumbledry or blue shallow. Sorry Alex and John, but because John called me a name, he became the next target. On the upside, you can now fix it ;-).

I think this is enough hacking for the day. I hope you all enjoy your ride, here at valley fair.

So it turns out that Richard’s new comment system is quite cool. I can abuse it to allow me to get more hits at least for a temporary period. I should get bonus points.

You know, if people would just read my blog, they would remember not to let this happen to them. Remember Menssen.org trying to read my header? Remember how I got his site to redirect to mine? It’s the same thing. So simple, and so many more hits for me (ok, so they normally have it fixed, but what can you do).

So talent is again on my side.

In some other news, Life continues to be strong. I’m always doing something cool, and I’m never writing about it. Take for example this location search engine I just wrote for one of our clients.

You input the zip code, and it finds all the things that are around that zip code. But wait, if you think about it, this is more complicated than it sounds. Zip codes aren’t right next to each other. You can’t just take a range of them. That would never work. Instead, I managed to find a table of all the zip codes in the nation, linked with there latitude and longitude. Now, using degrees, I can pinpoint the surrounding zip codes with a fairly simple query.

Oh, for another interesting piece of news. I took my first trip to the St. Paul Mayor’s office yesterday. Quite the place. I didn’t bump into the mayor (I guess he was on vacation), but still, it is quite a facility. Security at the front door with metal dectors. Keypads and a security guy to get back into the offices. Overall, a really cool trip. I hope to be seeing more of that office in the near future.

Well, I have some other things I need to get done, so back to those things.

Spring break came and went. Most of mine was spent working on MSA’s furnance, which I must admit, was a very interesting learning situation. Those things are so similiar to routers in there configuration. Maybe I will have to go into the repair HVAC business… Maybe not.

The rest was spent working on other sites. Lots of stuff done, lots of stuff still to do.

I just finished a midterm. My brain is a little fried, so I apologize for the randomness of this post. John is sending me IM’s about the shooting today. It seems like I should care, but really… It happened, and therefore can’t be stopped. I’m more concerned about what we can do to prevent it from happening again than I am about what happened. It is however sad.

Everwood isn’t on again. Oh well, I have homework to do.

Every day this week I need to be up by 8. That’s too early. What can I do though? JR needs to make money to pay the bills. Don’t want anyone’s website going down (no, we aren’t in any sort of danger of that, yet).

Richard told me to start the midnight clock. So I will get going on that.

Oh, one more thing… I’m now 2 and 2 after a hard loss to Nikki on Sunday… 2 weeks until round 5, where things should get shaken up a little bit.

With the loss of 99% of my data, I have decided that this time around, I’m going to go for quality, instead of quantity. If it works, my MP3 collection will be smaller, but better. My hard drive will have more open-ness to it. And life in general, will just be good….

So what’s the rules for this new MP3 plan Justin has?

1) All MP3’s must come from the orignal CD and it must be either ripped by me, or by someone I personally know who ripped it in accordance with this rule as well as the rest of the rules.

2) Only Full CD’s. I don’t want single tracks anymore. This should reduce the number of doubles as well.

3) Full 320 kbps audio.

4) Artist/Album/Artist - Track Number - Title

5) and most importantly, no downloading.

Afterall, we should do things legally, not illegally afterall. As far as I’m aware, it’s legal to copy my own CD’s to my hard drive, so that’s what I’m doing at this exact moment.

I’m thinking I might also keep an index of my mp3 collection for reference, that way people know what CD’s I need so they can get them to me for my birthday. That would be cool.

Well. I just felt like posting so I’m going to work my way to bed. Night world.

This is one of those things I pray never happens to people. I lost all my data on my primary computer. Yes, all of my data. All 500 Gigabytes of stuff.  Some of it I have burned to CD, own, or just don’t care about… Like for example, my MP3 collection is gone. That’s ok. I can get that back. Also gone is all my software. That’s ok, I have the cd’s for that.

However, there are some things that are permantly going to have been lost forever. This includes: Most, if not all the pictures taken with MY digital camera. It includes my old designs for this webpage and the code that went with it. It includes the code for some of my old programs (some of which I might still be able to find if I look hard enough, things like Alex’s TreeMapper).

The point of it is… I didn’t have a backup. Nope. No backup. I mean, really…. How do you backup 500 gig’s of data? It’s not like I could have put 2 terrabytes into my computer (ok, so I could have, but no…)

Ok, so let’s talk about how I have prevented this from happening in the future. For starters, I replaced the dead hard drive. Always a good way to prevent data loss: don’t put data on bad hard disk. I also purchased a 5th hard drive. I’ll get to why in a second. Before yesterday, my Raid was Raid 0, which is why I lost all my data. This form of raid is known as striping. It makes for faster hard drives because it can read from all 4, but it means that all your files are spread across multiple files. This of course isn’t ideal. Now my raid is Raid 0 + 1. Meaning: 2 drives are striped (for performance again) and 2 drivers are mirroring the 2 striped drives. This means I don’t have a terrabyte of usable space anymore (just 1/2 a terrabyte). But it also means that if any 1 hard drive fails, I’m still running.

But, that wasn’t good enough for me. I didn’t like the idea that 2 hard drives could fail and I would be in the same situation. So I also bought another 200 gig SATA hard drive, which I plugged in seperately from the raid. I’m dumping weekly backups to this drive of all my files. That means it would take 3 drives dieing to fail.

Now as soon as I get a cable modem, I’ll also dump remote backups to an external hard drive at MSA (that’s what it’s there fore afterall). But I don’t have that yet. Hopefully, this will prevent massive data loss in my own world.

On the same note, JR Computer Associates Servers have been worked on today. The idea to put FreeBSD on one of them has been thrown out by me because I didn’t like the missing functionality and some compatibility issues I had run into… Maybe the next time I get some spare time I will try freebsd, but until then, Mario and Luigi will both be running debian.

So thats what I continue to do now. Leaving MSA: 8:00pm today. Not to shabby for what all I got done. I wonder what I will still get done tonight.

Today has been one of those good and bad days. It’s currently 2 in the afternoon, and so far today I have managed to be awake roughly 8 hours. You can do the Math as to when I either went to bed, or, when I woke up, in either situation, I’m in the same boat. The weird part is, I feel very awake. Not tired at all in fact. I got out of bed without an alarm and I felt rested. Strange how 12 hours of sleep can make it impossible to get out of bed where 6 hours of sleep will allow you to wake up… Very weird.

I was up pretty late working on getting a dumb animation to work. I finally figured it out, but still, it took way to long to handle. I wonder if it would run as well as it does on my emulator on a real gameboy. I would upload it, but it probably wouldn’t do much good.

I had a midterm today as well. I didn’t do as well as I thought I would. It wasn’t what I was expecting. I was expecting a draw this diagram, instead, I got a midterm on things that we haven’t even had homework on yet. Strange how that works. Well, what can you do but lose way to many points for problems that aren’t all that hard.

I also managed to leave my laptop charger at home, so either I will have to go to the lab in a few minutes to do some work, or I will have to find Blaine and steal his. Either way, it was a bad choice to leave that behind.

Maybe I’ll go do some homework. In either case, fair winds for now world.