At work, we’re expanding our server room by bringing the entrance wall about a meter forward. This will give enough room so that both my boss and I can stand comfortably in there at the same time; it will also allow us to get behind and around servers as necessary. However, while the room is under construction, I can’t use my desk for all the plastic and dust and equipment flying about.

I spent yesterday camped out in a conference room with a laptop. Students tend to go there to take breaks from research (no food in the lab, dontchaknow), so I actually got to talk to them about something other than computers or their data or their pending conference presentation or thesis defense. It was also nice having the refrigerator nearby, and somebody left a bunch of very tasty Rainier cherries on the table for public consumption.

Today the laptop is inadequate for the work I’m doing, so I’ve commandeered a storage room with an Ethernet jack and made it into my temporary office. I’m going barebones here, though, with just one monitor on my beloved Gentoo box. It’s going to take some getting used to.

When the room is not under construction, we’re taking advantage of the summer lull as a chance to upgrade infrastructure. First on the list is a new server to operate the tape backups on a new jukebox. It’ll be using the mobo, CPU, and memory that we removed when we upgraded the offsite file server, a hard drive that has been collecting dust in a drawer, and a new external SCSI adapter. Hopefully I can fold it into the budding distcc cluster without too much trouble.

OK, so yes, I am posting more on my ongoing dental saga. It’s a notable situation in my life at the moment, though, so tough cookies.

Last night was the initial wave of treatment on #12. After a very bitter topical anesthetic and some injected lidocaine the dentist and his assistant got to work scouring out infected portions of tooth. (Even though I couldn’t feel a thing, I could hear every scrape through bone conduction; this was rather unpleasant.) Because the infection has reached the pulp as well, a simple filling is inappropriate, so I have an appointment on Super Duper Fat Tuesday to get started with the root canal.

There is a temporary filling in there now to protect the exposed tissues. It feels a bit weird, mostly because I had just gotten used to the minor gap left when the original tooth broke. It looks natural at first glance, though further examination reminds me of the germ at the center of a kernel of corn.

More on this later, as things develop further.

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I have created a monster…

We’ve been looking at houses lately, thanks in part to the price cuts that result from poor sales and in part to a super-sweet benefit of the ol’ employer (forgivable loans for down payments!). Sadly, though, just when we find a neat place in our price range in a qualifying neighborhood, it gets sold FAST. (Aside: we should so market this. “Find a buyer! Just pay us $X; we’ll feign an interest in your place and somebody else will snatch it up!”)

In discussing our situation the other day, we considered that maybe it just isn’t time for us to buy just yet. I attempted to be facetious and sent Fred a link to the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company, saying “let’s just buy some cheap land and get one of these”.

I didn’t expect him to fall completely in love with the idea.

Granted, those are brilliantly efficient designs, especially on the mobile-sized plans that don’t waste a single cubic inch. They don’t cost very much, their energy efficiency is just sick — one woman averages $5 PER MONTH for all of her cooking and heating fuel needs — and they can theoretically go just about anyplace. I would love to have one of these (the Weebee!) as a vacation home or as a little writing studio or something, but I don’t know that I could stand to live in one full-time.

Fred’s coming around. We’re still thinking small — it’ll save us heating, cooling, and electrical costs, plus it’ll be easier and faster to clean and it will prompt us to ditch a bunch of stuff we don’t actually use — but he’s no longer talking about chucking all our furniture and moving into a hundred square feet.

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Yeah, writing studio. What of it?

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New server is running pretty well as long as I remember not to emerge world very often. (After all, it IS only a 333MHz processor.) I’m still kinda sorta maybe thinking of installing distcc and having my work box do the heavy lifting on behalf of the home server.

That said, I see that Apple’s Time Capsule — you know, the OTHER bit of hardware Stevie introduced the other day — would consolidate storage and all network infrastructure into one pretty pretty package that maxes out at only 30W (less than either the drive enclosure or the laptop). I just don’t think I’m ready to drop $300 or $500 on it, though.

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Time to go; have to eat my very soft lunch.

The new server (still named “rupaul”) is in place. It is quite a bit smaller and quieter than the old server (”pangloss”), and it figures to save us a few bucks on the electric bill. All told, the upgrade project cost around $75.

Both parts I ordered (PCMCIA USB 2.0 card [link] and an external USB 2.0/eSATA hard drive enclosure [link]) arrived Thursday, so I shuffled some local services, brought pangloss down, and extracted the drive with all the /home data. Once the drive was in the enclosure — and yes, it is a snug fit — I took it to work and archived the data to my office box. That particular drive had also hosted /usr and /var, and I wouldn’t need to host either on the new box, so I re-partitioned the drive and put a new XFS on there before putting the data back.

After the “hardened” profile fizzled on me — it is still in beta, after all — I re-built the laptop’s OS from the normal G3 profile over the weekend. Had a couple false starts on the kernel, thanks mostly to some issues with battery modules, but after I got those taken care of on Saturday afternoon the process really got under way. Rebuilt world overnight with a few altered USE flags, and got my basic services covered on Sunday morning.

Sunday afternoon we brought the home network down to clean up the rat’s nest of cables in the utility room. While we were at it, we re-arranged connections to the UPS and found a more efficient layout for all the different components back there. Since that room contains the furnace as well, it is a tad warmer than the rest of the house, but nothing is getting too warm yet. (I’m not concerned about heat in the summer, as that room also has the exchanger for the A/C.)

As of now rupaul is serving files for authorized users (local and remote), managing DHCP and DNS for the home network, and keeping my work box’s portage tree up-to-date. Later on, I may add more services or upgrade the data drive (enclosure supports either IDE or SATA for that reason), but for now I’m quite satisfied with how that little laptop is handling things.

Now I just need to find somebody to exchange encrypted backup space with, and we’ll be all set.

Just as the pain and swelling from the one tooth subsided, another tooth elsewhere in the mouth started making trouble. In a lovely little bit of placement, though, this one is on the jaw itself and has a sharp edge that scrapes up the left side of my tongue. Scraped-up tongues tend to swell, and that has made the sharp edge even more difficult to avoid, which causes further scraping, further swelling, etc. Swollen tongues also make ordinary speech very difficult to understand, so I’ve had to get wildly exaggerative with my facial expressions and the non-lingual bits of consonants.

A friend of ours gave Fred a great suggestion for a temporary fix, though: melt candle wax, let it partially set, and pack it around the sharp bit. It’s an odd taste and an even odder feeling, but it works, as evidenced by my mostly-coherent speech and my renewed ability to chew and swallow without pain. I’m being extra-cautious about the temperatures and textures of my food, though, as I don’t want to melt or mangle my improvised crown.

I see the dentist tomorrow morning and again next Wednesday. Hopefully we can work out something a little more permanent.

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Nigel is still out of service; apparently his tires would have to be ordered from a warehouse, which delays things somewhat. I don’t really mind riding the bus to and from work, but it would be nice to Just Go sometimes without all the extra planning for transfers.

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Speaking of work, it was eerily quiet these past few weeks, but now that the winter break is over it’s picking up again. The quiet was kind of nice — made a bunch of patch cables and got a few other large-ish projects done — but it’s even nicer to stay busy with “real work”.

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Did the bulk of the whole Yule thing with Fred’s family on New Year’s Day. We had had a preview showing a few days earlier when my father came by to have me check out a computer issue (isn’t that how it always is?); he brought a couple presents, including a Roomba, which will be the first member of my robot army once it finishes the living room rug. Fred’s folks outdid them, though, giving us (among other things) a bread machine and electric grill which will need to find a home in our crowded kitchen.

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The Powerbook named rupaul got rebuilt with the Gentoo “hardened” toolchain and a different file system. Unfortunately, hardened is very very shaky on PPC, so I’ll probably go back to the regular toolchain for now and switch again later once the herd stabilizes a bit. Sticking with XFS, though, as it mounts faster and seems to perform better on this hardware than reiserfs.

I have a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card and an external hard drive enclosure en route. Once they arrive, the old server (”pangloss”) will be going down, and all of its data will be backed up off-site (woo-hoo rsync and a fat pipe) before the big drive gets re-partitioned. Since pangloss manages DHCP and DNS for the local network, though, the transition will require a little more reliance on the sometimes-flaky VOIP router (which is going to get replaced soon, just you watch). Since pangloss also hosts a local mirror of the portage tree, the transition is also going to stall some tree updates on my work box until I can get rupaul settled.

Also, I’m very tempted to sing “you bettah WORK!” every time I reboot rupaul to try a newly-modified kernel.

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Chorus rehearsals started Monday for the spring show. We weren’t there for the big chorus, but we will probably be doing the small ensemble again once that starts in a couple weeks.

School also started again Monday. This semester I’m taking a sociology class and a short fiction class. I’d much rather be taking something more major-specific, but there was nothing available that I hadn’t done and for which I had all the prerequisites. (boo.)

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So, caucus and primary season is upon us. I find it fascinating that the turnout so far is a smidge higher on the Republican side and a whole fucking lot higher on the Democratic side, yet all our “liberal” media can talk about is “HILLARY WAS EMOTIONAL THEN SHE WON OMGWTFBBQ”.

That said, it is extremely tempting to look into being a delegate to the DNC this summer, if only to see for myself how it all goes down.

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More later, I think.

Installed Gentoo last night on the old Powerbook (which did, in fact, get named “rupaul”). That part only took about 5 hours, much of which was inattention on my part. Once the new system was in and the new kernel installed, though, I re-emerged world with new USE flags; that part took seventeen and a half hours. Think I’ll be working on distcc for future major upgrades.

Now, to find a way to add about four hundred gigabytes’ worth of storage.