i got my boltz tv stand on tuesday. i put it together and moved everything onto it but the tv. jack came over wednesday night and helped me with the tv. man, that tv is freaking heavy. now the stand for my tv cost more than the tv itself. and by a decent amount. that’s kind of funny. but i think the stand looks good, and it should last through the upcoming nuclear holocaust.
thursday after work i went over to jack’s office and started doing some work on the linux file server i’d built out for him. he’s got an 8-drive 1.8 terabyte raid volume on it, and he wanted to set up 4 more independent drives to do backups onto. his case is a server design with 12 5.25″ bays in the front, and he’s got 3 sata rail enclosures that each hold 4 3.5″ drives. they’re pretty slick. and since sata is hot-pluggable, it’s pretty cool to be able to pull and plug them while the system is up. he needed to get data off of one of them before i wiped it, so we dropped by microcenter. we picked up a pretty cool external usb 2.0 drive connector. it has connections for sata, 3.5″, and 2.5″ drives. we also picked up a belkin 2-port kvm switch so he can use his mac keyboard, video, and mouse for the linux server. i had a coupon from microcenter, so i picked up a 2-gig kingston flash drive for free. (quite an upgrade from my current one — a 64 meg.) we hooked up the kvm, transferred the data, and i fdisk’ed and mkfs’ed the drives. i had realized before that the device names for the sata and raid drives might change if they are being added and removed, so while poking around online i figured out how to set disk labels and use them in the fstab file. that’s a nice thing. we got it all done and i rebooted the system just to make sure everything would mount in the right places…and it hung on boot while looking at the new drives. we played around with thing and figured out it was hanging on a 750 gig drive. even though it’d seen it and mounted it okay while the system was up, it couldn’t boot with it plugged in. it was already 3am or so, so i gave up for the evening. doing some research on friday, i think the problem is the sil3114 sata controller’s raid feature. i’m planning on disabling the raid ability (which we aren’t using on those drives) and seeing if it boots okay. once that’s taken care of, then i can start crafting the rsync jobs to do backups from the raid volume to the individual disks.
i watched the graduate last night at the potts’ house. i saw it back in 1991 or so, but i was tired that night and i don’t really remember it. i really, really don’t like the music of simon and garfunkle. it’s the one thing i’d definitely change about the movie. but the actors in it, the filming, the transfer from book to screen — all good. speaking of the book…
i read the book in the fall of 1994. i had graduated from college and — having no job — had moved back home to my parents’ house in a small, rural, Texas town. i had no direction or purpose, and was sort of just existing, trying to figure out what i was going to do. i was working from time to time at my parents’ antique store, and they had a bunch of books. bored, i went through them — mostly romance novels and worthless crap — and picked about three books of merit. of those, i read the graduate. it was odd, because i strongly identified with the character and his life situation at first, then suddenly he would do something crazy. then he’d be normalish again, and i’d once again find myself identifying with him. then he’d do something crazy again. considering i could identify with so much, it made me sort of paranoid about what might happen in my own life. but i never had an affair with an older married woman, nor fell in love with her daughter and stalked her to graduate school. (though considering how my life has gone, perhaps it’d been just as well if i had.)
anyway, back to the movie. from how i remember the book, the movie did a good job of staying with it. they had some really cool shots and filming techniques too. i can see why the movie has appeal. even if it has simon and garfunkle music. i really do wish the movie would have included what was one of my favorite parts of the book though, which is when benjamin (hoffman) — during the middle of his directionless summer, concerned only with drinking beer and watching tv — decides to go fight a huge forest fire with the indian firefighters. his return home and the conversation with his father is priceless.
Skip to content
failure is not an option. it's a requirement.