Ants on the Melon
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Wow, what a great day. I’ll fill in more as it becomes more concrete. WOOT!

Around 8pm tonight I noticed that my primary server at Rackspace was not online. Well, it was still pinging, but that was about it. I logged into my.rackspace and created a ticket for an emergency reboot (something I’ve only had to do twice in the 3+ years this machine has been online). Around 45 minutes later the machine was still not back online. This is not typical Rackspace support, but I know exactly what had happened. My account was marked as a “Racker Server” account a while back, even though I pay the full montly price for it and not the discounted employee rate. So I figured that someone saw this ticket come in for a Racker server and it wasn’t a high priority. Anyway, I called in and as it turns out they were working on it, but the secondary hard drive in the machine had died, and in the process of rebooting the BIOS was not recognizing the primary master drive. Grrrrreat. So I call up DCOps and let them know that I am coming to the datacenter to work on it myself. I got there around 9:30 and they already had the machine on a bench waiting for me. After changing out drives and putting a new proc fan in there, I started the process of repairing the filesystem to try to recover some of the data on the bad drive. 3+ hours later I finally finish and silver was ready to go back into the datacenter.

Tomorrow I have to migrate data off the bad drive on to the new one and schedule time for the bad drive to be taken out of the machine. I felt pretty confident that I could fix just about anything that could have been wrong tonight, so it could have been worse. Anyway, it was a good reminder of how comfortable I am with Linux. Even though I don’t use it for a desktop anymore, Linux feels more natural to me than any other OS, Mac OS X included.

It;s almost 2am here and I am exhausted, so I’m heading to bed.

A week or so before my trip to Virginia my mom called to say that she needed a new computer. Considering that her current computer was a 450 AMD with 192MB of RAM running Windows XP, I agreed that she needed something new. I really did not want to see her with another Windows computer, so I suggested that she take a look at the Apple Mac Mini. I also offered a few incentives:

• If she chose the Apple, I would help pay for it
• If she chose another Windows computer, she could not call me for help, but if she chose the Apple she could call me when she had questions

The second incentive was not to be a jerk to my mom, but simply the truth. I have no idea how to do anything on Windows, its been about 8 years since I last used Windows as my main desktop (6.5 on Linux and 1.5 on Apple). It’s much easier for me to answer questions for my mom and guide her through problems over the phone when she and I are both looking at the same type of system.

So after arriving in Richmond I met up with mom at the Short Pump Apple Store. After confirmation that they had everything we wanted in stock, we placed our order:

• The 1.25GHz Mac Mini
• An extra 256MB of RAM (512MB total)
• The Bluetooth/Airport combo
• A Bluetooth Apple Mouse, and
• A Bluetooth Apple Keyboard

The total came out at to $806, which seemed reasonable to me. So, we headed to Blackstone with the new toy and I began thinking about the networking at her house.

Flash back 4 years.

My mom and step-dad built a new house about 4 years ago, and when they were planning everything I suggested that they have CAT5 cable run through the house and into every room along with the phone lines. Even though they live in the country, they are just inside the range where DSL is available, so we wanted to share that connection throughout the house.

When I worked at Spire Network Services in New Orleans I was introduced to a project called Coyote Linux. Coyote Linux is a real nice little distribution that runs from a 3.5 floppy and provides routing, nat, dhcpd and several other services to your local network. When I moved back home to Virginia from New Orleans in August 2002 I dug up an old 486, popped two Netgear NICS in it, connected one to the DSL and the other to a 3Com hub, and put the machine in the bottom of the kitchen closest where the DSL connection terminated. Because Coyote runs from a floppy, it makes it very easy to make a read only environment. You basically configure everything the way you want, “backup” to the floppy, flip the “read-only” tab, and pop it in the disk drive. If the power ever goes out then the machine just boots right back up. At that point in time I had to make some customizations to the Coyote disk regarding the kernel modules for the NICs, and the documentation I wrote is still online.

So when we arrived in Blackstone with the Mac Mini I tried to hook it up to the existing network, but I ran into a few issues. I am not sure why, but for some reason I had a big problem with DHCP back in the day. I had actively disabled it on the Coyote machine when I set it up, and for another reason that I can’t remember, I chose weird sizes for the network range. The network was set to 192.168.2.0/29, and the hard coded DNS servers were apparently no longer online. Sigh. So, I messed with the Coyote machine for a while until I overwrote the disk with a non-working configuration. Double Sigh. At this point (10:30pm EDT after waking up at 4:30 CDT with 3 hours of sleep and taking 2 flights) I decided it would be a good time to retire the old 486. Plan B: I hopped in mom’s car, drove to Wal-Mart and picked up a Linksys wireless router for $50+. About 30 minutes later I had everything working and the Mini was online via its Airport card, Beautiful.

Another thing that is amazing is the Bluetooth integration. When I took the Mac Mini out of the box, the Bluetooth keyboard and mouse worked immediately, during the initial boot even. This sort of thing really impresses me.

And the best part of all is that I now have wireless access when I travel home.

Earlier this week I heard a song on KNBT that I really liked, but I never heard the DJ say the name or artist. It had something to do with an “Okie from Muskogee.”

This evening I was riding in my trucking listening to KNBT again and they had guests in the studio performing live on the radio. I really liked what I was hearing, and eventually they said the guests were Chip Taylor & Carrie Rodriguez. The DJ asked them to play one more, and requested “Angel of the Morning.” I know this song from The Pretenders and I really like it, so I was excited to hear these two perform it. Well, before he began playing Chip told the story of how he wrote “Angel of the Morning” around the same time in the 1960′s that he wrote “Wild Thing.” Huh? The person who is singing these soft folk songs is the same person who wrote “Wild Thing?” Anyway, they started playing “Angel of the Morning” and I was amazed. I had long since arrived at my apartment, but I was still sitting in my truck to hear the remainder of the song. After it was over the DJ announced that Chip and Carrie were about to head over to Gruene Hall for their performance. It took less than a second for me to decide that I would be driving to Gruene this afternoon.

I arrived up there around 7:30 or so, grabbed a Lone Star and found a spot to stand and watch the show. There were not that many people there, but a decent Sunday evening sized crowd, which is the way I prefer it. Along with Chip and Carrie were John Platania with his strat and another guy playing an electric bass. As it turns out, the guy playing bass had never heard any of the songs he was playing, Chip met him that afternoon, and he did a very good job, it was quite impressive. John is an amazing lead guitarist and kept a metal slide on his pinky finger the whole show, he played some beautiful riffs.

The crowd was really into the show and very enthusiastic, but things got even better when the band starting playing “Wild Thing.” As they starting playing this song I had no idea which direction it would go. Would they turn rock-and-roll? Would they play a calm and quiet version of it? No, it was like something I had never seen. The song lasted probably 8 or 9 minutes with Chip slowing it down to talk to the audience and then turning it back up to get everyone to sing along. At one point Carrie lit into her fiddle and played about 25 second lead. I immediately got cold chills, it was probably the most awesome 25 seconds of live music I have ever seen: a hot fiddle leading a folksy-bluesy version of “Wild Thing.” I would love to find out that someone was recording that.

Anyway, they played a few more songs and then Chip says that the next song is a good way to end the set. As soon as they started playing I recognized the song, it was the one I had heard on KNBT earlier in the week! It’s named “I Wasn’t Born in Tennessee.”

I came home and ordered 3 of Chip and Carrie’s CD’s from Amazon.com.

Chip, Carrie and John all have interesting histories. Chip has been a songwriter, a professional golfer, and a professional gamber (so successful that he was not allowed in any Atlantic City casinos). Check out each of their profiles:

• Chip Taylor
• Carrie Rodriguez
• John Platania

If they are in your area I would definitely recommend seeing them.

So it’s been a while since I have posted anything, but I have been out of town and have been really busy, so here’s an update.

I flew to Virginia on the 26th of May to attend my cousins wedding. It was good to see my family, many of whom I have not seen in several years. The wedding was held at The Stony Point School, which is really very nice and has an interesting history.

Dad and I went fishing on Friday evening, which was a lot of fun. I didn’t catch anything, but I wasn’t really trying. Later that weekend we watched Napoleon Dynamite, which I had been telling them about for a long time. I really love that movie.

I left Virginia on Monday evening and headed down to Atlanta for a few days of contract work and hanging out with Brian. I love those trips because I actually get to be 100% productive, non-stop 10-12 hours a day, and it feels great. I wish I could figure out a way for my regular work to be that interesting. It’s also great hanging out with Brian. Tuesday night we started talking finance and before either of us knew it 4 hours had passed and it was 1:00am, that was a lot of fun.

I made it back to San Antonio in time to see the dance that Alana choreographed for me. The dance was to The Hot Club of Cowtown’s version of “Deed I Do”, and it was really awesome.

I also got my mom a new computer while I was in Virginia, but I will talk more about that in another post.