08:34 – Cooler weather has returned to Winston-Salem. The high today is to be 73F (23C), but for the next several days it’s not supposed to make it out of the 60’s. Lows are to be in the 40’s (< 10C) for the next several days. Barbara turned the heat back on this morning.
More work on kit stuff today.
15:23 – I need to take a break. I was just running up a batch of labels for sodium hydroxide solution, which we supply in six molar concentration. Just for a little variety, I seriously considered labeling the concentration of that solution as “Caustic Soda – 2.0 pounds/gallon”, which just happens to be equivalent to the second decimal place to “Sodium Hydroxide – 6.0 M”.
Here’s that post about canned/pouched meats.
http://www.ttgnet.com/journal/2015/03/27/friday-27-march-2015/
Cannot get to my office today since we have a major natural gas leak on the only road to the office. Sucks.
Could take the over land route but wading that 3 ft deep bayou sucks.
The wife is using my home PC to get on her office PC using gotomypc. I don’t have an account so all I can do is check email and blogs. Three of my employees are at the office and working there but cannot leave.
@RBT, thanks! I wonder why I couldn’t find that. I really really looked.
@lynn, I was just thru the land 0 sugar. Had some business in Rosenburg. Beautiful day to be home……
nick
We got our road access back about noon. Just in time for lunch!
I was in Rosenberg yesterday with number one son. We were getting our fingerprints taken for our CHL licenses. They rejected my right pinky since it is at a 20 degree angle due to multiple breakage. The lady tried six times and it rejected each time so she thinks they will probably call me back for a retry. It was wild seeing all the scars on my finger pads blown up 10X.
The son passed through even though his left index pad has a massive scar due to a concertina wire incident (he was putting some out and it snapped and wrapped all around him).
“Elon Musk’s Tesla wants to power your car…and your home”
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-s-tesla-wanst-to-power-your-car—and-your-home-170638911.html
I have to admit that a home battery system is interesting from the prepper viewpoint. I wonder what the system will cost that can provide 20 kW peak power. Probably at least $1,000 per peak kilowatt.
Was it that nasty “triple-standard razor concertina wire”? That stuff sucks; you gotta use heavy canvas gloves for it. And still be wicked careful.
My fingerprints are also a problem every time they get taken now. And I need two more sets done, looks like.
Overcast with showers here.
Opthamologist sez I have a basil cell cancer lesion on my lower left eyelid so that’s coming off early next month. With reconstructive plastic surgery, too, all courtesy of the VA at a non-VA-affiliated site. Thank you, Dr. O’Brien, the 6’7″ eye doctor at the local VA clinic. Feels funny having someone look down at me.
@nick Google must not like to index the comments. Running a Google search on ttgnet.com for “canned meat” or “canned beef” doesn’t turn up that post. However, run a search on ttgnet.com for “molasses” which is a noun RBT used in his original post and it returns that day’s blog entry in the results. Makes sense. There’s a lot of comment spammers out there, so Google has probably tweaked it’s indexing robots to ignore (or very lowly score) the comments on WordPress sites (or it’s something the site admin can turn on/off).
Lynn’s link to a Tesla article reminded me of an Elon Musk related article I read earlier.
I found this a refreshing response to those business major douchebags that incessantly ask billionaires how they too can become billionaires: http://money.cnn.com/2015/04/21/technology/justine-musk-quora/index.html
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/census-record-51-million-immigrants-in-8-years-will-account-for-82-of-u.s.-growth/article/2563463
I’ll be 91 when Whitey is supposedly finally a minority here and won’t care too much.
Or…I’ll be dead and will care even less.
Otherwise, this is outrageous. And this is only “official” data. I reckon we can safely double these figures.
Also, most peeps are evidently gonna be morbidly obese, thus, more meat on the hoof for the starving revenants in the inner cities and their homemade vehicle axle BBQ spits.
@lynn,
I learned that the particular scar on my thumb is called a ‘stone.’ It’s a lump of hard tissue where a red hot welding wire poked thru the pad all the way to the bone. I packed it with neosporin, and when it healed, the new tissue was pretty clear. You could actually see in.
Apparently stones and other scars are pretty common. My tech told me it wouldn’t be an issue. And it wasn’t.
nick
BTW If I’m remembering correctly, no matter what you use for a biometric identifier, a certain percentage of the population won’t have that. I was surprised by the number being high. I think it was 4%. That seemed really high for something like iris pictures….
@chad, yep I figured something like that was at work. They used to have an option to search blogs (like the ‘search images’ feature) but it went away. I was really surprised that neither the embedded search widget, nor the site: modifier found it either.
I thought I was going nuts.
nick
Also, most peeps are evidently gonna be morbidly obese, thus, more meat on the hoof for the starving revenants in the inner cities and their homemade vehicle axle BBQ spits.
Racist much, sir! These peeps are all STEM graduates coming from India, China, UK, OZ, etc. You probably think they are all coming from Mexico on south. Racist! Comprende Señor?
Ah, then we are in good hands at last, sir! 50-million STEM grads from countries smarter than us! Outstanding!
Now I don’t have to learn Spanish after all!
Oh shit–harder languages….Chinese, Hindi, Australian…
Listening to some dance/electronic/something music as part of a Kurdish radio program from Moldovia. Fading and noisy but readable.
Almost 10000km. On 11.510 MHz
weird.
nick
Good DX to New Zealand on 15.720 MHz
And nice to have some news in english, although it’s mostly local politics and weather.
nick
I guess I should add that my ham transceiver on a 80M dipole sounds about the same as my 80’s era SW on an ~250 random length wire. I’m also getting strong canadian time standards at 14.675MHz with some fading now…..
Ah, bit-rot in action.
I have an automated backup process that has run pretty much untouched for years now. I look in on it every few months, usually when I’m in the process of making an offsite copy to stick in the bank. This time, I happened to notice that one particular directory wasn’t being copied, because the read-only link the backup software makes to get the data was coming up empty. Turns out that, in the configuration file, a comma had magically turned into a period, which was a syntax error, which meant that the directory wasn’t really connected.
Once upon a time, hardware errors were not all that infrequent. Today, hardware has become so reliable that it’s a real rarity to find a clear case. Mind, I’m glad that it’s rare, but there is a certain nostalgia for the bad-old-days when we worked a lot more directly with the silicon and iron.
The way I found it was by putting WordPress in admin mode, going to the comments, searching for “nick”, and manually checking each comment until I found the one in question.
Today, hardware has become so reliable that it’s a real rarity to find a clear case.
Just had a Seagate 2gig drive destroy itself. Opened the case and found black powder everywhere. The little internal filter was so full of the stuff that when I placed the filter on the table it left residue.
So I continued to disassemble the drive and remove the platters. As I suspected there was a major score line about 3/16 of an inch between the top and the next platter. The head apparently twisted and scored the platter. Continued to the next set of platters. Score marks in the same location. Next set of platters, same issue. It appears that all three R/W head assemblies suffered the same fate. I have seen a single head assembly destroy the platter but not all three head assemblies.
Something severe happened to the drive. I suspect a power outage even though the drive is connected to a UPS. The heads were in the middle of the platter and for some reason were not able to park themselves and landed on the platters causing the heads to twist. The UPS will hold the servers, firewall, switch and ancillary devices for about 45 minutes. However the University has had several long term power outages the last couple of months. Long enough that the UPS batteries get depleted and power from the UPS is immediately terminated.
I have no solution to that problem other than a generator which the university will never let us install as we are a tenant and not part of the university. The power outages all happened on weekends when there is no one here. Even if I go notified I could never here before the batteries are depleted.
Oh well. Not a big deal as it was a backup disk and I have another location that also keeps backups that is much more robust. This failed drive is sort of a secondary, worst case, backup archive that can be quickly removed from the building if necessary.
Ray, why were you still using such an ancient relic?
Ray, why were you still using such an ancient relic?
Sigh, should have stated 2 TB. But you probably knew that and are just trying to annoy me. Well played.
And speaking of relics (of which I am fast becoming) I remember my first hard disk drive in a PC, 5 MB and the drive cost a whopping $3,000. Wondered how I was going to fill all that space.
My first was a 10 MB. I bought an XT with no hard drive. At the time, we were selling a lot of XTs to different companies, and ended up replacing the 10 MB drives with 20 MB ST-225’s, 30 MB ST-238’s, or 80 MB ST-4096 Seagates, so we had a bunch of old 10 MB drives free for the taking. That 10 MB was plenty for WordPerfect, Lotus 1-2-3, dBase, and so on.
We was “early adopters.” I had a DEC Rainbow with two operating systems, two floppy drives, and no hard drive. Used it eventually as a dumb terminal to log into DEC’s data centers/server farms from home when I was a VAX/VMS sys admin for them. Also to the old Boston Computer Society bulletin boards; remember them?
Tempus fugit, homies.
Ray, watch my posts, you might catch me doing the same thing. Although you’ll probably have to wait for me to say gigabytes when I mean terabytes referring to an SSD.
Ray, most decent UPSes have software to shut down machines in an orderly manner…
Ray, most decent UPSes have software to shut down machines in an orderly manner…
The UPS does have that capability. It is an APC unit. But I have not figured out to get the single UPS to shut down five machines as the connection from the computer to the UPS is via USB. I can do it for one, but not for five machines. One machine which is a specialized backup machine with virtual environments where I don’t even have access to the OS on that machine. And that would still not solve the issue of the power to the external drive.
Ray, an array of boxen should be able to have the “master” machine (designated by being the one with the cable from the UPS) send a halt signal to the others. There’s probably a more sophisticated way to do it, but executing “rsh ‘shutdown -h now'” should do the trick. That’ll be a problem with the dedicated backup machine, but you might not be able to get it to recognize the USB signal anyway. I have no idea how to do this on a Windows machine.
Another trick that might work would be putting a USB hub between the UPS and the computers, kind of running it backward from normal use. I don’t think it would work, but it would be a quick and easy thing to try.
What about swapping out the big UPS for multiple single-computer UPSs? I understand budgets and squeezing more things underneath desks, but compared to your time dealing with the trashed drive, the UPS cost is small. (Though I also understand about the already-allocated salary money versus coming up with more money for new hardware.)
Finally, I, too, would have busted on you about your pathetic 2GB drive if Dave B. hadn’t beaten me to it.
Then again it could just be a typical Seagate failure. One sure thing about hard drives, they will fail. Not if, but when. Adequate backups are key.
In this case the virtual backup machine has copies of the files, I have copies of the files on a second machine and I have a copy at home that is refreshed every Friday. The one that failed was a convenience device where I was able to quickly find files and get them restored.
We had to do this with multiple Winblows servers hooked up to one big-ass UPS but it was years ago; the closest procedure for what we did is here, and we’d gotten PsTools from SysInternals before Microslop bought them out.
http://www.drennanit.com/automatically-shutdown-multiple-servers-after-a-power-failure/
Solutions vary with the types of UPS hw in use and Winblows server versions, but like I say, it’s been a while. The info at the link looks a lot like what we did.
In a couple of umpteen years, I do not think that we have had any drive failures due to power failures. We have had many drive failures due to heat or mechanical failures though. Dropped heads are never pretty. And several failures due to that magic pixie dust on the glass platters when those IBM drives first came out. I had fun throwing those against the wall.
I don’t even bother hooking up our UPSes to the PCs that they are protecting. We rarely have power failures that go beyond a couple of seconds (flickers).
BTW, I keep three LAN backups spinning at all times.
I was going to make some comment about not doing this if you want to expand to the point of having employees because it would confuse them. I’ll suggest something more devious. If you’re hiring someone who claims to understand chemistry, this might be a sneaky and underhanded test to see how much they really know.
Sigh. With “I don’t even bother hooking up our UPSes to the PCs”, I meant “I don’t even bother hooking up our UPS USB shutdown notification to the PCs”.
” I had fun throwing those against the wall.”
We had finicky tapes at the DEC data centers and on the night shift we’d all had major issues getting them to work for backups and restores. Once I saw one of my guys get frustrated and slam one down on the floor. I came rushing in and he looked all guilty and like he was gonna be fired; I picked it up and hurled it like a discus pitch into the far wall. Then we grabbed some more and did it again. We thought we’d cleaned up all the frags but the next day our dumbass fugly pig manager asked about it and said one of the day guys had found a frag on the floor. We played dumb.
Thirty or so years back we had a particularly stupid computer operator who managed to destroy a large number of mainframe drive platters and heads. This involved removable sealed platters and drives with heads. He kept shifting the failed platter around, destroying several drives/heads. He then put fresh, working platters in to the now destroyed drives/heads, wrecking them too.
Somehow, he didn’t get sacked (the union took his side.) Some people just aren’t meant for this sort of work.
The one good thing about just letting the machines power down on their own is that when the power comes back on the machines will restart on their own. That way if there is a power outage on a weekend I don’t have to come in to bring the machines back up.
These are server grade machines and are fairly robust running a server OS. I have never had a problem with the machines in five years with power outages and there have been about a dozen long term (as in the UPS runs out of power). The only issue has been the Seagate drive which is not a server grade drive.
I did have the UPS discharge it’s magic smoke one time. Came into work and the systems were down. The person that comes in early and was working said there was a loud pop and the systems went dead. Had to scramble to get enough extension cords to get the systems powered back up. The UPS was fried and had to order a new UPS. It was not cost effective to repair the old APC UPS. First time that has ever happened to me.
One time I lost the power supply (brick unit) for the firewall and thus no internet access. A new power supply was going to take a week to arrive from the vendor. Went downstairs to the electrical engineering department and got a lab power supply. Set the voltage and polarity to the required settings, set the amps to what the fried power brick was rated (just to protect the firewall), spliced in the power cord and ran for a 10 days with that setup.
At one time the older servers had multiple redundant systems, three power supplies, dual CPU’s, raided disk drives, etc. The one thing that eventually failed in all the machines was the motherboard and it was not redundant. At least Compag made the system such that a motherboard swap was less than 5 minutes.
An old (2008 vintage) PC had one of its drives fail on me. A SMART type monitoring tool started giving warnings, and over months a 0-100% reliability slider kept falling. I backed it up (twice) before the slider hit 22%. All of the falls were related to short term power outages. (The other drives in this PC were unaffected.) Then there was another outage and that was that.