baby steps
Posted by mcummings
That's right 
Thursday afternoon I got back to my desk at work to see a high priority email from my wife - Tara had just taken her first steps, on purpose! A mad dash home (dash being an exaggeration - this is northern Virginia traffic after all), and sure enough, there's my little Tara trying to walk. I don't think she's managed to string together more than 4 or 5 steps at a time all together, mostly just a few steps and a pivot, but she's trying as hard as she can, despite her sisters 'helping.' Makes a daddy-o proud, it does
Hiatus of sorts
Posted by mcummings
It's no secret you don't see me around the old watering holes any more. The truth of the matter, and this has been a little while in the making, is that lately my heart just hasn't been in working with Gentoo. I'm taking a bit of a hiatus while I decide on the plunge and direction I want to take. Trustee duties remain, at least until the next election, but I let the perl team folks know earlier this week that I was going to be going offline for a little while. Bah. Just sharing in case anyone has any burning /msg's waiting to fire at me the second I hop on irc
On usb drives (not sticks)
Posted by mcummings
Over the course of the last few weeks, I've had an opportunity to examine (the hard way) a few different external hard drive vendors. Up for a quick review are the lacie drive, the seagate freeagent, and the maxtor basics.
The lacie drive sets itself aside first and foremost because it comes formatted vfat. You may not think that that's too desirable, but it's a filesystem that both linux and your average windows friend's desktop can read without issue. Personally, I think the "designed by F.A.Porsche" cases are ugly - but their stackability had me out looking for a second before I had to concede that they were getting pulled from the market. I've been running with my 250gig lacie for about 6 months now, and I have no complaints.
Next up is the seagate freeagent. The first downside on this drive is that it comes formatted for ntfs. That's overcomeable, but the second annoyance with it is that it has this 'great technology' to spin down the drive to reduce power consumption. The side effect is that after a short period of inactivity, despite being listed as mounted the drive is really offline and needs to be unmounted and mounted again. Not really ideal for my purposes, which is to have external storage for my myth box. There is a work around to disable this feature, and I have plans for it on my desktop (and am thankfull I have it), but not really a solution for external video storage on my mythbox. I say the workaround isn't really a solution in this scenario because the workaround relies on knowing which usb device it will attach as - and on a reboot, while reality says it will always come as device foo, technically it all depends on which usb device gets loaded first.
Last up is the maxtor basics. Starts off with the same annoyance as the freeagent, namely that it comes ntfs formatted, but that's really the end of my complaints. Unlike the freeagent, it doesn't attempt to turn itself off, so once mounted, its available until unmounted (what a novel concept).
Final caveat to the intrepid shopper - if you really need 500 gigs, then a 500 gig drive will be too small. Technically I have a terrabyte in external storage sitting next to my keyboard (a shiny new saitek eclipse II - very sweet and nice). The reality is I have closer 900 gigs, because a good 100gigs gets lost between the three drives in things like filesystem tables, etc. This isn't specific to the external drives, but just a general reminder about drive space vs. drive space allocation.
Have fun kids
Connection woes resolved
Posted by mcummings
Before I go through and respond to the nice folks (and bulldog 
who responded to my inbound access problem, the answer turned out to be my router (again). Switching to a backup router verified this - I was able to ssh in immediately again. Of course, it was a really old router, so things like streaming myth across the network were trashed, but it worked for a few days until I got my new shiny netgear in place (man, i love that router/firewall). i'm definitely getting less and less enchanted by linksys, which in recent years seems to be going steadily downhill in terms of quality of product, and steadily in favor of netgear, which I now have two routers from (print server and access point), both of which work like awesome champs.
Yes, squirrel’s lay eggs
Posted by mcummings
A squirrel visited us this evening, foraging for nuts she had buried in the backyard who knows how long ago, obvious signs that she had had babies recently. She walked up to the back glass door and stared at our girls as she cracked the nuts from last year and pushed the nut meat into her cheeks.
My wife and I have three daughters, which means our oldest daughter has seen Mommy go from a normal shape and size, to something my wife refers to as a the shape of a balloon and the size of a house (her words, I'm not that ballsy). Our oldest daughter has seen her mother's tummy swell, and then go down again as a new sister has joined us.
So how do we answer the question, do squirrel's lay eggs? We tried explaining no, but the questions got more detailed than we're ready to explain to a five year old. So yes, squirrel's lay eggs, and I'll give you a fat lip if you tell her otherwise