Downs and Ups

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In one sense, it was a really bad week. Hours after I posted last Sunday, I became violently ill, almost certainly due to something I ate. After about 24 hours, I was able to start re-hydrating, and taking in such challenging foods as soda crackers (in small quantities – I had ten crackers, all of Tuesday). Wednesday was slightly better, and that night I slept through the night. So I went to my one day of work on Thursday, and got enough done.

The upside of the week was Capclave, which I attended on Friday and Saturday. It was going on today as well, but I am still not fully recovered, and decided to lump Sunday and holiday Monday together into another period of recuperation instead.

Capclave was, just like last year, awesome. I had a lot of fun hanging out with a bunch of really smart people, many of whom write F&SF or work with writers, from editors to artists to publishers. Clearly, I’d get even more out of the conference were I in the biz, but time for that sometime later. Because I’m not nearly as much of a George R. R. Martin fan, I was able to spend more time learning about new writers, and other fun stuff. Last year, with John Scalzi as GoH, I frankly spent more time in squee mode, to the detriment of the balance of my conference. Capclave peeps, I thank you for a wonderful Con, and I’m already looking forward to next year.

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Mmmm, rain. I almost left this out. Since last Monday, we’re just shy of 5 inches of rain in our back yard. That brings our 11-1/2 month total to 44.06 inches, just over the 30-year annual mean rainfall for our area.

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My message to Congress: Do Your Freaking Job!

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Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • Lance Cpl. Jeremiah M. Collins, Jr., 19, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, died Oct. 5 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
  • 1st Lt. Jennifer M. Moreno, 25, of San Diego, California, died Oct. 6, in Zhari District, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained when enemy forces attacked her unit with an improvised explosive device.
  • Sgt. Patrick C. Hawkins, 25, of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, died Oct. 6, in Zhari District, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device.
  • Sgt. Joseph M. Peters, 24, of Springfield, Missouri, died Oct. 6, in Zhari District, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device.
  • Pfc. Cody J. Patterson, 24, of Philomath, Oregon, died Oct. 6, in Zhari District, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device.
  • Spc. Angel L. Lopez, 27, of Parma, Ohio, died Oct. 5, in Zabul province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with small arms fire.

Fall II = Summer?

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Hmmm. Six plus hours working in the yard yesterday, and nearly broken as a result. Why? It was nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit  out. I was slamming the H2O and got through it. The garden beds are cleared, turned and mulched with leaves harvested from the front yard:

Gardens put to bed before winter

Gardens put to bed before winter

After that was done, I mowed both front and back.

Today I got the shopping done, then roasted coffee and cut my hair, and wrapped the day’s chores by washing the car. That’ll bring rain. I should probably wash the car more often if it does, since we’ve had only about 3/4″ or so since late June.

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Many of the evenings recently, I’ve been working my way through Michael Jang’s RHCSA/RHCE certification study guide. While I’ve been using Linux for a long time – about 18 years now – there’s lots of features that I don’t know because I don’t use them. I want to know more both because I might learn something actually useful in my day-to-day work, and because the certification will be useful to the business when it comes to proposal responses and such. Right now I’m about a quarter of the way through the book. I’m taking my time and doing even the stuff that seems obvious on the face of it, because there are likely details I’ll want to grok. Michael Jang knows his stuff and communicates it well – Recommended!

My other connection to Michael Jang is this book: Linux Transfer for Windows Network Admins: A Roadmap for Building a Linux File Server. You can see that while Michael is listed on the cover, Amazon still lists me as the author of the book. I was in negotiations to write that, but declined to sign a contract that required me to write the book on spec with no advance. I hope the book did well for Michael.

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I have no condolences to offer for fallen warriors this week, as DoD hasn’t claimed any casualties in the last week. It’s possible that reporting is sluggish due to staffing issues during the US Government shutdown. But let us hope for the best – that there were no US casualties to report in the last week.

 

Fall Yard Work

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Yesterday I worked in the front yard, cleaning out some stuff from the beds, giving all the shrubs a haircut, and mowing the grass. I found this bird’s nest while I pruned the forsythia, and want to know if there’s a recipe. This isn’t, I think, the right type for bird’s nest soup. To give you a sense of scale, this would comfortably hold but one golf ball…

Bird's Nest. Soup?

Bird’s Nest. Soup?

Today, I worked in the back yard. I pulled out about 10 pounds of potatoes, a couple of shopping bags full of peppers … and that’s about all she wrote for this garden. Three of the beds are cleaned out, four left to go. I had the iPhone propped up on the fence playing me music while I wielded the shovel. After a while, I noticed the music, it was gone. This is the iPhone’s excuse:

iPhone's gotta fever!

iPhone’s gotta fever!

So, rule of thumb – don’t leave the phone sitting in the sun, it’s not a happy place.

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Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • Staff Sgt. Liam J. Nevins, 32, of Denver, Colorado, died Sept. 21, at Forward Operating Base Shank, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with small arms fire while conducting range training in Gardez, Paktia Province, Afghanistan.
  • Staff Sgt. Timothy R. McGill, 30, of Ramsey, New Jersey, died Sept. 21, at Forward Operating Base Shank, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with small arms fire while conducting range training in Gardez, Paktia Province, Afghanistan.
  • Lt. Cmdr. Landon L. Jones, 35, of Lompoc, California, died Sept. 22, as a result of an MH-60S Knighthawk helicopter crash while operating in the central Red Sea.
  • Chief Warrant Officer Jonathan S. Gibson, 32, of Aurora, Oregon, died Sept. 22, as a result of an MH-60S Knighthawk helicopter crash while operating in the central Red Sea.
  • Staff Sgt. Thomas A. Baysore, Jr., 31, of Milton, Pennsylvania, died Sept. 26, in Paktya Province, Afghanistan, from wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with small arms fire during combat operations.

Liaden Book Time

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  • Agent of Change
  • Carpe Diem
  • Plan B
  • I Dare

These I have read (relatively quickly, given how busy I am these days) – books written by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. I came across Agents of Change when it appeared in the Baen Free Library. I devoured it, and went to Baen to feed the habit. I ended up buying the Korval’s Legacy Collection and the Phase Change Collection direct from Baen. Good pricing, ten books full of awesome. Taken together, the four books named above are a galaxy-spanning space opera that brought me to mind of the best of E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith and Heinlein. They make me very happy. I’m also partway through Fledgling, which is set in a different part of the same universe. Tie-ins? Of course, at least a bit.

Why didn’t I know about these when they were written? Del Rey first published Agent of Change in 1988! That was admittedly a frantically weird part of my life, but I’ve almost always found time for great science fiction. I just … missed them, some how. I’m so glad that Miller and Lee not only wrote these, but have kept on writing: Exciting Times for the Liaden Universe® tells us that there’s plenty more to come, and I still have lots to read from Korval’s Legacy and Phase Change. Highly Recommended!

Welcome to Fall

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Now I’m waiting for the first 39 degree morning as my next harbinger.

The weekend … it was productive. Mostly moving stuff around on walls, and hanging up assorted wall hangings that Marcia’s made for the house over the last few years.
That and patching systems made up most of my time. I still have more cleanup to do in my office, but that can wait for later. Very tired, and a long week ahead.

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Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • Staff Sgt. Randall R. Lane, 43, of Indianapolis, Indiana, died Sept. 13, in Kabul, Afghanistan, from a non-combat related illness.
  • Sgt. William D. Brown III, 44, of Franklin, North Carolina, died Sept. 19, in Laghman Province, Afghanistan, from a non-combat incident.
  • Spc. James T. Wickliffchacin, 22, of Edmond, Oklahoma, died Sept. 20 at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, of injuries sustained when an improvised explosive device detonated near his dismounted patrol during combat operations in Pul-E-Alam, Afghanistan on Aug. 12.

X < 50

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… where X is the temperature outside when I get up in the morning. Today was the first day for that event, post-summer. But only just, 49 degrees fahrenheit at 0800 this morning. This is my leading indicator of the imminent arrival of the Fall season. There’s also the calendar, which tells me the Autumnal Equinox is 6 days and 20 hours or so in my personal future. But the temps are the big deal for Fall as far as I’m concerned, not the calendar. It was a cold summer, all things being equal. I’m waiting to see what Fall brings us.

Yesterday was a chore day. I shaved the brown lawns front and back, and did a bit of weeding in the sad gardens (where weeds are now the big product, and the veg is mostly dead – a lot of August travel on my part had a big effect on garden maintenance). In the afternoon, I vacuumed the house, did a bit of bathroom cleaning, and cut my hair. Dog walks were interspersed throughout. Today was not as ambitious. Shopping, coffee roasting, and a bit of computer work rounded out my Sunday.

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Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of this fallen warrior:

  • Staff Sgt. Robert E. Thomas Jr., 24, of Fontana, California, died Sept. 13, at Brooke Army Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston, Texas, of wounds suffered during a non-combat related incident on April 21, 2013, in Maiwand, Afghanistan.

Bad sysadmin, no cookie

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In a fit of giggles, I did something on purpose which one normally only does by mistake. I zeroed out a boot drive on a Linux box. The system had previously been wiped with DBAN, and a test CentOS install thrown on for REASONS. Those reasons were done, and it was due for wiping again anyway, so, what the heck…

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=4M

Do NOT cut and paste that into your *NIX box as root unless you’re not running Linux (in which case /dev/sda is unlikely to exist), or you want a re-install opportunity because you’ve got great backups and you want to test them. Oh, yeah: Cut the blue wire first.

This is what happens:

Zero out a running system drive

Zero out a running system drive

So endeth the lesson.

Launch weekend

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Well, it was a launch for NASA’s LADEE mission, a lunar orbiter (full name Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer”), from Wallops Island in Virginia. I headed up by the tennis courts to get a better south east view, further from the trees. Using binoculars, I was able to clearly see the ascent from about 10 seconds post-launch, through first stage separation and second stage firing, and on into the distance for a long while. Very cool. Usually the Wallops launches aren’t so spectacular, and I’m usually clouded in and can’t see them anyway from this distance.

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In other news, I stripped Scientific Linux (a Red Hat respin distro) off of Serenity, the home Linux box, and refettled the hardware with the latest Kubuntu. For a home box, I wanted a bit more versatility and package selection than SL had on offer. Start to finish about 24 hours. Lots of stuff to copy off the old box, then rebuild RAID and boot stuff, copy backups on again, and configure services so that all the assorted jobs and services that depend on this system work again. All good now, far as I can tell.

Also over the weekend, I started re-finishing the small table I had in my office – that’ll be an occasional table in the guest bedroom once I’ve got enough coats of poly on it.

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Our condolences to the families, friends, and unit of this fallen warrior:

  • Staff Sgt. Todd J. Lobraico Jr., 22, of New Fairfield, Connecticut, died Sept. 5, 2013, from wounds sustained when enemy forces attacked his unit with small arms fire near Bagram Airfield, Afghanistan.

Travels done

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And we’re back!

Nine days in California and in the air are done: We flew out to SFO on the 22nd, and flew back through DFW on the 30th. We visited with my folks for about three days, then headed over to SF and stayed there while I attended VMworld 2013. I attended three general sessions and 19 technical sessions in four and one-half days … my brain nearly exploded. I watched countless demos, met many wonderful and smart people, and acquired enough t-shirts to last me until the next millennium. The weather was lovely, and Marcia split her time between the City and learning some design software.

While in the air, I was reading a couple of Liaden Universe novels by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller. Agent of Change and Fledgling are both available for free at both the Baen Free Library and on Kindle for the time being. You can consider those to works to be a gateway drug, since the writing is wonderful. You’ll spend some more of your time and money on their books, because you should. Learn more at http://korval.com/.

I’m not sure, but I’d guess that the authors get more of your money if you purchase through Baen … you can always ask them. It’s certainly worth encouraging the Baen Free Library when you buy from Baen, too.

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Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • 1st Lt. Jason Togi, 24, of Pago Pago, American Samoa, died Aug. 26, in Hasan Karez, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained when enemy forces attacked his vehicle with an improvised explosive device.
  • Sgt. 1st Class Ricardo D. Young, 34, of Rosston, Arkansas, died Aug. 28, in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan, of wounds sustained when insurgents attacked his unit with small arms fire.
  • Staff Sgt. Michael H. Ollis, 24, of Staten Island, New York, died Aug. 28, in Ghazni Province, Afghanistan, of wounds sustained when insurgents attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device, small arms and indirect fire.
  • Staff Sgt. Joshua J. Bowden, 28, of Villa Rica, Georgia, died Aug. 31, in Ghazni, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained when enemy forces attacked his unit with small arms fire while on dismounted patrol.