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I did make it to the Chris Cornell concert at Stubb’s the other week. I enjoyed it, although it was a late night and Tuesday hurt. I also cut my finger trying to crush a can into the recycling bin. Grrr.
Last weekend, my friend Chris wanted to know if I wanted to see the Plain White T’s at Antone’s. I like a couple of their songs and it was only $20 so I was in. Danger Radio, from Seattle, opened. They have a very cool tech streak and really enjoyed themselves. Not bad- even though the set was only about 45 minutes. The Plain White T’s are also a pretty fun band- they did a three part show calling a “Three Part Harmony” where they separated their sets into a intro set, an acoustic set, and then a final set. We were out by 11pm and back to my house well before midnight. The next day didn’t hurt as bad.
There were more kids there then I could count. Tons and tons of 16 year olds. Another friend described it as “almost as bad as a Switchfoot concert”. I can’t disagree.
The Gaslight Anthem is playing at Antone’s later in the month. Tickets are cheap too. I saw them on Dave Letterman awhile back and do got the album off of iTunes, so I will probably try and make that one.
This weekend is the Masters. I got to watch/listen to a bunch while I worked at home yesterday but won’t get to see much today. I certainly will be watching Saturday and Sunday. I don’t have any Easter plans, but will probably do a Sunday dinner. Saturday night is Blue October at Stubb’s. I have seen them a couple of times live now so when I heard this concert was coming up I was on it. They are doing two sold out nights here in Austin- so you know it will be crazy downtown.
Oh, and Sunday is also Mom’s birthday. Happy birthday Mom!
I got a Nokia E71 yesterday. Time to jump on the smart phone bandwagon and I didn’t want a new contract to get an iPhone. It has G3 Web, GPS, Media Player, an Radio, and does WiFi. I like it so far. Hopefully I like it a lot because it wasn’t cheap.
Yeah, I have been a pretty big slacker posting on the ‘ol blog. The move into the new “Connected Lab” is complete. Most every system is online and fully functional. Turns out it was about 100 physical servers and about 300 virtual servers. Loads of fun.
I lost my newish Nikon camera at a UT baseball game a few weeks back. I got a new Canon to replace it. A waste of cash, but I need a point and shoot.
The big hail event of 2009 was last week. I got pretty lucky. Only very small dents on the truck. I didn’t even see them for a couple of days until the light hit them when driving. Several of my friends have pretty messed up cars because of the baseball sized hail. I think the house, with the new roof, fared OK, but I have not been up on it yet to find out. No pictures though.
I got the ATI replacement stock in for my Hi Point 995. It took me a couple of hours to install, but I am happy with the results.
Chris Cornell is playing at Stubb’s tonight. I plan on going. Blue October will be in Austin in April. I am going to that one.
Dodgeball is done, but Four Square is alive. It looks neat, but I will have to learn to Twit. Or Tweet. Or whatever.
I know this is a long shot but are there any BalanceNG experts or reasonably adept users that can help me out?
I have a reasonably simple setup but trying to get a VIP on one LAN to balance to targets on another is just not working for me.
And if not, does anyone know of an easy solution to handle that type of translation while keeping the source address?
No, they really are not related. At least I hope not.
This weekend was the end of the Dodgeball service which was a funky text messaging service that let you keep up with friends as they were out an about. Google bought them a while back and I guess could not figure out what to do with them. In this belt-tightening economy they decided they could not afford the service anymore. It’s a shame I really did enjoy using it- even if some of my friends were a bit to annoying sometimes…
I saw Taken tonight. I enjoyed it a lot. I’m a sucker for action movies with a decent story. This was both. Liem Neeson was a great cast for the concerned father with a nasty past. The theater was basically empty at the 7:05 showing. I might have to make Sunday nights my movie night. I’m not sure how busy Watchmen was tonight, but maybe in two weeks when I can get away it won’t be packed.
Another week begins tomorrow. The Dell adventure continues. Each week since the move in on the 20th has been better than the last so hopefully it won’t be too bad. There is a pretty good chance for a new manager in my future as well. We’ll see how that goes. I also get root planing at the dentist tomorrow at 8am. That procedure is just as pleasant as it sounds…
Two really good quotes/stories I came across today:
First a great story about a No-Penis on Otis’s blog. I needed a good laugh today and that did it.
Second a great and timely quote for WWTDD do:
My Firefox spell check doesn’t even go up to “octuplets”. It stops at sextuplets. Even Firefox thinks that shit is ridiculous.
Classic. Thank you intertubes!
The analog cutoff has been delayed until June. (link) What a load of hooey. We have been inundated with information for months and months and months. I have DirecTV and therefore are not directly affected- but even they have a dedicated channel giving information about the cutoff. Ridiculous.
If I ruled the world this is what I would do. On the original date, the cutoff would happen. I would make the broadcasters put up a single image reading “Your analog television is no longer capable of receiving signal. Please contact the DOC at 1-866-DTV-2009 or http://www.dtv2009.com for details and information”. Done. Leave that up for two months then let the stations cut off their analog signal completely.
Digital television is like a band-aid. Yeah, it will sting when you rip it off- but the wound has healed, your skin is stronger, and you will be better off with out the analog bandage on your body.
I have been using ING for 3 or 4 years now because their rates have been pretty good and moving money around is fairly painless. A couple of jobs ago I got laid off and used the severance money to start a CD Ladder. It was working quite well because the rates were often about 1% or more higher than their standard savings account rates.
Then came this month. I had a CD renew at 1.5%. At the time of renewal, the savings rate was 2.4% (it dropped yesterday to 2.2%). It does not make any sense (or cents, heh) to keep the money in a CD making over a half percent less. I canceled the CD and will let the money sit in my savings account until the rates improve.
If anyone does have CDs coming to term, you might want to check on them to make sure you are not getting the interest rate shaft…
We have a couple of XEN servers (details about the install are from here). Recently one of them started rebooting for no good reason. I decided that upgrading the server to the newest bits from CentOS and running that for awhile to see if everything cleans up. Sounds simple but it isn’t.
- First you need to upgrade the host system. I just ran
yum check-updatefollowed by ayum update. Tons of packages were upgraded including the kernel. - I stopped any guest VMs from starting automatically, then I cleanly shut down all of my guest VMs.
- Check /boot/grub/menu.lst to make sure you are booting the new kernel
- I rebooted
- Like the install, a new initrd file should be created. I used this command to do mine:
mkinitrd -f --with=xennet --builtin=aic7xxx --builtin=serverworks --preload=xenblk --omit-raid-modules /boot/initrd-2.6.18-92.1.22.el5xen.img 2.6.18-92.1.22.el5xenThis creates a new initrd the guest systems can use. Note the kernel version. This can be gotten with uname. - Then I rebooted again to use the new initrd.
- After the system came up, I needed to make a couple of changes to the guest images
- One change is in the image file itself. It needs the new modules in /lib. I use XEN image files rather than partitions, so I am able to mount the image file with a command like:
mount -o loop /var/lib/xen/images/guest123.img /mnt - I copied the two /lib/modules directories to the image. In this case they are 2.6.18-92.1.22.el5 and 2.6.18-92.1.22.el5xen. Then I unmounted the image.
- Next I needed to modify the XEN config file for that image. For me it was located as /etc/xen/guest123
- I removed the kernel, ramdisk, and vif lines from that file and added these to match my system:
kernel="/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.18-92.1.22.el5xen"
ramdisk="/boot/initrd-2.6.18-92.1.22.el5xen.img"
vif=['bridge=xenbr0'] - Then I started the guest image and made sure it booted without any problems. The big thing to check is network. The updated vif line allows the network to keep working.
I have three other XEN servers that probably should be updated as well. That will happen sometime in the next couple of weeks and if the notes change I will update them accordingly.
Happy New Year to everyone! I spent the early part of my evening with some friends then went home and watched a movie. The big burst of fireworks let me know when the new year began. I guess people “forgot” there was a burn ban on because I found rocket remnants on my lawn…
First day back in the office today and my Woot items from Christmas are in. For the Random Crap I got:
I believe that does qualifies as random crap.
The three Random shirts are:
Can’t complain for less than $30.
Today is my first day back at work since the 19th. Time to get back on the grindstone.