Archive
Adventures in the UK
Driving over here in England is “great fun”. I’ve actually gotten to the point where I’m comfortable driving on the wrong side of the road, and on the wrong side of the car. I can even take roundabouts at maximum speed! 🙂
The flat I’m staying at in Reading is across the street from a major mall with lots of restaurants, so that’s nice and convenient! Ironically there’s a Chili’s, Starbucks, Pizza Hut, McDonalds, and even a Krispy Kreme, along with a handful of other restaurants lining both sides of the river next to the mall, so a taste of home is not too far away. I’m still getting my morning Starbucks hot chocolate!
This morning on the drive to the office (in Kingsclere – about 25 minutes south on a bunch of back roads) we discovered a new style of music on the radio I’ve never heard before: punk rock with bagpipes. Only in the UK!
Well, back to work! If you’d like to catch up with the travels of one of Kaitlyn’s favourite toys, Milk Dud, keep an eye on http://novaks.smugmug.com/gallery/4450616_eVN9K#261634527.
IT Gone Wild
A la “Office Space”…
This is what happens when you get tired of servers crashing on you. You make a preemptive strike. This one won’t be bothering us anymore (okay it’s been off for over a year, but it still felt good after everything we’ve been through).
In addition to a couple screw drivers and a hammer impaled into the box, I discovered you can make a great musical instrument (a shaker) out of a hard drive. If you hit it hard enough the platters inside shatter into thousands of little pieces that then float around inside the case.
Don’t piss off IT guys. 🙂
FLD?
What’s a FLD? That’s a F#%$ Load of Disk. 🙂
We just put hooked up a Dell PowerVault MD1000 RAID array to a file server in our Spokane office. The chassis has 15 750GB drives in it, arranged in a RAID 50 array (2 sets of 7 disks in RAID 5 with a RAID 0 stripe across both RAID 5’s, 1 global hot spare). Over 8TB of online storage … that’s 8,000GB!
A Font for John
My good friend John can’t STAND the font “Comic Sans”. You know, the one that looks like this:
John – I give you this from Indexed…
PC vs Mac
I’ve been working (my butt off) to integrate a new company into our email system over the past week and weekend. It’s an ad agency so there are a lot of Macs around … which definitely complicates things and created about an extra day of work for me. I’m not a Mac guy, so a lot of my work has been trial and error with a healthy bit of intuition and a pinch of luck. That being said, I just had this conversation…
Lead Mac Guy: I just want to say we’ve had more Mac tech support around here in the last 3 days than we have in 9 years.
Me: Wow – thanks, but that’s sad because I don’t have a clue.
[banter about PC’s vs Macs…]
LMG: You’re just jealous because you use a second grade system.
Me: Better second grade than kindergarten! [walks off to a room of raucous laughter knowing he got in the winning shot]
To quote Toyota … oh what a feeling!
But how is the cornering?
“JCB Construction’s new 60 MPH, state-of-the-art HMEE, built for the U.S. Army and poised for deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan.(PRNewsFoto/JCB)”
Um … yeah. So evidently we can’t protect our work sites and roads leading to them in Iraq and Afghanistan very well. So the solution isn’t to better protect them, it’s to order a backhoe that can outrun the insurgents. I wonder how well this handles the Top Gear test track?
Anyone else see the irony here?
Tech meets Toys
I thought this was a great comparison of the current market forces behind competitive high definition DVD standards Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. KC is a HUGE Thomas fan. 🙂
…and a farting window
My better half finally updated her blog last night with a post about some things that she likes. Did you know a window could fart?
🙂
He said WHAT?
I was listening to some call in show on the radio here in Baltimore this morning driving to the office from our hotel. There wasn’t a lot of moderation beyond “Hello caller…” and it pretty much just seemed like a call in and rant show, with most folks dancing around various different radical ideas. It was interesting.
There was a caller saying that the Republicans are behind the push to computer-based voting machines so they could easily rig more elections, “just as they have been for years.”
There were callers lamenting the disenfranchising of voters because of ID requirements to prove you actually are the person on the voter rolls. Specifically one lengthy complaint was that it was too difficult to get yourself down to the DMV to get a drivers license, or even just a simple state ID card (no driving privileges, but it’s a photo ID).
The last call we heard was a rebut of this notion, and it was truly one of the best calls to a radio show I’ve heard ever. The main point was driven home like this…
I live in a fairly poor area of town … it’s the ghetto really. If people ’round these parts want to vote they can put the ribs down and the malt liquor and take a couple hours to get their butts to the DMV and get an ID. They don’t seem to have any trouble finding time to go to clubs or buy lottery tickets.
NICE.
Ouch – that’s gotta hurt
It can’t be a good sign for the Biden, Gravel, or Thompson campaigns when their candidates got fewer votes in New Hampshire than write-ins. Yikes!
Nathan's Occasional Blog 