07:29 – The hospital discharged Barbara’s dad to a rehab/nursing home facility yesterday. The transfer was supposed to happen at 3:30, and for once it sounds like they got something done on time. Barbara left work early to meet the ambulance at the facility. I finally called her cell phone around 5:00 to find out what was going on. Barbara was too busy to talk long, but she said she was signing a whole bunch of papers. I hadn’t thought about it until I talked to her, but then I remembered that the same thing had happened when we transferred my mom from the hospital to a nursing home. And it really pissed me off, because I remembered that the papers they’d really want signed would be financial responsibility papers that would ask someone other than the patient to voluntarily assume responsibility for paying. Of course, they never mention that accepting financial responsibility is entirely optional. They’re just looking for as many “co-signers” as they can get, to make sure that the facility isn’t stuck if the patient’s insurance or the government doesn’t pay. And they take advantage of the confusion to sucker family members into signing these agreements.
Actually, these financial responsibility agreements should be void on their face. A contract requires a meeting of the minds, and it’s obvious that no family member who understood what they were signing would agree to sign. By doing so, they’re voluntarily assuming a potentially large liability that they’re under zero obligation to assume. Most people in that situation just assume that this is routine paperwork that must be signed for their parent to be admitted. It’s completely unethical for health-care facilities to present these papers for signature without fully informing the family members that it’s their right to refuse to sign, and such refusal will have no effect on the patient being admitted or the level of care provided.
In practical terms, this is unlikely to affect us, but it still enrages me that the facility took advantage of Barbara’s concern for her father by requiring her to sign financial responsibility papers that she wasn’t legally obligated to sign without disclosing that she wasn’t obligated to sign them. Bastards.
09:50 – I just finished the physical build on my new system, which is Barbara’s old system. It’s a Core i7 980X hex-core processor, which not all that long ago was a $1,000 CPU. I don’t remember how much memory is in it. There are three sticks, but I couldn’t see the labels, so they may be 4 GB or 8 GB sticks. Doesn’t matter. Even 12 GB is more than enough for what I do. I pulled Barbara’s old hard drive, labeled it, and stuck it in a drawer, just in case. Then I spent an hour or so vacuuming the case (an Antec Dark Fleet DF-85) and installing a new 3 TB hard drive. I’ll probably add more hard drives eventually, but that’ll do for now. I should also connect my eSATA external hard drive frame, which holds one or two standard hard drives. Either that, or I may just use the quick-swap bays in the case.
I started to install Linux Mint 13 Maya LTS from the same disc I used to build Barbara’s new system, but quickly realized that it was the 32-bit version. I’m downloading the 64-bit version now, but only because I want support for memory above 4 GB. I know there are still some apps that don’t work properly on 64-bit Linux, so I’ll just hope that all of the ones I need work properly or have adequate substitutes available.
Once I get the OS installed and make sure everything works properly, I’ll move the system unit, the new 23″ display I bought for it, and the other stuff off the kitchen table and into my office and plan the cut-over. I’m nervous about that because I have so many applications on this old system and I’d really like to get as much of the data and configuration settings migrated so that I don’t have to start from scratch. At least I’m running Firefox on the current system, so everything on it should migrate easily to Firefox on the new system.
I decided to give up Kontact/Kmail/Korganizer in favor of Thunderbird, so I’ll export the data from Kmail, including my contacts, in as many formats as possible before the cut-over. I also need to make a detailed list of all the applications I have installed for stuff like video/image/sound editing and so forth. I’ll leave the old system set up right beside the new one for a while, just in case.
12:57 – Well, this is depressing. I set up my new system with a 128 GB Crucial SSD and a new 3 TB Seagate Barracuda. I booted the 64-bit Linux Mint Maya disc and chose to partition manually, setting up the SSD as the system drive and the hard drive with a small swap partition and a large ext4 partition for data. When I told the installer to continue, it went to work and I watched the progress bar progress to about half way done. At that point, I heard an odd buzzing sound from the system unit. It lasted only a second or so, and I was hoping it was just one of the eight fans installed in the case. Alas, it wasn’t. That buzzing was the sound of the new 3 TB Barracuda dying. The partitioner finally blew up and said it couldn’t write the filesystem to the hard drive. I rebooted the system, and the BIOS told me the DVD and the SSD were now the only ATA devices present. Crap.
This drive is one that Seagate sent me as an eval unit a year or so ago, so there’s no warranty on it. So I headed over to NewEgg to look at hard drives. Not that I’ll ever again buy anything from NewEgg, but their reviewers tend to be a bit more technically-ept than the Amazon reviewers. I decided to look at capacities of 1 to 3 TB. There’s a 4 TB Seagate available, but that’s more than I care to put on one drive, and the cost/TB is much higher than for lower-capacity drives. It seems the sweet spot is 2 TB, so that’s what I looked at. I was surprised that the drive of choice seems to be the Seagate ST2000DM001 rather than a WD model, but so be it. NewEgg had them for $90 with free shipping, but I won’t do business with them ever again, so I went over to Amazon and found they had that drive for $99 with free shipping. Let’s hope it’s not DOA.
but she said she was signing a whole bunch of papers
Went through this with my aunt when she was placed in the nursing home. It really irritates the staff when you get there at 4:30 and take your time reading all the documents before signing the documents. I think it took me 1.5 hours to read and sign what I needed. There was also a financial responsibility form that I refused to sign telling the staff member that medicaid would be paying the bills and if they had problems with that to talk with medicaid as they are a medicaid facility.
If I would have needed to stay until midnight I would have done so. I knew from dealing with other agencies that people are out to shaft the family of the elderly to get as much money as they can, legal or not. The medicaid office even tried to claim my aunts VA benefit as theirs until I told them it was against federal law. They finally agreed after I threatened to have the VA call them. They knew they were not entitled but were trying to fool people.
The ambulance company tried to tell me I was responsible for an ambulance bill that was not fully paid by my aunt’s insurance and medicaid. About $280.00 was left that should have been taken off the bill. But the ambulance company insisted that since my aunt had the same mailing address as me, that I was also responsible for all her bills. They threatened me with collections, I countered threatened with a lawsuit if they did use collections along with a complaint to the state offices of medicaid for fraud. The ambulance company backed off.
It is not just nursing homes and care facilities, it is the state governments and providers that will grab for all that they can, even if they are not entitled.
Whenever I sign something for my mother, I always sign it with her name, and then follow it with “by Dave B. POA. ” Hopefully this makes it clear my mother is responsible, not me.
Words to live by from Ray, for future reference. It occurs to me that once the State gets its hordes of bureaucrats “enabled” to handle all our medical/insurance stuff in league with insurance companies, hospitals, doctors, and local and state government offices and agencies, the opportunities for graft and corruption will be Legion. Those with the money to pay “under the table” and evade various regs, rules and strictures will be taken care of to some extent. The most vulnerable will eat shit.
This will be parallel with what happens with all our retirement accounts and funds now rapidly diminishing in real buying power among a host of institutions and also being relentlessly plundered.
We’re all going to be fully drained of resources and wherewithal and any ability to resist and then we’ll become totally dependent on Leviathan’s mercy and justice. At least that’s the plan as the Oracle of Retroville sees it this fine sunny spring morning.
At least that’s the plan as the Oracle of Retroville sees it this fine sunny spring morning.
Ah, your usual rosy perspective on things I see.
OK, let me get rosier; the very nature of Leviathan is that he is a great and monstrous beast, slow, relatively stupid, blundering, and so forth. He most likely will not be able to consolidate his power fully in this huge country and therein will lie our own opportunities.
We’ve seen that much of what Leviathan touches turns to shit, and this is no doubt as true of his current goals and objectives as regarding us poor Mundanes as it is of his other historical exploits.
Be of good cheer, friends, and stout hahts.
Re migration of settings and such, can’t you leave the old box on the network and either nfsmount or sftp over to it to pull app settings as needed? Or did I miss something in the rearrangement of hardware?
That’s not the issue. I’ll have several complete backups of my old system, and I’ll copy my old home directory to a backup home directory on the new system. For that matter, I’ll probably just leave the systems running side by side. Getting stuff off the old system isn’t a problem. It’s getting it working on the new system that’s the problem.
For example, setting aside the mbox vs. maildir issue with Barbara’s old mail, I thought I’d at least transferred her contacts over. I exported them on the old system as VCF 3.0 format, which Thunderbird happily imported into its own address book. The problem is, the names and addresses came over fine, but none of the phone numbers did. That wasn’t a huge problem for Barbara because she has only a couple dozen contacts. The phone numbers were visible in the plain-text VCF file, so she could just enter them manually into the Thunderbird. For me, that would be a disaster, because I have a couple thousand contacts that are grouped in Kaddressbook. So I’m going to export my contacts in every format Kmail offers, which is everything from a couple versions of VCF to plain text to CSV to excel. I may have to export by group type and then import the same way to get the groups to carry over.
And that’s just a trivial example. Linux and most Linux apps use plain-text config files, but I have at least two or three apps I need to migrate that use BLOBs.
Robert,
What edition of Linux Mint 13 are you using? I assume from your mention of K* that it’s the KDE (64-bit), correct?
No, it’s 64-bit Maya with MATE
They’re just looking for as many “co-signers” as they can get, to make sure that the facility isn’t stuck if the patient’s insurance or the government doesn’t pay. And they take advantage of the confusion to sucker family members into signing these agreements.
Right now, medical care is about 20% of the USA GDP. As medical care progresses to 30% of the USA GDP over the next 20 years, things will get worse, way worse. There are some very tough decisions to be made by our country on who is going to pay for things. And, will some people not get treated or just warehoused and allowed to die. Sarah Palin was very correct about the forthcoming death panels but even she does not understand how tough it may get. And it is all in the name of money. Who is going to pay?
As a bonafide oracular guru, I wish to be on a Death Panel. I would like to decide which of the bureaucrats and overlords are overdue for warehousing and eventual euthanasia, after they’ve worked off their room and board, of course. I will wear a nice tan uniform with a colorful armband and spiffy spit-shined jackboots.
Wow, this is gonna be a GAS!
Bob,
I assume you plan to go with Linux Mint Maya because it is long-term support? Will you be able to get current updates on things like Firefox, Thunderbird, and such? I know a long time ago that Ubuntu used to not automatically upgrade to a later version of lots of tools; you had to upgrade to a later release.
Yep, I wanted the LTS because experience has shown that I tend not to upgrade in a timely manner. For example, my main system is running Ubuntu 9.04, for which support expired about 2.5 years ago. Support on Maya lasts through April 2017.
I was surprised that the drive of choice seems to be the Seagate ST2000DM001 rather than a WD model, but so be it.
I have not had a WD 1 TB, 2 TB or 3 TB caviar black or caviar green drive fail yet (if I remember correctly). We only have four of the 3 TB caviar green drives so far (two internal and two USB), need about six more to transfer all ten backup drives to 3 TB.
$99 is a good price for a 2 TB 7200 rpm drive. The WD 2 TB Caviar Black is $155 (we own two of these now):
http://www.amazon.com/Western-Digital-WD1002FAEX-Internal-Desktop/dp/B0036Q7MV0
I also note that WD skips 3 TB for their “Black” drives (dropped the Caviar) and went straight to 4 TB (with 5 platters!):
http://www.amazon.com/Black-Desktop-Hard-Drive-WD4001FAEX/dp/B00A2IM76K/
BTW, is your motherboard UEFI? You may need that for larger than 2 TB internal hard drives but I am totally not sure here. Definitely not for USB hard drives.
NewEgg had them for $90 with free shipping, but I won’t do business with them ever again,
Me either. Newegg ships drives in saran wrap and call that armored. I call it worthless.
The Ongoing Situation:
“I don’t want to hear about the black crime rate or the Columbine killers. We’re talking about immigrants here! There should be ZERO immigrants committing crimes.There should be ZERO immigrants accepting government assistance. There should be ZERO immigrants demanding that we speak their language.”
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/04/24/the-problem-isnt-just-illegal-immigration-its-legal-immigration-too/
“The Ongoing Situation…”
Sort of says it all. Send us your sick, lame, lazy, poor and criminals. We need more Democratic voters. Thanks Teddy!
Mr. OFD, I have to agree with you. We’re fucked.
http://www.humanevents.com/2013/04/24/the-problem-isnt-just-illegal-immigration-its-legal-immigration-too/
“Unless, that is, they have a college degree and bright prospects. Those immigrants are prohibited.”
Wow, is that ever true. One of my employees has been working for me for 18 years. He immigrated to this country from India with a Chemical Engineering degree from IIT Bombay (a premier university in India) and earned a PhD in Chemical Engineering from the University of Alabama. I then hired him on H1B status as he wanted to stay here in the USA. His path to citizenship has been a freaking nightmare and I’m sure that he has not told me the entire story. He had to have an immigration lawyer the entire way and even then there were major mistakes as the bureaucrats changed the rules and the paperwork forms randomly.
I set up my new system with a 128 GB Crucial SSD and a new 3 TB Seagate Barracuda. I booted the 64-bit Linux Mint Maya disc and chose to partition manually, setting up the SSD as the system drive and the hard drive with a small swap partition and a large ext4 partition for data.
Wait, where is your online backup hard drive? I always put a spare hard drive in critical PCs that has nothing but a copy of the other drives in the PC. I use robocopy daily to backup the entire usable drive space to the online backup drive.
I also use a rotating external hard drive once per week to get an offline copy of the drives. I have seven USB external hard drives.
I may be paranoid about data but I’ve been burned many times. And I do not believe in partial backups, incremental backups or deleting files off my backup drives until they are full (then I just reformat).
The demographics here are nearly as dire as they are in our foreign policy masters’ nation of Israel. The Stupid Half of the War/Money Party, i.e., the Repub imbeciles, are doomed. They can grovel before the Latino masses as much as they want and it will avail them nothing. Morons. And the less said of the Evil Half of that same Party, the better; they do not have our best interests at haht.
Lynn’s Indian employee is an example of what we *should* have been letting into the country and he could have been a professor if he wanted and ramp up STEM here. They made/make him jump through flaming hoops and then we let in the hordes, most of whom I don’t blame for trying to come here, hell, why wouldn’t they???
Now we have let a bad genie out of his bottle and he ain’t going back in it again; thanks so much, Teddy; I hope it’s nice and warm for you where you are today.
Side note: Coulter is generally right more often than she is wrong, but she can be over the top on stuff that don’t need to be addressed suchlike; also I have it on good authority from people who’ve known her up close and personal over the years that she is a real honest-to-God bitch-on-wheels and mean to folks. That may explain the lack of any long-term stable relationship with a guy, but who am I to judge? I suspect a triple bacon-cheeseburger with the works, a side of onion rings, some fries, and a jumbo mocha Fribble would do wonders, followed by a jolly rogering by the right guy.
I was responding to MrAtoz and got mixed in with the pooter stuff.
So I should get an SSD and will have to install Win 7 on it so I can then use my Win 8 upgrade on it, and stick it in this desktop; then backup my data files and apps to an external drive meantime and format this old-fashioned 1TB platter drive here and move the data and apps to it, right? While booting from now on off the SSD…?
Please excuse any ignorance on my paht; it’s Hump Day Evening and I’m beat and been on clusters and terminal concentrators and fiber optic stuff all day; also I’m getting RIF’ed next Tuesday with a bunch of other drones and we now have to look for jobs again, in my case after two years of busting ass and now nearly sixty. Gettin’ too old for this shit…
also I’m getting RIF’ed next Tuesday with a bunch of other drones and we now have to look for jobs again, in my case after two years of busting ass and now nearly sixty.
That sucks! I am sorry to hear that. There are jobs in Houston and Austin (which is still weird):
http://www.hostgator.com/jobs
Or in Pittsburg (where I host my website):
http://www.pair.com/about/jobs/jobs.html
Geez, I’m sorry to hear that Dave.
Not to worry, guys; I’m not; there’s jobs up here, too; since I posted my updated resume a couple of weeks ago because I was suspecting just this exact thing, I’ve been getting emails and phone calls daily. That should pick up drastically since I sextupled down on it last night here; interviews next week. The IT job market is looking fairly decent right now….
The bummer is not only leaving a place where one has finally maybe not quite mastered but is very comfortable with the infrastructure, but also during two years developing good relationships with a bunch of good people on the teams. I’ll miss my machines and my colleagues but will try to stay in touch; we gotta stick together somewhat against The Man, who loves to cut costs and is RUTHLESS about it when it comes to small fry like us, but blows it on utter bullshit elsewhere. Hey, long as the high rollers can still make their greens fees…
Condolences, Dave.
I don’t suppose sysadmin stuff can be performed remotely? I know a lot of it can be, but hardware swapouts and such can’t. I don’t know how that translates into employability with a company located in, say, Tennessee.
Update: Your “no problem, mon” message came in between my loading the page and submitting my comment. OK, good on ya.
Sorry to hear that Dave. Yeah, the big knobs know how to splurge on themselves but love screwing the little guys.
I walk out the door for the last time on 3rd May, and boy, am I looking forward to it! My workplace has being going to shit for years, managerialism gone wild. From 1985-1990 I would have worked for nothing there if I didn’t need the moolah. Now management just does stuff, buys crap software without asking us drones for our opinion. I *will not* miss Insight and Remedy.
Today was a holiday here, and I slept in till 2.17 pm… (smirk)
Sweet, Greg; I’m tempted to just walk myself but really can’t; I gotta work until I croak, evidently. Unless we win the lottery. Or at least until daughter is done with college, grad school, getting married, etc. Oh wait–there’s grandkids, too. Yeah, about when I croak.
@SteveF; yeah, a whole lotta sys admin stuff can be done remotely, but the deal with this job is that enough of it is hands-and-feet with hardware that someone has to be on-site regularly; additionally, we have various security clearances so those don’t just get handed out to any Tom, Dick or Harry. A Tamerlane, maybe, or some legal immigrant scientist from Red China…
I can afford it. I’m inclined to keep working, but I don’t need to. After I’ve had some time off I might look for another job, but only in Adelaide. Just be glad you’re not Italian. The wedding parties are gigantic and they don’t do things by halves.
I’m way fah from being Italian, but I’ve noticed over the years that weddings, receptions and parties, no matter the ethnicity in this country, have gone bonkers. Apparently it is expected that no expense nor extravagance shall be spared, with most of that pressure coming, as one might assume, from the bridal party/family. That would be us, should that time ever arrive. We simply do not have it, and it is doubtful that we ever will, again, short of winning the lottery. Princess will have to content herself with the same sort of low-key deal what her mom and I had fifteen years ago at this place:
http://www.oldroundchurch.com/
Two years later, after receiving the written permission/blessing from His Late Holiness, Johannes Paulus Secundus, we did a small blessing-of-the-Church wedding here:
http://www.saintaugustinechurch.com/history
Reception for the first justice-of-the-peace wedding was in the mountains at a ski resort B&B, paid for by MIL. Thanks! I sacked out early and everyone else kept partying into the wee hours.
Second small reception was at our house where I saw my late dad’s ghost eyeballing me through the sliding glass doors on our deck.
I may be paranoid about data but I’ve been burned many times. And I do not believe in partial backups, incremental backups or deleting files off my backup drives until they are full (then I just reformat).
Absolutely paranoid. Daily backups of the database to a separate machine. Daily backups of all the files to a USB connected drive on one of the servers, all machines to the same device. Daily backups to a backup machine, such machine being able to cycled up to stand in for a failed server until the failed server can be repaired. Weekly backups of all the data files from all servers to a second drive on my desktop which then gets copied to an external drive that is kept off site.
The backup software that we use “Backup for Workgroups” keeps only one copy of a file but pointers to all the machines that use the file. We can keep copies of deleted files and versions of files for months. Pretty slick software from Lockstep corporation. Been using it for 8 years or so and it just works. More than once I have had to recover a file from a couple months back to retrieve an old version.
The “warm backup” server stand in that we use is from Quorum Labs. The OnQ appliance. Had to use it once when a server went down. Stayed on the backup appliance for 6 weeks while new server parts were acquired. Took my time getting the server back up because there was no rush. The OnQ device worked as it was designed.
Cloud backup was considered but was expensive for our needs and I am still not 80% sold on the cloud as a solution.
Hey OFD, glad that your future is bright! Amen on that working to the grave. I just need more vacation days, about 100 this year would be good. I am still exhausted after the household move in Feb and we closed the sale on our old house this week – got money! Now to pay off the bills from fixing up our old house…
Cloud backup was considered but was expensive for our needs and I am still not 80% sold on the cloud as a solution.
I am thinking that the Cloud is OK for apps (google apps is freaking awesome with gmail being best in class). But storage of personal / business documents in the Cloud is scary due to weak security. We have 1.6 TB of data / stuff / precious items / crap on our LAN here and there is no way that I could get it up to the Cloud on our two merged DSL lines. Plus their T&Cs appear to say that they do not guarantee storage of anything. Big dumb drives appear to be the best way of storing large quantities of stuff still.
And even if you can find a cloud storage vendor whose technical chops you trust and who offers an iron-clad privacy guarantee, there’s no saying that the law or the interpretation of the law won’t change tomorrow and make all of your data open to inspection by any government organization without a warrant or subpoena being needed. And by “tomorrow” I mean “sometime in the past”.
OFD wrote:
“…I’ve noticed over the years that weddings, receptions and parties, no matter the ethnicity in this country, have gone bonkers.”
Yeah, my younger nephew got married last September, no expenses spared (but they only had two attendants each.) Her parents are loaded so it didn’t matter.
I’ve believed for many years that couples should just elope. I like the pageantry of a wedding to a certain extent, but I’m glad I don’t have to pay for it. The photographer at my nephew’s wedding was on deck from fairly early in the morning till late at night. The cost must have been insane.
“Two years later, after receiving the written permission/blessing from His Late Holiness, Johannes Paulus Secundus, we did a small blessing-of-the-Church wedding here:”
Does that mean, from the RC Church’s point of view, you were living in sin for two years?
“http://www.saintaugustinechurch.com/history”
I do so adore stained glass. When I retire I might take a craft course in making it. I love traveling in Europe so much because there is so much old glass.
People who trust their data to the cloud deserve everything they get.
“I do so adore stained glass. ”
Same here. At my old Episcopal Church in Worcester, MA there gorgeous windows, one above the men’s choir stall that shows a young man with a German shepherd. He had been in the boy’s choir (internationally known and oldest in the U.S.) in the late 30s and was an Army K-9 soldier KIA in Italy a few years later. Other windows were of the saints and several English clergymen of note, including Robert Grossteste, who did much for medieval science.
The parish where go now also has beautiful stained glass; I gotta get over to Europe someday before it’s been completely islamized and overrun.
rsync is your friend for backups. But when it isn’t enough in these days of big data, there are alternatives,
How to transfer large amounts of data via network.
.mg
And even if you can find a cloud storage vendor whose technical chops you trust and who offers an iron-clad privacy guarantee, there’s no saying that the law or the interpretation of the law won’t change tomorrow and make all of your data open to inspection by any government organization without a warrant or subpoena being needed. And by “tomorrow” I mean “sometime in the past”.
This has already happened to me professionally. The FTC filed a monopoly case against one of my competitors and snatched all of my competitive files using a federal warrant. The only difference is that I got to choose the files in my office. If my files were offsite then they might not need a warrant.