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.