Got back from the backpacking/hunting trip this morning around 1am. It was quite a blast.
You can read all about it in exquisite boring detail (with pictures!)
here.
This document was last modified on
Got back from the backpacking/hunting trip this morning around 1am. It was quite a blast.
You can read all about it in exquisite boring detail (with pictures!)
here.
This document was last modified on
For those who are morbid or like to look at such things, here is a picture of
kurts wound.
The DVD drive on my DVD/mp3 machine decided to die. Very anoying. It
basically would play a movie for a few minutes, then sieze up
and stop working. Then I would have to reboot to get the machine
back. So, today I pulled out an old DVD drive from a old broken
machine, and it also turned out to be broken. Finally I managed
to borrow one from tkil ‘s machine
thats here. It seems to work ok finally. What a pain.
Here’s some pictures of
walking the dogs and socket’s graduation party
which I stopped by.
You ever have “one of those days”? I don’t usually. Most of the time I
have nice mellow days where I work on things that are fun to
work on and enjoy the company of my dogs and listen to my
music. Today was not a mellow day.
The other day my mp3/dvd entertainment machine’s main drive decided to
die a painfull death. Luckily it was only the OS disk and had no
mp3’s or movies on it. So, I quickly looked over
techbargains
to see what place had the best deal on a drive. Turned out to be
bestbuy. Ran over and picked up a new drive and put it in the
machine and re-installed it. Got things mostly resetup. That was
yesterday. This morning I awoke to the machine being locked up
tighter than a drum, so no music. Lots of work stuff going on,
so I didn’t have time to mess with it. I had forgotten how
Really really bad radio is. It’s mostly commercials. If
they are playing music it’s something you have heard about 1000
times. ;(
So, finally got some time to work on the mp3 box and then a gigantic
gust of wind came thru the back yard. This wind managed to pick
up my glass topped table on my deck and shatter it into about
100000 peices. So, out with a snowshovel and a broom to try and
pick it up before the dogs got cut. Managed to mostly get it,
but some of the glass fell thru the slats in the deck and wedged
in there. Hope they stay there.
Finally got the mp3 machine working and music back. Had a nice
beer. Had a nice dinner (cheesey rice and cajan chicken breast)
and was just thinking about what movie to watch or the like when
a client calls with an emergency. I try and call them back and
my cell phone doesn’t seem to want to work right. It says
“calling…” but after waiting for about 2minutes it’s clear
it’s not going to get past that to the point where it’s
“connected”. After a while get it all sorted and now it’s time
for bed. What a day.
Nothing to exciting to report the last few days. Just the regular
routine. Went down to therapy dog class wed night and had a nice
time. Took twyla with me this time and she really enjoyed it I
think. Thursday was
BLUG with dinner before hand
at fiascos. A pretty nice talk from socket about his mailing
list reasearch. Tons of possible things going on tonight: A BBQ
up in Fort Collins, a group of folks possibly meeting in boulder
for drinks/dinner, a group going to the Concrete Blonde show
down at the gothic, a group going to see movies. Of course just
staying home and relaxing sounds good too.
At 5pm today I take kurt in and get his stiches removed. He’s healing
up nicely. Still also looking for a dog/house sitter for
Memorial weekend. Hope I can find one.
Went up to Fort Collins for the annual meeting for
CGC. It was a pretty nice laid
back time. They had a Rekki/Healing touch person giving the
talk. Not sure what to think of that, but whatever works for
people. On the way back there was a nasty wreck on I25. They
called in the
helicopter.
Today was the
gilly girls dancing greyhounds team
event down at the adams county fairgrounds. Here are some
pictures.
I took a bunch more, but it was impossible to keep the camera at all
steady with all the dogs pulling me in 4 diffrent
directions. I did get to talk to some folks I hadn’t seen in a
while, the dogs got a ton of pets. Sounds like things will start
to gear up for the ren faire booth soon.
Since I am running the 2.6.6 kernel on my laptop now, I decided to take a look at
laptop mode
since it’s included in the kernel now. The laptop-mode.txt
readme that comes with the kernel has the approprate scripts in
it, so I copied out the /sbin/laptop-mode script and ran it. I
saw no mention of JFS support in the readme or the script
however, so decided to go look on the net. The
laptop mode
page does say that JFS is supported, but thats it. Digging
around on google got me a discussion about JFS and laptop mode
on the JFS list. Looks like JFS didn’t need any modifications to
work with laptop mode, it just works. So, then I did a
‘/sbin/laptop-mode start’ and a ‘hdparm -S 4 /dev/hda’ to set
the spindown time on my drive low and start laptop mode. Nothing
happened. To figure out what was keeping my drive spun up, I
used: “echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump”. That spews out every
process that hits the disk and if it’s a read/write or a cache
hit. Using that I fixed a few things: Set syslog to not sync
after each log (a – before the filename), closed some firefox
windows that were autorefreshing and writing to cache, setup
syslog not to log my fetchnews jobs on each run. Tried laptop
mode again, but it still wouldn’t spin down. The drive was
inactive as far as I could tell. Perhaps it’s an issue with my
drive somehow, so I looked around a bit more and pulled down
smart_spindown
which is a handy script that checks for activity and then spins down
your drive if there isn’t any. It has backoff so that if things
seem busy it will wait longer and longer to spin it down. Using
that script things spun down and appeared to work ok. Running it
overnight I was able to see up to about 10min of spin down time
at various points, sometimes as little as 30 seconds. I think
this might be worth the savings if you were really hurting for
power, but otherwise seems kinda pointless.