jumpy jumpy vitamins » weightlifting

Of network re-wiring and new servers

jeem — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 03:26:38 +0000

Science doesn’t take a holiday (or at least it doesn’t in my new catchphrase) but many scientists do. As a result, my boss and I are doing significant projects while most people are out of their labs.

Last Friday we re-wired most of a network closet. It was tedious, but since very very very few people were using the network at the time it didn’t really cause any problems with ongoing research, and the results are considerably prettier and easier to work with than the old ‘wherever it fits’ approach. I’m not sure when we’ll finish that closet, though.

We’re also working on a new file server for one lab in particular. They have a lot of proteomic data, so they need quite a bit of storage: twenty terabytes. (I am quite certain we’ll all laugh at this capacity in ten years: “OMG can you believe that we thought that was huge?!”.) My first task was explaining what a terabyte is; all these scientists deal with milli- and micro- and nano- and pico-, not with mega- and giga- and tera- and peta-, so the scale of the new array is a bit beyond them at the moment.

The new server arrived fully assembled from the vendor, but apparently nobody warned my boss that the package would weigh about 150 pounds (i.e., as much as me). Turns out he’s never done any sort of weightlifting, so I had to kind of walk him through a rudimentary squat move so we could get it off the floor. I will confess that I found his expressions pretty amusing; however, his cursing remained in English and did not slip into French, so apparently he didn’t find it that bad. (He did revert to his native language once we got the stupid thing into the rack: a curt “Bon.” summarized it for both of us.) When it came to installing the new server, though, I wound up climbing very carefully through the tangle of wires behind the rack to connect the new server to everything. Joy. I don’t mind the small spaces, but I HATE thinking that my misplaced foot is going to knock out a cable and therefore destroy fifteen years of research data.

I might have some interesting news on the work front soon, but I officially know absolutely nothing of the situation so I won’t comment here. In the meantime, though, I still have plenty to work on, so I won’t lose myself to speculation.

More from /dev/random

jeem — Wed, 06 Jul 2005 19:08:00 +0000

Wildly distracted at the moment, so this’ll be fast.

Apparently, this very site comes up when one searches for “nude boy and asparagus”. No friggin’ clue why.

Got the home network infrastructure mostly in place; just waiting on the eBay-purchased 802.11g AP to arrive via UPS (scheduled for Friday). Now, to tinker with Samba.

Also going to work on an IceCast server so that we can stream audio via network for parties and other special events. Of course, I’ll also have to figure out an inexpensive way to put decent-quality client systems in each room and connect them to the network, but that is a future problem.

Hit the gym again yesterday, and am loving the twingy feeling in my chest and upper back.

Need to go eat something — more later.

I swear, there’s something very Brownian going on in my head.

jeem — Thu, 30 Jun 2005 19:10:00 +0000

I just can’t focus on a damned thing, thanks to all manner of random activity in my brain today. Hopefully I can alleviate this by dumping core here.

I am semi-secretly stoked that geekslut has returned to blogging.

Wikipedia’s completed its upgrade to v1.5, thank God. Now I can breathe easily and go back to my usual pasttime of wielding the Fiery +5 Sword of Revert. (can’t come up with a decent wiki-thac0 joke here, sorry.)

Fred and I just finished moving in together. Now, we edit our stuff. Drama may ensue.

Been slacking in the gym… aside from moving (hello! June in St. Louis!), work drama, and a nasty bug I caught (102° fever), I haven’t had the time or energy. Doesn’t help that the new trainer’s TOUGH, either, though that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

WTF! is there no Radiohead on US iTunes?

The last of the Beethoven symphonies are up; get ‘em while you can. Haven’t yet listened to the BBC Orchestra’s #9, but if it’s anywhere near as good as their #6 then people will be in. tears. during the final movement.

Why does the ad-block in GMail show recipes for everybody’s favorite tinned meat product when one looks in one’s Spam folder? Did Hormel pay Google off or something?

Sorry, but if you’re asking about purchasing any of my bodily fluids, the answer is no.

Working on the home network. Very cool thing about the new place: CAT5e, POTS, and coax jacks in every room, all home-run to the utility closet, and POTS and coax very easy to disconnect from service providers. Facepalm moment for rehabbers: no electrical outlet in said utility closet, so I have to run an extension cord under the door from the hallway and put a table or something there so that the cord doesn’t get disturbed.

At work, been cracking down on unattended logins lately, and I have to admit that it’s a lot more fun that usual. This time around I have the full and very vocal support of the CFO, so people are actually listening, and I can actually disconnect problem users (cue evil cackle).

Also been tinkering with a few programs: Samba at home, GAIM at work. Samba is going to be the file storage-slash-print serving-slash-authentication system at home; GAIM will eventually be the office IM client (running on a Jabber server), but has a few tweaks to be made before it can go “live”. (BTW, if you see me online on a messenger client during the day, then this is why. Say “hi” if you like, but it may take me a few minutes to respond since I’m technically supposed to be working, y’know, while I’m at work.)

Put your dirty dishes in the dishwasher, please; it makes the whole prevention-of-rotting-food-in-the-sink thing so much easier.

Eager to start cooking again after the move-enforced hiatus; the thyme, marjoram, rosemary, and basil on the spice rack are calling unto me.

I swear, if one more person suggests I go tanning, I will club them with a bottle of aftersun lotion.

Will somebody please explain to me the appeal of all this white-girl-missing news?

Best smackdown I’ve seen lately: when Rove et al. were whining about how Sen. Durbin compared Gitmo to the Soviet gulags, somebody (can’t remember who, sorry) looked in Solzhenitsyn and substantiated Durbin’s comparisons easily.

good Lord, do I really have that many edits on en:?

Damn, I need to get back into Diablo II. There’s just something very cathartic about wailing on demons and the undead.

Yay Spain! Suddenly I know where we can retire.

It’s the end of the second quarter already. Day. um.

I did warn you that these’d be random, right?

Windows users: go update.

To the person who found this here blog by searching for the word “fornicate”: I love you. To the person who found this here blog by searching for the phrase “small red bumps near triceps”: Ingrown hairs, acne, insect bites, impetigo, or some rare and exotic and messily fatal disease; go see a doctor to find out which.

I love the word “messily”.

Been listening to the iPod at work; the network admin now laughs when I follow up Mozart with Radiohead with Värttinä with the mashedup “Superlangalang” (M.I.A. “Galang” meets the Super Mario Bros. theme).

Fluxblog has me hooked on a couple Swedish groups: The Similou and Lo-Fi-FNK. Goooood shit.

More people read this blog on Fridays than any other day of the week. More people read in the 9:00 hour (Pacific Time!) than any other hour of the day. More people read this blog during the week of April 17 2005 than any other week.

I think that’s about it for now. Thanks for helping me cope with my randomheadedness.

Um, and again.

jeem — Sat, 21 May 2005 19:27:00 +0000

I did mention a major project, right? Well, unfortunately, it was major enough that I couldn’t really update all y’all. Sorry. It’s over now, mostly.

Since the last update… well, Ed got married, I got engaged to Fred, I keep moving up in the Wikipedia active-poster rankings, my workouts are becoming shorter but more intense, finished that project (thank God), learned that Fred is completely unwilling to learn how to keep score at a baseball game, we’ve started looking for a place together, I’ve started looking for another job, and we became addicted to Amazing Race (sooooooo glad that Uchenna and Joyce won…).

More this next week; in the meantime I have a man who requires specific attention, hint hint.

Back again…

jeem — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 19:09:00 +0000

Yeah, I know, I suck because I haven’t updated y’all all recently, blah blah blah. I have an excellent excuse named Fred, who has been mentioned here before and who is my boyfriend/partner/sweet babboo.

Started singing with the Gateway Men’s Chorus, the local gay men’s, uh, chorus, at the urging of the aforementioned BF/P/SB. I also managed to get myself into the Gateway Singers, the auditioned ensemble formed from the larger chorus; that seems to be mostly about timing, though, as the director was looking for a baritone/bass and I just happened to be thinking about joining the chorus. Doesn’t hurt that I can read music, though, or that I have a bit of experience. (or that I’m sleeping with one of the high tenors.)

Ed’s getting married this weekend, and I’m the best man, and I still have to write a toast.

I MUST find the lyrics to “One Two Cha Cha Cha” by Usha Uthup and chorus. The movie it’s from (“Shalimar“) is TOTAL cheeseball, but the music is suitably funky and desi all at once. This particular piece starts it all off and is probably the best earworm-killer I have yet found.

And while I’m thinking about Wikipedia… turns out I’m one of the top thousand (human) contributors to the main article namespace on the largest ‘Pedia (the English-language one). Not entirely sure how to feel about this; after all, most of my edits have been reverts of vandalism, spelling or grammatical fixes, or minor copyediting. (Yes, I’m becoming a WikiGnome.)

Not feeling the workout today — otherwise I’d already be down there — so I’m skipping it. Harrumph. Otherwise, though, things are progressing nicely: squats are about to hit the 405-pound mark (4 45-pound plates on either side of the 45-pound bar), toe raises on the leg-press sled just reached 585 lbs, weights on upper-body exercises are increasing by leaps and bounds, and the mid-section is becoming strong and flexible. I’m even (slowly) upping the amount of cardio I’m doing.

Work… sucks. As always. But at least some key people are starting to develop clue about the wealth of documentation already available on the company intranet.

The network admin and I are talking about developing a new database system for the company, though. Well, OK — we have discussed it jokingly for over a year now, but we’re moving away from the “jokingly” and more towards the “seriously” now. It’d be a MySQL/PHP/Apache project, like so many others, but would be specifically geared towards our unusual needs.

Then again, I have to finish a major project before we can start on any of it, as its deadline got moved up by almost a month. grrr.

Yes, I know I’m rambling.

Oooh — while I’m thinking about it — I snagged a secondhand Thinkpad T23 from work, found its problem (bad hard drive), replaced the bad part, and got a slick Gentoo install going on it. Just need to get the onboard networking components running and it will be supersuh-weet.

Fred and I are going to be moving in together in June, when his current lease expires. We’re essentially living together now — he and I wear the same size, and I’m even wearing his clothes right now, for everything but the whities and the shoes — but it’ll become “official” then. Once we get through this whole wedding bit we’re going to start looking for a place…

The iPod’s filling up gradually, mostly with interesting MP3s I find places. Recent additions include Mozart’s Requiem, Beck’s newest album, a musical version of “Silence of the Lambs” (fave song: “Put the Fucking Lotion in the Basket”), and a German group that covers techno and pop songs in the style of Fred Astaire et al. (“Oops I Did It Again” sounds SO MUCH BETTER this way, I’m not kidding you). I’m also putting chorus rehearsal tracks on there to listen to obsessively.

The iPod has also helped me discover that Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” is completely and utterly inappropriate to play loudly from one’s car stereo when one has the windows down. Suffice to say, you will freak out everybody within earshot.

Going to the ballgame tonight. Should be good. They lost the last one I attended this year, and it was a real heartbreaker: Cardinals down by one, Danny Graves walked Larry Walker to load the bases with one out in the bottom of the night, and Albert Pujols — on the first pitch — grounded into a 5-4 double play. d’oh!

Tonight Fred will learn how to keep score at baseball games, whether he likes it or not. Neener.

More news to come later; now, peach cobbler. Mmmm.