etalii*Step

Last night I started writing a post than this over whelming exhaustion came out of no where and I could barely move or keep my eyes open. Maybe because I was walking in the sun and it was pretty hot, I don’t know. So anyway I ended up laying on my bed and passed out pretty quick. Not sure how long I was out but even after I woke up from the nap I was pretty tired.

I was talking about picking the permanent job I wanted in yesterday’s post. I was going to list all the reasons for the both of them but that will just bring back the stress left over from the week of trying to decide. So instead I’ll just say I’m moving back to my small town to work for a little hospital. I still have no idea if that is the right decision but then there is no way to know how either of them would work out. I won’t know that for probably six months.

So that’s the biggest thing of I think the past seven months. Actually I never wrote about the decision to move down to the city or my experience in my little rent-a-room. I was at least smart enough I didn’t get a place with a lease so I’m not paying for an extra place or paying the fee for breaking a lease.  So at least there’s that. And it has been nice not paying $400 a month in gas for the last all of 2 1/2 months. Although I actually spent a lot more on my move that I saved in gas in the short time I have been here. So I may be looking at a net loss truth be told. I was really REQUIRED to buy a new bicycle. And the desk was probably technically optional although the desk I had would have taken up entirely too much room so really I needed a simpler desk, which is what I found.

The room I rented, and am renting, is actually quite small but I think I’ve done a more than adequate job of optimizing the space. I have the bed, the computer, the two monitors, even a little area behind the door for what I like to call the “tech lab”. And the closet is actually quite large even if I don’t always actually utilize it.

But that doesn’t necessarily matter any longer because I’m moving again, back to where I just got through moving from 2 1/2 months ago. At least it’s a permanent job and I don’t have to worry about the hour+ commute on a daily basis hopefully ever again. In fact the longer term goal is to live in a place within walking distance of the hospital so I don’t even need a car.

But first I’m going to make sure the job is holding and I make it through whatever probation they make me go through or whatever and since my sister has offered to let me live with her I may live there a while and well come next spring who knows what I’ll be doing or where we’ll be.

On a lighter note I have also purchased a few games in the last seven months. Which is weird since I don’t usually play games but I keep buying them anyway.  One of these games is Minecraft. Actually I’m already kind of starting to get sick of it. But then I haven’t even made my self weapons and armor and turned on monters nor I have done enough digging I have found some redstone. Haven’t made any mine carts either. I didn’t manage to make an under water tunnel made of glass. That was kind of fun project. It doesn’t actually go anywhere important, it was mainly like a learning experiment sort of thing. I was also planning to make a road from where I have been working back to where I began which is a fair distance across the map. The road was going to be a straight line through sand and mountains and probably six or eight blocks wide with storage chests and crafting blocks every so often off to the side. That was the plan. Eventually I would put in mine carts to make the trip that much easier.

I haven’t played with any mods or installed any special texture packs. I’m as much just learning stuff about it still right now as anything. I’m just glad I’m starting to make glass with some regularity. I certainly have more than enough sand it’s just a matter of finding coal which as I get deeper down mine shafts starts to get more common.

I imagine reading about minecraft is kind of boring so I’ll change the subject. I did finally buy a new laptop. It’s pretty nice except it can’t really play minecraft.  I mean I turn down all the settings to the lowest possible and I get about 20 frames per second. That’s not really worth it.

Okay one more thing: I found a special launcher to make Minecraft “portable” and I put it in my drop box. So every time I quit playing there’s my latest Minecraft world all ready to go. I also use robocopy to put Minecraft on my USB drive I always carry around.

Speaking of which I started doing that with my years-old portable firefox. Maybe I shouldn’t say why. Lets just say it’s easier and leave it at that.

I also bought my Mom a new laptop. She’s suffered through using the atom-based netbook long enough. So I bought her a $300 Acer with an AMD processor. Which means AMD graphics. Which I assumed to be superior to Intel graphics. But thing I assume everything is better than Intel graphics. Haven’t tested Minecraft on her new laptop yet. I probably shouldn’t be surprised if it comes out about the same. I kind of which I’d bought myself the same system as hers. If nothing else the keyboard keys are lot more seperated than my Asus system.

Oh yeah, my laptop is an Asus with a “Pentium” processor and 4 gigs of memory. I got it on special for around $350 down from closer to $450. Can’t really play Minecraft though.  Okay I think I’ll stop this post here.

So maybe it appears as though I haven’t made a post in seven months. Although that would be a largely accurate observation. In fact I didn’t even renew this domain until the last possible second even though I hadn’t backed anything in this up. Years of posts and I almost lost them all.

So why am I posting now? I don’t think I’m going to go back to posting every day or even regularly. I mean sure it would be nice to believe I would do that again but I have a feeling not.

So obviously some things have happened the past seven months or so but really the most relevant is my putting in my two weeks notice at my datacenter job. In fact yesterday was my last day.

I did this because I got not one but two offers for a permanent position: one back up in my home town that I just moved away from only 2 1/2 months ago, the other only a few blocks from where I live now in the city.

It took forever to decide which one to take. I just couldn’t find a black and white “obvious” reason to pick one or the other.

I  saw Tron: Legacy yesterday, but not at the Imax, in the “Disney 3D” or “Real3D” whatever. It was this relatively small theater or at least some of the screens seem kind of small to me. I think it’s a 14 screen or something like that. Anyway it’s a normal theater with a single “IMAX” screen.

I saw it with a buddy of mine who originally wanted to see it on the “IMAX” screen. I assumed he meant the REAL Imax in the local big city, the kind with the ginormous projectors and only two stadium sized seating theaters. The “real” Imax in other words. So I started calling the mini-Imax at the local theater the “poorman’s Imax for chumps” and apparently my buddy is really sensitive about that insisting it is a real Imax with the same sized screen. Load a crap I say. Load a crap. His reactions were really funny for some reason.

Oh and Tron was alright, not great. Really made me wish I could have re-watched the original before I saw it. Haven’t seen it in many, many years. Doesn’t seem like the kind of movie you just rent like Indian Jones or Last Star Fighter. It’s apparently not available any place either. Which is weird. Seems like they were trying a bit hard to avoid any Matrix references or similarities.  Actually it didn’t even seem that 3D-ish to me. Like one of those hologram stickers really. And I missed the first couple of minutes also. I would say see it in Imax, see it in 2D or wait for video. It’s one of those movies you’ll either like or not get.

Okay so it’s a new year. Last year I had the thing with the one blog entry a day which I kept up for eight months or so. Still getting comments about nip/tuck for some reason. It’s really weird. Anyway I haven’t come up with anything like that for this year yet. I don’t think I’ll do the blog thing again. Maybe just studying a little every day.  Or stretching. Something like that.

I’ve been trying to come up with this theory about where computing could be going in the future. Or I should say one possible course even if it’s not really all that likely to be what will happen in the future.

See first we have small devices like iPhones and the various Android devices with more and more powerful processors and graphics power.

Then we have this new technology called Lightpeak: it’s kind of a competitor to USB 3 I think but it’s fiber optic with enough bandwidth to connect all the devices imaginable: the video, the network, disk drives, everything on one cable.

Then there’s SSDs that are ever increasing in capacity at the same time getting smaller and smaller.

Okay so we take all these things together and here’s my theory: we have our primary device, a PDA/phone type device for lack of a better term. It is what what we would carry around and use away from home.

Then at home some kind of a dock that connects to everything else. Everything else being the mouse, monitor, network, storage.

Okay for the storage, as I said it would be solid state which is getting smaller and smaller. So if it’s so small why does it have to look like drives do now? Why a rectangular box that has to attract attention to itself? There’s no reason really. So lets say the home storage resource isn’t a stack of boxes that look like hard drives. Lets say they’re normal everyday things that are just on your desk already. Pens, pencils, the cup that holds the pens, and…okay I don’t know. But the point is the storage is all tied to some kind of surface, like those charging pads they have now days, that’s connected to the lightpeak hub or whatever. So that’s the whole storage pool, completely invisible and redundant and always there.

Okay so also you have an image of your mobile device always in storage that auto-syncs every time you connect it. Lose the device just get a new one, connect it and it’s identical to the last time you plugged it in.

Also, similar kind of setup in your car. Another connector, goes into car mode and it’s the brain of your car with the turn-by-turn and voice activated what-not.  And storage in the car of course.  Same sort of mirror and backup.

And for security lets say it’s all encrypted and can easily be made dormant if the device is last or your car is stolen or whatever.

And lets say all the storage is further mirrored online and devices can be easily replaced because it’s all part of a subscription that’s tied to your internet and/or TV, whatever.

Okay I haven’t worked out all the details. I think I have some cool ideas though. Not that anything resembling this is likely to happen. Just kind of a brain storm, that’s about it.

Okay it’s Christmas Eve and I’m writing in a blog. Not sure if that’s fitting, weird or weirdly fitting. Anyway I just watched Scott Pligrim vs. the World for the first time and all I can say is wow…wow. I happen to be aware of the director’s past efforts: only a little series called Spaced and a movie called Shawn of the Dead. And some other stuff too probably. Mostly he seems to work with Simon Peg. Or he did.

Anyway Scott Pilgrim is about the greatest geek dedication of a movie as I’ve ever seen. I just got through watching it and if I had time I would just watch it again. Or possibly buy my own copy of it on some kind of disc. They sell those right? Movies with discs on them? I mean discs with movies on them?

The in jokes in this movie are just incredible and in almost every scene. Actually spaced was a lot like that as well.

Technically December starts tomorrow, I realize.

Well to put it mildly it’s been a while since I posted. I guess the new schedule really through me off. Also, I started to play Starcraft 2. And then didn’t really stop playing Starcraft 2. I’ve played through the single player campaign twice now, both on “normal”. And have played against the A.I. a bunch of times. And did some co-op versus the a.i. as well. But not very much.

My new schedule isn’t going as I had hoped, mostly because I can’t always fall asleep straight away when I get home. I did get the schedule moved back a little bit, from 2:30 to 11:00pm instead. So that way I get home around midnight every night.

I still haven’t finished converting the WHS to a virtual WHS which has a lot to do with the number of hard drives I assumed I needed. Well I spent several hundred dollars I probably should have saved on four new hard drives. But I keep finding new options that distract me from this goal. And SC2 distracts me as well.  For example I inadvertently found this distrusted file system called GlusterFS that allows multiple servers to be setup with different hard drives and all of them to be administered from a single web interface. A large storage pool scaled over multiple machines in other words. I haven’t even downloaded it yet. It’s open source though I can only assume it’s free to download and try.

I had also about given up on FreeNAS because I was confused about how iSCSI worked and the file systems: I thought you had to format the storage via the FreeNAS interface and since NTFS support as “experimental” I be would be stuck with a rather large FAT32 volume. Now I’ve read some things implying this is not really the case. And since I have enough hard drives now I might be able to do some real experimenting with this. Although I should probably do this in a VM.

I did get this idea of some how mounting the iSCSI target as a local volume then mirroring that with an actual local drive. So everything written to one is written to the other. I’m sure how if at all well that would work though.

I’m sure there’s lots of stuff I wanted to write out that I’m not thinking of. But that’s okay, have to stop soon anyway. I did just finish watching the director’s cut of Kingdom of Heaven. To put it mildly it’s a bit better than the “theatrical cut”.  In fact I would compare it to another great epic: Lawrence of Arabia. It has some similarities. In Lawrence the main character is helping some Arabs break free of British rule. In Kingdom the main character is trying to defend against possible Arab rule. Sort of.  And this version of Kingdom is definitely not “action packed”. Sure there are some epic battles but they’re few a far between. Most of it is kind of a chess game and manipulations of the different parties leading to the final battle. There’s a lot of philosophizing about religion and what it means to a good person even in the face of brutal medieval  battles.

Okay one more thing, a new TV show probably very few have heard of: The Walking Dead. As the title would imply it is a show that revolves around zombies. Or rather the survivors of the zombie apocalypse. All the normal metaphors about living and death and facing mortality and the death of others apply alongside good fashioned arrow-to-the-forehead zombie killing.

It’s kind of weird the way the show works. I mean the show works but in an unexpected way. Ya, that. It’s more-often-than-not very “slow”. And yet some so amazingly compelling I still can’t stop watching it. I never really got into Mad Men but I imagine it’s something like that. It’s just made in such an amazing way even if any description of a given compelling scene will as boring as watching paint dry it’s still over the top amazing compelling. I just can’t stop watching. Really.

Okay well I don’t know if I’ll keep making entries but it was kind of therapeutic to write this out so I hope I do come back and write more.

Starting on Monday my new schedule will officially kick in: from 3pm to 11:30pm. Well really that last half hour can vary depending on the length of my lunch. If I could skip lunch I would but it’s some kind of labor requirement.

Anyway I probably already went on about this but I am hoping to be able to go to bed as soon as I get home around 12:30am so I can get a semi-normal amount of sleep and have a semi normal day leading up to being at work at 3pm. I don’t know how my sleep and eating schedules are really going to react to this bizarreness. But that’s the theory. So I’m kind of looking forward to it. I guess I’ll get up at 9:30 or whatever in the morning, have a normal breakfast, have lunch at 12 or 1:00 or whatever, go to work, have dinner at a normal 7pm and then when I get home go straight to bed having already had dinner. Right? I don’t know why I’m fretting over this so much it just seems like I am. I just have to wait and see that’s all. Just have to wait and see.

I’m hoping it does work out because at least I can, again in theory, do things like go on jogs or walks or whatever every day or nearly every day. I can study. I can do lots of stuff since all my outside work time will be weighted on the before work on end instead of the after work end like now.

Okay. Moving on. I still haven’t set up any kind of new server with a virtual WHS or anything. Part of me wants to some how transition all my current data on the WHS to the storage oft he virtual WHS but in a VM on the WHS. I doubt that made sense. Lemme try again.

Create a new virtualbox VM, install WHS, get everything patched up and whatever. Okay.

On the real WHS do a removal of one of the hard drives from the storage pool, I happen to have a 1TB drive with only 1% taken up apparently so it won’t be too hard, and start creating virtual hard drives for this new virtual WHS on that 1TB drive. Once several virtual drives are created and stored on the 1TB go back into the virtual WHS.

Create a storage pool out of these several virtual hard drives. So one big volume of virtual hard drives.  Then start transferring some data over to the virtual WHS from the real WHS.

Now for some reason I’m kind of paranoid about one of these virtual disks getting corrupted some how in which case there goes all that data. It’s probably not really anything to be worried about. But anyway I was going to figure out some way of duplicating those files or whatever to try and make that less of an issue. Or I’ll just copy the data so it’s not so much an issue.

I also started to put together another project for my OS installs. It’s rather extensive and I think I’ve obsessed over it before but this time I’m going to try and go out of my way to take it one step at a time. For instance I was going to use “VistaPE” to do the OS installing. And I would write a batch file and script the DISKPART utility to auto-partition the drive then restore a WIM for the prep of the OS install. Something like that. So instead of getting distracted with the details of step 20 I’m going to just concentrate on VistaPE, figure out how to make it auto-launch a specific batch file, scripting DISKPART, restoring a WIM, etc.

This way, keeping focused on one task at a time, maybe I can make gradual progress toward finishing which is always better than no progress at all.

This has indeed been kind of a long week. A long week that some how seemed to go by quickly. Maybe those two things contradict each other but it still seems some how right.

I think I’m finally starting to get a handle on some of the official things I will be doing at my job for real. I mean I learned how to fill out all the paper work for actually “kicking” a new storage server, so that was fun. I am still doing a lot of wiring in racks. I have to say, for an job in the “technology” field I certainly seem to be doing a lot of lifting and screwing and running wires around this way and that. Doesn’t seem very technology, doesn’t seem very technology at all.

I did find a booklet with the “Intel Xeon Inside” emblem on it which I affixed to my Thinkpad T60. That at least got a chuckle out of my team lead. See, that’s the sort of thing you find most amusing as a “data center monkey” – the idea of a Xeon inside your T60. To data center monkeys that’s fucking hilarious.

I did finally declare the Windows XP install for my land lady I had only been working on for two weeks officially completed and gave her the computer along with my unused LCD monitor. She seems quite happy with it which considering what it replaced (an original Celeron Dell with 256 megs of memory) she should be quite happy with the difference. I think the one I gave her was an AMD 3200+ with onboard memory and either 1 or 2 gigs of memory I can’t remember running XP. So Ya, a little faster.

I know I already obsessed with over this one several posts but I’m going to think about it again. But this time I think I’m going to “just do it” and I feel a lot more like I can just do it since I am done with the land lady’s computer.

And that’s the whole virtual WHS thing with data split up in to a bunch of virtual disks across several physical disks. All virtual disks of course mirrored to some of purchased or pre-packaged NAS device/PC. I can’t really afford a real FreeNAS device anyway.

So that Celeron with the 256 megs I mentioned? I think it’s the perfect teeny size for a NAS. Only problem is there isn’t really any room inside for hard drives. So I was going to do some surgery on an old backplane of mine that wasn’t working quite well then modify the case to fit the back plane. I don’t know how well or if at all that would actually work… I mean it would be a lot of surgery to the chassis itself. Not to mention this backplane would be going right where minor little things like the on/off switch currently are.  Oh and being an old Celeron of course it doesn’t have SATA ports. Why would it have something useful like that? Nor does the PSU have SATA power of course. That can be easily solved with adapters though. So there’s that. I do have an old SATA RAID PCI card I could use. That would make spinrite a little more complicated to run though. As I would have to take the drives out, connect them to a different PC, run spinrite on them for however long that takes and then put them back in. Probably in the right order. I suppose it’s doable though assuming I could find the RAID card.

So it’s the perfect size and shape I’m just not sure how practical it would be. One alternative would be to do the chassis surgery and stick a different motherboard in there. An ITX or atom board or whatever. It is after all just supposed to be a NAS. Nothing fancy. I mean it doesn’t actually need all that much power in the processor I don’t think. It’s just going to sit there and make some drives available.

So once that is all set up I would set up some kind of sync up system, possibly using RSYNC, there by having a mirror of all my data.

On actual server hosting the virtual WHS would be virtual box of course. I wanted to setup phpvirtualbox on it so I could have the server in a headless state.

….later

I just re-evaluated the old celeron box for like the 7th time probably in the past several weeks and reached the same conclusion: it’s not really of much use, period. No integrated NIC means a cheap PCI NIC. And apparently that means no form of PXE boot option. Also no USB drive boot option at all. I even checked Dell’s web site and there’s no BIOS update, just that original that it shipped with. So this celeron board is for intents and purposes completely useless. Unless I’m missing? I mean for a while there I thought hey it’s old maybe there’s a chance it would boot from an internal zip drive. Some how I doubt it. And even if it could…would be able to anything else I wanted? No, I don’t think so. I’ll have to find a cheap Atom board or other ITX or something like that. Too bad I suppose. Would have been nice to use it without spending too much on it. There’s still the issue of fitting all those sata drives into it, figure out fan mountings and whatever else anyway.

I seem to b more obsessed with this hypothetical NAS box than I am with the actual server that will be primarily holding all my data. But I guess there’s not much left to talk about with that. I’ll be buying a new motherboard I think with a new CPU and new memory. Most likely several gigs worth for the memory. The CPU has to be at least new enough it has that VM extension of course. And cheap, very cheap. So probably an AMD since they seem to be so cheap these days.

I wanted to boot off of some minimal host which would thereby not take up a lot of resources thus the guest OS would have that much more. I was leaning toward FreeNAS than towards some minimal Linux like DSL and now after some frustration of finding the right Linux I might end up right back where I started with FreeNAS. I haven’t decided yet.

The thing I like most about this VirtualBox solution is that I can shift around the host OS as well as the host’s hardware. I can use any hardware I want really and just about any host OS I can think of. And my server is just sitting there happily running. I’m sure the performance would vary depending on memory and CPU resources but at least the guest OS wouldn’t know the difference. This to me is the big advantage over VMWare/VirtualPC or the Citrix Xen/Linux kernel VM stuff: If the motherboard dies it’s okay. If the host OS crashes for some reason it’s okay. Because the data is backed up and I can use any host I want to boot the virtual server.

Also, VirtualPC only supports three virtual hard drives at a max capacity of 160 gigs each whilst VirtualBox supports terabyte+ capacities and I lost count on how many drives of any type you can specify such as IDE, SATA or SCSI. So to say VirtualPC is inferior feels like an understatement. And well I do have some kind of virtual machine server type of deal, the 2005 edition, from my MSDN subscription. And actually the version of server 2008 and is supposed to only do that as well. In fact it just boots up into Windows environment but only pops up a command shell. And I didn’t really get much past that point. I know the command shell pretty well but it’s not like there’s a wget utility in Windows or something. I mean how are you supposed to do anything with it to set it up or whatever? Obviously I was missing something.

So as as I was saying boot up DSL or FreeNAS or whatever which auto-loads and boots my virtual WHS. There’s my server and all my data waiting for me. The data backed up to a hypothetical NAS box also on the network. That’s about as I’ve gotten so far. That’s one thing I think I’m planning for tomorrow. To at least attempt to start this. I mean even if it’s XP has a host with nothing but VirtualBox running on it. Who cares, I just want to be able to look like I’ve actually gone beyond the obsessively thinking about it stage to the might-actually-be-doing stage. Okay I’m going to bed.

In my last post I was frustrated with getting some IE8 updates auto-installed during Windows install. For the few that that made any sense to I would like to mention I have in fact managed to add the IE8 install to SVCPACK.INF and added the four IE8 updates to the application install section of the Windows install. And now, and long looooooooong last, there is only two updates that come up when the auto-install is done: one is for the malicious software tool thing for August and the other is for the WGA checker thing. The only thing I haven’t added of course is some form of office. I think I’m a little exhausted from the stupid IE8 thing. Course it’s the new month and “patch Tuesday” is probably coming up. Unless it was this week. Whatever. Office is going to be like starting all over again with OS installs probably.

I was brainstorming again about my distant goal of  a fun virtualized server environment in which all my data is contained in virtual hard disks. I re-re-re-remembered why I’ll be using virtual disks by the way: because anything else and Windows would not be able to mount it. I mean Windows does NTFS only and Linux seems to have issues writing to NTFS. Reading seems to be more or less workable but that hardly does me any good now does it? And no, I’m not dropping back to FAT or FAT32. Move forward not back. Friend don’t let friends use FAT32. So on and so forth.

Where was I? Right. Brainstorming. I was trying to figure out if it would be a good idea or even possible to just kind of dynamically allocate a new virtual drive every time I create a new VM. I’ll be using (in theory) PHPVirtualBox to create new VMs and other-wise managing the VMs so maybe this wouldn’t be an issue. I was just realizing I can’t really create any OTHER VMs ont he server if the whole storage is in fact filled with existing virtual drives waiting to be filled by the virtual WHS unless there’s some non-filled up space leaving enough room for some other virtual drives for other VMs. A special VM just for a PXE server for instance. I haven’t figured out if that will really be practical yet. That’s what I was thinking about.

I have a long way to go before I can even start thinking about that anyway so it probably doesn’t matter. There’s the new hard drives, eventually building a new super-cheap-server to host everything and I’m thinking about converting a little computer into some kind of NAS to backup all these VMs. Well it’s a super-small chassis anyway with what appears to be a first-gen Celeron and 256 Megs of memory. I was going to try and use that but I’m not sure it’s practical for reasons like not SATA connections on either the motherboard or the PSU. And the PSU is way over-sized and who knows how old anyway. So I could add a new more practical PSU and put in a SATA raid card I happen to have. But what if the RAID card fails? Well if it’s setup right that won’t be the only copy of it anyway. Still makes me worry. Also, this little Celeron I don’t think can boot from USB flash or USB much of anything for that matter. Also, I wanted to add my old back plane that can fit four hard drives. After heavily modifying it of course so that the drives are connected directly to the motherboard (had some issues with it) and also to add some fans. But this little chassis just has the one 5 1/4″ CD slot and a floppy slot. Behind the Dell plastic outside is a cold hard metal inside. So to use this chassis I’d need some kind of machine shop to trim that little bit out and size it. Which I could probably do. And the USB booting issue? Well that’s still an issue actually but perhaps maybe, and I haven’t tried this period before never mind on the little celeron in particular, but I do have a really, really old Zip250 I kept for some reason so this little Celeron might have that capability built into it that it could boot from something like that. Maybe….? I mean if it had room along side the back plane holding all those drives. Or the “internal” Zip250 would be REALLY internal as in actually inside the case.  If there’s was room. Which there may not be. Something to think about over the weekend maybe or some other time when there is more time.

Today I spent an embarrassingly large number of hours trying to automate the install of IE 8 along with some related updates. So I would have as updated of a machine as possible when I do a fresh install. Using VirtualBox of course. I’ve got it done actually. Except for this one update, KB981332. I have it auto-installing during the Windows install process and I just double-clicked the thing and restarted the VM and still Windows Update comes up and says it needs to be installed. Still. It’s very, very frustrating. Only thing I can think of is that is must be one of those two separate updates by the same name thing that MS does sometimes. I guess they have to replace an update with a newer version because there was something wrong with the original.

There is one thing I can do though: there’s an update log recorded and left in I think the Windows directory. It says the updates installed and the actual download location too actually. So I’ll just let it install on the VM and then see what the log says. Then download the update as an actual file and copy it from VM land to my updates folder. Ya, that should work…

Of course, it’s not that big of an update either at 670KBs or whatever. So there’s that.

Well that did allow me to download the update fresh from MS. Then I renamed it and over-wrote it in my directory structure so I could make a fresh ISO and try the whole thing again. Doesn’t that sound exciting? Okay sure I suppose I should be moving on. I still have to fix the IE policy that apparently is making downloads disabled by default and figure where all my beloved .REG files went that did things like disable to stupid accessibility bar and turn off all the sounds for me. Also find and package up all the drivers for the computer I’m going to loaning my land lady.

Oh and perhaps I should mention that I’ve come across a new piece of computer equipment. Ya see I worked for free at this non-profit place for like four months at or near 40 hours a week. Well half of May/June/most of July. So three at best. Anyway there was a major screw up with their OEM vendor supplying monitors and long-story-short I now have an extremely nice 24 inch monitor on my desk next to my existing 24 inch monitor/TV combo thinger I have had.

I had actually been waiting for my even older 19 inch 4:3 monitor to die. But damn all the luck it works as good as the day I bought it three or four years after I bought it. I wanted it to die so I could buy a second 16:9 monitor. But oh look, I’ve come up against a new one on my own. And all I had to do was work for free for three moths. I need a “will work IT for…free….and monitors…” sign I can hold on a freeway on ramp or something.

So I never thought I’d be that guy looking at two 24 inch monitors on his desk like some kind of glutton or some other more appropriate term possibly. And I didn’t plan it that way obviously. I didn’t plan the eight gigs of memory in my computer either. I bought all the parts with six gigs then won two gigs in a raffle.

So at the risk of getting philosophical here does this mean I’ve used up and depleted all my luck/karma or does this mean my luck/karma is merely paying me back for the 14 months of otherwise bad luck?  I mean will this be balanced out by bad luck in the future? Pfff. I can’t think that way. This is all a coincidence. The memory. The monitor. It was going to happen anyway. It doesn’t “mean” anything. Right?

In between the VMs I was also trying to work with Damn Small Linux. I was originally using some even-more-stripped-down version of it in which the mouse and keyboard worked plenty fine in the VM. Then I found this ISO for “current” (actually called current.iso) so I tried that. And the good news is it is way more functional and workable with lots of colors and useful icons for extensibility the bad news is the keyboard and mouse don’t work, period, in the VM. I tried search on this issue and apparently either my google-fu isn’t much today or no one else is having this issue.  Maybe if I left it up a while or something. For the system to detect it. I don’t know if that work. Probably not. I really wanted to get this administrator package installed on it called Webmin to do just what it sounds like. But I couldn’t get that to work either. Kept telling me I didn’t have the right version of perl but also refused to update my version of Perl. No, not annoying. And I haven’t tried yet to install VirtualBox but I’m guessing that wouldn’t do much better.

Well I decided to try out the “IE 8 Admin Kit” and see if it did any good. Couldn’t do any worse right? Well it certainly asked all the right questions and has apparently generated a good install package apparently but I’m going to go to bed and find it out what happens tomorrow.

So I’ve fallen behind on my posting once more but I don’t really care as it turns out because I’ve been using the evenings to try and train myself or at least experiment with how soon after I get home I can actually manage to get into freaking bed.

Eventually, see, my schedule is supposed to shift to a 11am – 3pm time frame. It’s been two weeks at this job and this has not happened. Why? Because I guess the wrong guy went on vacation at the wrong time and he is the only one that can give the signature to allow me network access enough I can use a freaking laptop at work. You know, the main utensil that would make it in fact possible to actually do the job for which I”m being paid. Ya, that thing. Anyway I guess I’ll be going to work 9am to 6pm for yet another week and probably won’t have my laptop even then.

But I got distracted, didn’t I? Yes. My goal was to come home and go to bed as quickly as possible so I could get up at an almost normal time like 9 or 10am and accomplish things before being at work at 3pm. So I’ve been trying to practice this a couple nights this week and it never goes too good because I always turn on the media server which in turn leads to watching some Futurama or whatever episode in bed. So tonight I left the server off but wanted to turn on the desktop anyway to check my bank balance. And possibly check the web-based mail for my employer. Ya, I don’t have email access either. One of the many vital ingredients to doing my job. As long as I’m paid then whatever sure what do I care? It’s not like I’m volunteering or something. Although if I was I would probably be putting the actual skills I want to continue to hone into use as opposed to the highly sought-after skill of plugging in power cables and sliding hard drives into 4U chassis. Wow, thanks for that. Again, I’m getting paid so why am I complaining?

Of course it could very well be for all I know I’ll get my laptop tomorrow, learn the job next week and in two months I won’t remember that lateness of getting the stupid laptop. It will be but a very distant memory. Right? That would easily happen, sure. Or I would get a call from that former boss of mine offering me a position for more money and marginally closer drive-time-wise which I’ll have to take because…what? I’m actually contributing to this job right now? Really? I doubt it.

Okay I guess that was some good venting. I remember I was brainstorming about new hardware and server things. At some point I realized I probably shouldn’t buy a bunch of stuff two weeks before labor day weekend. There’s usually sales over labor day weekend. Right? So I’m glad I waited. Of course waiting for black Friday weekend would probably be even more wiser but I do feel like I need at the very least those new hard drives. It’ll take a long time to do the initial spin-rite-ing on them after all. I’ll probably do one at a time.

Then eventually a new server of some kind. With the VM CPU extension of course. And I’m starting to think I should move away from FreeNAS as the host. I mean if all FreeNAS is going to do is sit there and tell me I have hard drives installed (and possibly their health and temps or whatever) I could do that through Linux. And Linux as an official VirtualBox OE available, unlike BSD/FreeNAS. I’ll use WebMin, which I haven’t tried yet, to admin the box and PHPVirtualBox to admin the VM stuff. As for the distro I wanted to keep it light. Like perhaps customizing DSL if at all possible. I think it is.

I’ve also been dreaming of re-purposing this hard drive “backplane” I was using at one time. It allowed me to just slide drives in and out easily which was really nice but eventually for whatever reason the drives stopped being recognized by the BIOS at all consistently. So I finally just took it out. But maybe I can use that wholly or in pieces along side a “pico ITX” system I once had to tie all the drives together. Or something. The PicoITX system would then make the drives available on the network. And I’d be booting it off of DSL or FreeNAS or whatever and put it in some clever case. This would assume the PicoITX board had four SATA connectors and I could figure out a PSU for all the drives since the Pico one probably couldn’t handle them all. Well it was just an idea.