An Encapsulated Weekend

Saturday morning started earlier with a quick run to Kensington to get my hair cut, then over to Alexandria to help Skip & ubel_josh move into a new apartment in the same complex. They had already transferred one truckload before I arrived with the help of Jeff & Dave, Christopher and Heather; we shortly had several other truckloads of furniture transferred. Dale, Steve, Doug and zzbear joined in as well. In all, we had the worst of it done by the mid-afternoon.

I spent the bulk of Saturday evening attempting to upgrade the unholy trinity of Sendmail, ClamAV and SpamAssassin on my Linux box. While I can't say I made a great deal of progress, at least I've determined definitively some approaches to the upgrade won't work. Note to Novell: your implementation of /etc/sysconfig/sendmail is a neat idea but utterly broken. Please try again, kthxbye.

I called a four hour C1 dance/workshop Sunday morning & early afternoon to get our newbie C1 dancers closer to at-speed dancing before we unleash them into the greater dance community. It wasn't a complicated affair: we had only one square and took generous breaks, but it was probably the longest block of square dancing calling I've done to date and the first time I've done significant sight calling & resolution of C1. Our newest dancers did pretty darn well too, signalling verbally when we hit a call which caused hesitation or confusion so we could workshop it thoroughly.

As soon as we pushed everyone out the door, we dashed down to Arlington to collect Jeff M., then head to the Potomac Yards cinemas to catch the 4:25 PM showing of "Iron Man." It was a fun flick and Robert Downey Jr is kinda hot with the facial hair so it was a matinee ticket well spent.

Following the movie, we visited a Korean restaurant in Annandale, VA, which Jeff had researched. Good food although slightly more expensive than I was expecting. Still, Jeff treated us so I can hardly complain about that.

Once home, I made the obligatory telephone calls to my mother and grandmother. I chatted with Mom for a while but could only get Grandma's voice-mail. All is well, more or less, back in Canada.

From Sunday late afternoon, it has been raining continuously and, at times, very vigorously. There are flood watches in place until 2 PM today for low lying areas; some school districts around DC are opening late or have cancelled their classes entirely. 4500 homes were without electricity this morning. Our home is well situated to remain dry and our power remains on, but we've had intermittent loss of our satellite signal since last evening, the first time we've experienced that in years. I hope that the region's water reservoirs are now back up to par.

An Encapsulated Weekend

Saturday morning started earlier with a quick run to Kensington to get my hair cut, then over to Alexandria to help Skip & ubel_josh move into a new apartment in the same complex. They had already transferred one truckload before I arrived with the help of Jeff & Dave, Christopher and Heather; we shortly had several other truckloads of furniture transferred. Dale, Steve, Doug and zzbear joined in as well. In all, we had the worst of it done by the mid-afternoon.

I spent the bulk of Saturday evening attempting to upgrade the unholy trinity of Sendmail, ClamAV and SpamAssassin on my Linux box. While I can't say I made a great deal of progress, at least I've determined definitively some approaches to the upgrade won't work. Note to Novell: your implementation of /etc/sysconfig/sendmail is a neat idea but utterly broken. Please try again, kthxbye.

I called a four hour C1 dance/workshop Sunday morning & early afternoon to get our newbie C1 dancers closer to at-speed dancing before we unleash them into the greater dance community. It wasn't a complicated affair: we had only one square and took generous breaks, but it was probably the longest block of square dancing calling I've done to date and the first time I've done significant sight calling & resolution of C1. Our newest dancers did pretty darn well too, signalling verbally when we hit a call which caused hesitation or confusion so we could workshop it thoroughly.

As soon as we pushed everyone out the door, we dashed down to Arlington to collect Jeff M., then head to the Potomac Yards cinemas to catch the 4:25 PM showing of "Iron Man." It was a fun flick and Robert Downey Jr is kinda hot with the facial hair so it was a matinee ticket well spent.

Following the movie, we visited a Korean restaurant in Annandale, VA, which Jeff had researched. Good food although slightly more expensive than I was expecting. Still, Jeff treated us so I can hardly complain about that.

Once home, I made the obligatory telephone calls to my mother and grandmother. I chatted with Mom for a while but could only get Grandma's voice-mail. All is well, more or less, back in Canada.

From Sunday late afternoon, it has been raining continuously and, at times, very vigorously. There are flood watches in place until 2 PM today for low lying areas; some school districts around DC are opening late or have cancelled their classes entirely. 4500 homes were without electricity this morning. Our home is well situated to remain dry and our power remains on, but we've had intermittent loss of our satellite signal since last evening, the first time we've experienced that in years. I hope that the region's water reservoirs are now back up to par.

My Monday Wasn't Supposed to be Like This

I left work at my usual time this afternoon but the heavy rains slowed commuter traffic considerably. Thanks to some judiciously chosen back streets --dodging the flooded areas of town-- I still made it home without being too late.

On a whim, I powered up my office laptop and logged in to see if there was anything particular in e-mail since I left work. There was. Hardware work that was originally scheduled for Tuesday night had been shifted to Monday. Not a big deal, except that the hardware to be installed was locked in my cube and I had the only key. Damn!

The return commute to the office would have been pure hell at that moment so I had a brief dinner, took a nap and then, while kent4str and cuyahogarvr went to justetthon's C1 dance, I drove the other way towards Frederick, MD.

The night shift had arrived early so I was able to hand them the hardware directly and discuss the task list with them. We came up with a small short-cut for this particular project which will save some time later this week too.

( Click for UNIX/SAN geek-speak. )

I'll just have to keep my pager on my nightstand all night, just in case. If this works as projected, we'll apply it to the other SAN migrations scheduled this month and next.

I drove directly to the C1 dance from the office, arriving in time for the last half-hour of dancing. kent4str tapped out so I could dance with cuyahogarvr. Both cuyahogarvr and meinfs were dancing easily and smoothly. While our squares occasionally had issues, the problems were just as often by the more experienced dancers as by our newest ones. Declare victory, I say!

My Monday Wasn't Supposed to be Like This

I left work at my usual time this afternoon but the heavy rains slowed commuter traffic considerably. Thanks to some judiciously chosen back streets --dodging the flooded areas of town-- I still made it home without being too late.

On a whim, I powered up my office laptop and logged in to see if there was anything particular in e-mail since I left work. There was. Hardware work that was originally scheduled for Tuesday night had been shifted to Monday. Not a big deal, except that the hardware to be installed was locked in my cube and I had the only key. Damn!

The return commute to the office would have been pure hell at that moment so I had a brief dinner, took a nap and then, while kent4str and cuyahogarvr went to justetthon's C1 dance, I drove the other way towards Frederick, MD.

The night shift had arrived early so I was able to hand them the hardware directly and discuss the task list with them. We came up with a small short-cut for this particular project which will save some time later this week too.

( Click for UNIX/SAN geek-speak. )

I'll just have to keep my pager on my nightstand all night, just in case. If this works as projected, we'll apply it to the other SAN migrations scheduled this month and next.

I drove directly to the C1 dance from the office, arriving in time for the last half-hour of dancing. kent4str tapped out so I could dance with cuyahogarvr. Both cuyahogarvr and meinfs were dancing easily and smoothly. While our squares occasionally had issues, the problems were just as often by the more experienced dancers as by our newest ones. Declare victory, I say!