Teleidoscope

Sat, Nov 29, 2008

Experiment

Posted at 4:11 pm MST to Technology

Today I had toast for breakfast, spread with Fleischman's original margarine. It tastes and behaves much better than the Spectrum spread I have been using, and I don't seem to be reacting badly to it. Like the ricotta cheese that I didn't react to in September, real margarine is made from the whey, not the curds.

'I Can't Believe It's Not Butter' has buttermilk, which I know I am allergic to -- I spotted that reaction last spring even before the official allergy tests. But it looks like actual margarine, like egg yolks, may be in the 'don't over-do it' category.

It looks like I will be able to make my stollen this Christmas and eat some of it.

I found some goats'-milk butter at Whole Foods, but it is very pricey. I'll try some tomorrow to see if it very different in flavor. The label says European style, so it is cultured butter, not American-style sweet cream butter. That may make a difference in recipes.

An advertisement a few days ago said that Hellman's/Best Foods Real Mayonnaise is made with 3 main ingredients: eggs, oil, and vinegar. I've never been much of a mayo fan, but I suppose that can go into the "small amounts Used with care' category too.

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Thu, Nov 27, 2008

Turkey Followup

Posted at 8:09 pm MST to Technology

The turkey came out nice and juicy, with a crispy brown skin, but this recipe really needs a wide flat pan, not the oval speckleware roaster I used. I also need to drop the starting temp to 450 or decrease the time (I had already dropped it from what the Alton recommended, but this oven runs fast because of the convection fan). Maybe the same temp for 20 minutes, then check it? Or Wrap the wing tips.

Also add water to the drippings more often during the slow phase so they won't try to burn as much.

I need to complain to Kitchenaid because they haven't sent the broiler pan and roasting rack that go with the oven. I'll do that tomorrow, when there should be sales people available to answer the phones.

Now everything is in the fridge except the carcass, which is in the slow cooker being rendered down for stock. A 14-ish pound turkey carcass just fits into the slowcooker once the limbs and big chunks of meat are removed and the skeleton is broken into two chinks at the waist. The stock should come out clearer than other years usual, because it won't have remnants of stuffing in it.

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Thanksgiving 08

Posted at 10:08 am MST to Technology

I'm trying Altn Brown's recipe (more or less) for roasted brined turkey. So I started yesterday.

Brine



In about a quart of water, 

heat the following to a full boil 



3/4 cup kosher salt

1/2 cup light brown sugar

Tb black peppercorns

1/2 Tb  allspice berries
Tb candied ginger




cool to room temp

then refrigerate

When I was ready to brine the turkey, late yesterday evening, I rinsed the turkey thoroughly (and removed and reserved the neck and giblet bag) and carefully slid it into a 2.5 gallon ziplock bag in my 12 quart stock pot. It just barely fit into the bag, and stuck out a little above the top of the pot. If the turkey was any bigger I would have needed to use a canning kettle, invest in a custom turkey brining bag, and chill it somewhere other than the fridge. As it was, I removed one half-shelf from the fridge and the pot fit in there nicely (those split shelves are really handy in situations like this).

I added 2 quarts of vegetable broth, the chilled brine-spice mixture and about another quart of water, which is all the bag would hold. A little squirted out when I zipped the bag shut: there was just one small bubble of air in the bag.

Early in the morning, I put the neck in a saucepan of water an began simmering it to make broth.

I rough chopped 3 stalks of celery and half a medium-large onion and added them to a hot skillet with a couple of tablespoons of extra-light olive oil and 1/2 pound of breakfast sausage, broken into chunks. When the celery and onion were starting to soften I added the organ meats, cut up small.

While the sausage/giblet mixture was cooking down I experimented with goat cheese stuffed celery. I used Chevrie, which is not quite the right replacement for a recipe originally designed for cream cheese or Neuchatel. It turned too drippy when the Worchestershire sauce and sliced green olives were added: I need to try a stiffer cheese next time. But my breakfast was a couple of stalks of stuffed celery and a sandwich of the olive/cheese misture between two slices of toast, so my Thanksgiving custom has been upheld despite the new dietary restrictions.

When the sausage giblet mixture was thoroughly cooked, I stirred in some fresh ground black pepper and poultry seasoning and ran it through the food grinder attachment of my Kitchenaid into a bowl of torn up bread -- about half a loaf of 100% whole wheat (no malt!). I wiped out the skillet with a slice of the bread and ran that through the grinder at after the meat and veggies, followed by a slice or two of just bread. That's the best way to make sure all of the good stuff is out of the grinder.

I poured the broth from the turkey neck into the stuffing bowl and began tasting. Added salt, more pepper, and more poultry seasoning, and a dash of ground allspice to tie it to the flavor of the brined turkey, and a little plain water to get the texture right. If I were cooking the stuffing inside the turkey I would have made it last night, so I would be putting cold stuffing into a cold bird, but I am following Alton's advice and cooking it separately as a dressing.

I will put Alton's aromatics inside the bird.

Aromatics



cinnamon stick
red apple sliced

1/2 onion, sliced
cup water



heat on high in microwave 5 minutes

Then add to the cavity with 4 sprigs of rosemary and some sage. Rub outside of turkey with oil and roast on rack in a shallow pan in 475 degree oven for 30 minutes.

Remove from oven, insert probe thermometer into deepest past of breast and cover breast with double layer of aluminum foil. Set thermometer alarm for 161 degrees and return turkey to 325 degree oven. Should take about 2 to 2.5 hours roasting time. After an hour, put the casserole dish of sausage-giblet dressing in the oven too.

Other stuff I will be eating: sauteed carrots, roasted potatoes, squash, boiled onions. Mulled cider.

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Wed, Nov 26, 2008

KRDC

Posted at 1:03 pm MST to Technology

Cool.

KDE, my preferred desktop environment on Linux, now has an application, KRDC, that can be a client for multiple remote VNC and RBP(Windows Remote Desktop) connections.

This will make life much easier when I am working with the various virtual machines on my laptop and server.

I think I need to adjust the monitor settings for the server, though. The old ViewSonic monitor in the study (which is going to last forever because I use it so rarely) needs to be set to 96 dpi unless I want to use a magnifying glass, but the setting needs to be 75 or 60 for the VNC text and images to not be huge when they show up on the remote screen.

To set up VNC server on Fedora/RedHat machines I set VNCSERVERS and VNCSERVERARGS values in /etc/sysconfig/vncservers. I don't think VNCSERVERARGS has a dpi setting, but Google is not being cooperative.

To get kde in the VNC clients, I use a ~/.vnc/xstartup that ends with

startkde &

instead of the deafult

twm &

.
Some machines need to have the full path of startkde.

I need to do a little digging in the config files of the various virtual machines: I'm not sure why the Centos 5 image video is acting different from the RHEL image video. Probably something in the X11 settings is different. Fortunately, since Centos and RHEL are almost identical, I can probably make the RHEL behavior match Centos (which is much more cooperative at the moment) by copying some settings over.

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Mon, Nov 24, 2008

Restoring

Posted at 11:30 am MST to Technology

Man! The initial sync of a big RAID array takes FOR EV ER. But It finally finished and before I went to bed early this morning I had the OS fully updated and the /data and /home partitions restored from the external drive.

My backup routine includes dumping the full list of installed packages to a file (rpms or dpkgs, depending on the flavor of Linux) so I was able to determine which packages I needed to add to the installation to get closer to my original configuration. This doesn't include major applications like clearcase and vmware that were installed using other mechanisms, but it helps me remember packages like apcupsd (which lets the server communicate with the UPS).

I don't want to trample my clean install with the aftermath of a fairly rocky upgrade, so I won't be doing a full direct restore of root and etc. But I have all the old config files saved, so I can recover specific configuration information.

It's nice to be working from a full backup, which I don't usually bother with. When I just do a /home and /data backup (the more usual case) I copy /etc to /home/etc_sav before doing the main backup, so I don't lose all the settings.

On the laptop, I have the vmware virtual machines under /home/vmware, and /var/www is softlinked from /home/www, so everything that can be backed up usefully is in or copied to the one partition. While I'm restoring the server, I'm going to relocate a few things to /home and /data to consolidate things that need to be backed up (like the vmware virtual machines) away from things I don't want stepped on during a restore (like the logs and other debugging info in /var).

Stuff to do today:

restore the configs for the following:
   apcupsd
   dnsmasq (including /etc/hosts)
   networking (fixed IPs instead of the DHCP from the install)
   mysql?
   vnc
   GUI login screens (I prefer KDM, and like to have root able to log in directly)
restore data from backup
   www
   vmware
   clearcase
   mysql?
reinstall and reconfigure
   clearcase
   vmware

I'm really glad that the external drive has a firewire connection, not just the slower USB.

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Sun, Nov 23, 2008

New Drive Setup

Posted at 6:23 pm MST to Technology

I had forgotten how well-designed the interior of the server case is. There are two drive cages for 3.5 inch drives that came out smoothly so I could unmount the old drives from them and install the new drives.

I think I'm beginning to understand what happened to the old drives, and why I had problems booting after the update.

Three of the old drives had similar partitioning, but one had an additional partiton for swap space. I am quite certain I would have put swap on the first drive (sda) when I installed, but after the upgrade from FC7 to FC8 and 9, the drive with swap space was sdb. The boot failed until I reinstalled grub into the new sda.

Then one of the drives started to fail. I suspect that may have been the old sda drive: anaconda may have moved it to sdb because it was responding more slowly to the configuration tool.

When I first powered up the server with the new drives, it could only see 4 of them: 1 in the upper drive cage and three in the lower drive cage. When I rechecked the power connections, it turned out that the plastic shroud around one of the power connectors I was using in the lower drive cage was broken, so the leads weren't making a solid connection. Switching to a different power connector brought all of the drives up.

It is possible the drive was failing because its power had gone flakey. We'll need to test the old drives before we install them into the office servers: it is possible they are all usable provided they have clean power.

The old configuration was 3 drives in the lower chamber drive cage, using 3 SATA connectors on a single power cable, with one hard drive and a DVD-RAM drive in the upper chamber on a different power cable.

I had a power-to-dual-SATA power splitter (I think it came with the motherboard, actually) that is long enough to give me power for two additional drives in the lower chamber. So the new configuration has 4 drives in the lower drive cage (filling it) using two different power cables, and 1 in the upper chamber in the 3.5 inch cage, with the DVD still in the 5.5 inch cage. The motherboard supports 6 SATAs, so with 5 DHs and the DVD, that is now maxed out.

In researching Linux soft RAID, I learned that you need to wait for the RAID to fully sync after the first boot before you do anything else.

Then

grub-install /dev/md0

should prep all of the physical drives to be fully bootable in case sda fails.

The new disk configuration is

/dev/md0 RAID1 /boot (/dev/sd*1) 100 meg each
swap (/dev/sd*2) 1 gig each, not raided
/dev/md1 RAID10 LVMGroup00 (/dev/sd*3)

/dev/sde1 and /dev/sde3 are the RAID hot spares

LVG00:
root  /      10%
home  /home  20%
var   /var   20%
data  /data  50%

Once everything is stable I give low priority to the swap on /dev/sde2 so it won't be accessed except in emergencies. I set the other 4 swap spaces to equal priority:

# /dev/sda2
UUID=             swap    swap      pri=2        0       0
# /dev/sdb2
UUID=             swap    swap      pri=2        0       0
# /dev/sdc2
UUID=             swap    swap      pri=2        0       0
# /dev/sdd2
UUID=             swap    swap      pri=2        0       0
# /dev/sde2
UUID=             swap    swap      pri=1        0       0

(Updated to fix fstab syntax: it was wrongin the article I copied from.)

Then I set all the drives to spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity to save power and wear on the drives. The spare should be hardly ever be spun up.

Note: use

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid

to determine which partition goes with which UUID in the fstab.

# hdparm -S 180 /dev/[sh]d[a-z]

and add the command to the end of /etc/rc.d/rc.local so it will happen on every reboot.

And once I get the OS updated and configured I need to make sure any RAID or drive failure notices (from SMARTD) get forwarded to my regular email address.

I also need to create a couple of mount points for external drives: one for the firewire Tbyte drive and at least one for a thumb drive or other miscellaneous drive.

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New Drive Setup

Posted at 1:42 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I had forgotten how well-designed the interior of the server case is. There are two drive cages for 3.5 inch drives that came out smoothly so I could unmount the old drives from them and install the new drives.

I think I'm beginning to understand what happened to the old drives, and why I had problems booting after the update.

Three of the old drives had similar partitioning, but one had an additional partiton for swap space. I am quite certain I would have put swap on the first drive (sda) when I installed, but after the upgrade from FC7 to FC8 and 9, the drive with swap space was sdb. The boot failed until I reinstalled grub into the new sda.

Then one of the drives started to fail. I suspect that may have been the old sda drive: anaconda may have moved it to sdb because it was responding more slowly to the configuration tool.

When I first powered up the server with the new drives, it could only see 4 of them: 1 in the upper drive cage and three in the lower drive cage. When I rechecked the power connections, it turned out that the plastic shroud around one of the power connectors I was using in the lower drive cage was broken, so the leads weren't making a solid connection. Switching to a different power connector brought all of the drives up.

It is possible the drive was failing because its power had gone flakey. We'll need to test the old drives before we install them into the office servers: it is possible they are all usable provided they have clean power.

The old configuration was 3 drives in the lower chamber drive cage, using 3 SATA connectors on a single power cable, with one hard drive and a DVD-RAM drive in the upper chamber on a different power cable.

I had a power-to-dual-SATA power splitter (I think it came with the motherboard, actually) that is long enough to give me power for two additional drives in the lower chamber. So the new configuration has 4 drives in the lower drive cage (filling it) using two different power cables, and 1 in the upper chamber in the 3.5 inch cage, with the DVD still in the 5.5 inch cage. The motherboard supports 6 SATAs, so with 5 DHs and the DVD, that is now maxed out.

In researching Linux soft RAID, I learned that you need to wait for the RAID to fully sync after the first boot before you do anything else.

Then

grub-install /dev/md0

should prep all of the physical drives to be fully bootable in case sda fails.

The new disk configuration is

/dev/md0 RAID1 /boot (/dev/sd*1) 100 meg each
swap (/dev/sd*2) 1 gig each, not raided
/dev/md1 RAID10 LVMGroup00 (/dev/sd*3)

/dev/sde1 and /dev/sde3 are the RAID hot spares

LVG00:
root  /      10%
home  /home  20%
var   /var   20%
data  /data  50%

Once everything is stable I give low priority to the swap on /dev/sde2 so it won't be accessed except in emergencies. I set the other 4 swap spaces to equal priority:

# /dev/sda2
UUID= pri=1            swap    sw              0       0
# /dev/sdb2
UUID= pri=1            swap    sw              0       0
# /dev/sdc2
UUID= pri=1            swap    sw              0       0
# /dev/sdd2
UUID= pri=1            swap    sw              0       0
# /dev/sde2
UUID= pri=2            swap    sw              0       0

The I set all the drives to spin down after 15 minutes of inactivity to save power and wear on the drives. The spare should be hardly ever be spun up.

Note: use

ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid

to determine which partition goes with which UUID in the fstab.

# hdparm -S 180 /dev/[sh]d[a-z]

and add the command to the end of /etc/rc.d/rc.local so it will happen on every reboot.

And once I get the OS updated and configured I need to make sure any RAID or drive failure notices (from SMARTD) get forwarded to my regular email address.

I also need to create a couple of mount points for external drives: one for the firewire Tbyte drive and at least one for a thumb drive or other miscellaneous drive.

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Sat, Nov 22, 2008

Sub 2 Dollar Gas

Posted at 1:03 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I ran some errands at the big box stores before settling down to work on the server. I needed printer ink and label-maker tape from Office Max, and while I have the server open I might as well use some canned air to clean the dust off the CPU-cooler fins.

Costco has Foster Farms turkeys -- fresh and minimally processed -- for 87 cents/pound and they even had a couple of small ones left. I got a 14.8 pounder. Now I need to figure out if I want to try brining it. And what to have with it. I've got a business meeting Wednesday afternoon, so I can pick up any ingredients I'm missing on the way home. No eggnog this year -- raw egg might be pushing it and I think goat's milk would make it taste funny. Maybe I'll mull some cider instead.

Costco Gas had gas under 2 dollars even for Premium. Regular unleaded was 1.769. I can't remember the last time I paid so little for gas. This is good for people in the East who heat their houses with fuel oil: fuel prices this winter should be a lot more reasonable than people were predicting even a couple of months ago.

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ETFs and Stocks

Posted at 12:33 am MST to Miscellaneous

The money from my old IRAs and 401Ks is now all consolidated and invested. We went for a 60/40 split between stocks and cash&bonds, but actually most of the cash and bonds money is going into a 6 month CD. Hopefully the bond markets will be more stable by the time it matures, 4 months into the new presidency: the current bond market is pretty horrible.

My new stock holdings are a mix of individual stocks and funds, including ETFs (Exchange Traded Funds) which are supposed to be a more flexible kind of mutual fund. I like funds because they let me invest in areas I think should do well in the future (like 'clean energy' or 'biotech and genome') without having to guess which specific company in the area is most likely to take off (or least likely to fail). I don't have enough money to invest to get as much diversity as I'd like without using funds.

On the down side, investing in funds means I now have small positions in some companies I would really rather avoid, like Microsoft. But at least I don't directly own Microsoft stock. They may be able to change course and reinvent themselves as ethical and competent software creators but I haven't seen any signs of it yet. And there are signs that the monopolistis super-tanker is heading for the rocks.

I'm not a day-trader: I expect to hold the stocks I buy for months or years, so when choosing between stocks that seem to be good buys, I prefer to spend my money on stocks that I feel glad about owning.

I do own Apple directly now, in addition to what is in the funds. Also Cisco and AT&T, and the shares of McKesson I acquired via the employee stock purchase plan from when I worked for the company they eventually bought. And I have invested in RedHat (at about 100 points less than its price at the peak of the dot-com bubble, but that's why I could afford to buy some) and a company that makes silicon wafers for chips and photovoltaics (WFR), and in stocks from a few other small companies. There are advantages to buying in a week when the market has been bottoming out.

I did not buy gold: it is too expensive and it feels too much like speculation as opposed to investing. Companies do things (admittedly often stupid things, but not always), gold just sits there. It is overvalued for an industrial material, and I don't think the people who flee to it as a hedge realize that its value other than as a material is as arbitrary as the value of paper money or the electrons in a bank computer. Unless you actually have the physical gold buried in your backyard or where ever, you are just playing market games with something that can't even be productive.

I did not buy XCel, because I can't see directly owning a company that can't process a change-of-address in nine years.

I did not buy VMWare: I like their products, but the virtualization market has gone squirrelly in the past year or two and I want to see it shake out a little before I put money into that niche.

I did not buy Archer Daniel Midlands directly (I think it is included in one of the funds). I don't think I need to be more strongly associated with drowning the country in corn and soybeans.

As a food stock I bought HainCelestial (organic foods and tea), which sells stuff I buy and is more or less a local stock. My transportation stock is UNFI, a company which hauls organic food to supermarkets. And my heavy industrial/infrastructure stock is a company that makes cranes for building bridges and things.

My holdings are tech heavy -- forward-looking tech, I hope -- because tech is what I know, and light on financials because no one sane is doing fresh investing in financials until things stabilize. At this point I'm going to leave things alone at least until after the holidays and the inauguration, and probably until that CD matures in May

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Thu, Nov 20, 2008

New Drives

Posted at 12:37 pm MST to Technology

The new drives just arrived. I'm letting them come up to room temperature and evaporate any condensation(it's very cold and damp out today) before I install them. But it looks like I know what I will be doing this evening...

In the meantime, I need to review some docs on how to set up RAID10 with a hot spare and auto-notification of failures.

The drives were shipped yesterday from Memphis, by way of Rockford, Illinois. Newegg just didn't inform me that they had shipped until this morning.

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Wed, Nov 19, 2008

Feh

Posted at 11:57 pm MST to Technology

Having the server down seems to have made my whole test environment go squirrelly.

The Newegg order has not shipped yet.

The registration on my astraltrading.com domain is screwed up because my ISP's spam filter ate the renewal notices from Domain Direct. And they have raised their prices. A lot, considering that I am using a minimal service from them. Or their renewal process is rigged to force me into a different, higher priced service than I used to have. I renewed for one year while I decide whether to find another registrar.

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Tue, Nov 18, 2008

Raid Drives

Posted at 9:40 am MST to Technology

The Raid arrays in the server have been working fine for a week, but now I think there is a problem on one of the physical drives. The /var partition is on an LVM partition on top of a RAID 10 built on sections of four drives, and one of them is reporting hard errors.

The other partitions on the same drives seem to be OK for the moment, and I backed everything up to the external terabyte drive Sunday evening, so I'm not actually missing any data. But The server won't boot without a functional /var.

I have one more SATA controller slot available in the server, so I should be able to build a hot spare into the arrays, then pull out and replace the drive that is failing. (I may need a SATA power splitter cable to get power to the additional drive.) That assumes that I can figure out which of the current physical drives is the one that is failing, which can be a little tricky.

It looks like Newegg has 1.5.Terabyte Samsung drives for $150 ($100/Terabyte!!) with free shipping. I think I need to order 5 of them to get a full RAID-plus-hot-spare configuration for the future.

When they arrive, I'll need to decide whether to try rebuilding the arrays in place, which would give me a mixed array of 3 small and two larger drives once the dying one is identified and replaced. Since I have a very current full backup it might be simpler and quicker to swap out all of the drives and set up clean partitions when I reload the operating system, then restore from the backup.

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Fri, Nov 14, 2008

First Snow 2008

Posted at 7:26 am MST to Weather

There is snow on the ground this morning. The high country is getting hammered, but down here it's just enough to whiten the grass and make the morning commute a mess. Not enough, unfortunately, to give us any appreciable moisture.

They are predicting a warm weekend and a high of 70 on Tuesday.

I thought I saw a little snow on the ground Wednesday evening, but a chinook came in and by yesterday morning everything had dried out.

Including my sinuses. This is the second day of a sinus headache which is getting annoying.

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Thu, Nov 13, 2008

Long Term Care Insurance

Posted at 7:08 pm MST to Miscellaneous

Lots of future planning these past few weeks.

My parents died young, but in general I come from long-lived families. My grandmothers died at 93 and 98, after years in nursing homes, and my aunts are 80 and 84 and still going strong, but starting to fade a bit.

I've been getting offers of information about long term care insurance from credit unions and professional organizations, and finally decided that I should see about getting some insurance while I'm young and healthy enough to get decent rates. I sent in one of the credit union cards last month and spoke to an insurance agent a few weeks ago.

Today he came back with word that I was accepted for the John Hancock plan I had applied for. He said the application went through faster than he had ever seen.

So now I am making what are effectively monthly pre-payments for future long term care. The coverage compounds to cover future inflation.

The money from T. Rowe Price finally came in -- a lot less than there was when we first asked them for it. I need to check the mailbox, too, in case the money from the IBM 401K has arrived from Fidelity.

And our company is looking at 401K plans again. We haven't had one for a few years because we got to a point where the management fees were too high and the number of employees we had involved were too few. I'll need to coordinate my 401K selections with Tom, the broker who is helping me manage the IRA money.

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Temple

Posted at 6:34 pm MST to Current Events

By way of Slashdot and Smithsonian: archaeologists have found a huge 11000 year old temple site in Turkey. That means it was built before there was writing or cities or most agriculture.

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Planet Pictures

Posted at 6:14 pm MST to Current Events

Wow. Scientists have taken pictures of planets in two different solar systems.

They have a picture from Hubble of a single planet about 4 times as far from Fomalhaut as Neptune is from the Sun. Fomalhaut is 25 light years from here.

They also have a picture from one of the big infrared telescopes of TWO planets orbiting HR8799, which is 130 light years from earth. (A third planet has been located in that system.)

Somebody needs to start giving planets we actually have pictures of better names than Fomalhaut B and HR8799b and HR8799c.

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Mon, Nov 10, 2008

Investment Companies

Posted at 5:30 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I'm still working on consolidating management of my various IRAa and 401Ks under one account at RBC Wealth Management, where I will have an actual live broker, Tom Fitzgerald (Hi, Tom) helping me keep track of things and make decisions.

Of the consolidations:

My primary credit union, Bellco was good about transferring the money promptly from my IRA account. They even transfered the money directly to RBC so I didn't have to deal with carrying the check over to Tom's office. I still have some money in a CD there which might as well stay there until the certificate matures.

I had two accounts with Fidelity.

The 401K/IRA money from when I worked for Access Health, which was acquired by McKesson, was rolled over promptly. (I had to drive the check over to Tom's office when I received it, though.) And the stock certificate for the stock I bought through the Employee Stock Purchase Plan arrived while I was in Boston, so I was able take that to Tom this afternoon. I don't think I've ever held the actual stock certificate for stock I owned before.

The 401K money from Unidata had ended up as an IBM 401K after a series of mergers. I must have done a good job of picking the funds I invested in, and Fidelity did a good job of taking care of my money: I lost track of that money for several years during some of the mergers, but there is a lot of money there. The transfer was delayed for a couple of weeks while they changed the account to my house's new (since 1999) address because I hadn't noticed that the notices from the IBM 401K were still using the old address. But they seem to be processing things promptly now.

Unlike the companies that have been cooperative and professional about handling the rollovers, T. Rowe Price has been a total pain. We faxed in copies of the signed request forms in mid-October, but first they wanted requests for each individual fund, and now they are saying they never received the signed document. They said they had no record of receiving the fax we re-sent this afternoon an hour and a half after it was sent. And they take FOREVER to answer their phones. They seem to be very understaffed. Not a comforting situation. I'll be very happy to get my money out of there. I'm beginning to wonder if the foot-dragging is due to more than incompetence and understaffing. Unfortunately, it's the single biggest chunk of my money. Fotunately, it is not the majority of my money.

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Without Bread

Posted at 8:20 am MST to Miscellaneous

Home again. It's good to be home with my own bed and my own stuff. And the oven, which didn't want to work last Tuesday, seems to be fine now. I'll be able to make bread later. I'm hungry for bread after 5 days when I mostly couldn't risk eating it.

The tree surgeon came while I was gone and cleaned the dead and broken branches out of my trees. They look very nice, and should be less prone to breakage this winter. I suspect they will do well next growing season, too, especially the big tree near my bedroom, which now has a lot less top to be supported by the same root mass.

It was nice seeing my family -- Aunt Bev will be 80 next birthday and Aunt Irma and Uncle Tom will be 84 and 85, so I really need to get back to see them more often. Uncle Tom is a bit shaky these days, but he looks very good. Especially considering that he is an 85 year old man who fell off a roof two years ago.

My brother Larry and his family are also doing well. Larry will be a department head next year, so he will be teaching fewer classes and attending more meetings. They are planning to build their retirement/vacation home probably beginning sometime after the first of the year. (Larry is younger than me. Yikes.)

It felt like I was eating constantly on this trip, but I think it was just that I was paying so much attention to food. My weight is just up about a pound, and my body-fat percentage is down about a point and a half, which suggests the gain is muscle or water.

I was careful at the buffets at the conference, avoiding all baked goods for fear of malt and selecting other items carefully. I did eat eggs -- even scrambled eggs -- without any problems, which is going to make life a lot easier.

I think I really don't eat that much when I am on my own. Both of the actual restaurant meals I ate seemed HUGE, and the meals my sister-in-law served me seemed adequate or almost too much, though she worried I wasn't getting enough to eat.

I ate 4 meals at Irma and Tom's and barely managed to keep them from being huge: Irma hardly eats anything herself, but she follows the family tradition and serves huge portions to everyone else, and starts offering snacks 10 minutes after a huge meal. There are advantages to being allergic to most commercial baked goods...

When we used to go over to Nonna's (Irma's mother) we would always fill up on her wonderful soup or pasta, and then when we said we were too full for the meat course, she would say "Eat it without bread." I was eating without bread this weekend.

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Thu, Nov 06, 2008

Sprint PCS

Posted at 5:47 am MST to Travel

My laptop now has a working cell modem. This is good, because the hotel charges obscenely for its broadband service.

The modem doesn't officilly support Linux, but it is working well. I just need to reset the default route manually after I bring up PPP.

route (to get the existing table)
sudo route del default
sudo route dd default gw 

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Tue, Nov 04, 2008

Uncanny Valley and John McCain

Posted at 4:02 pm MST to Media

One odd thing I noticed about many of McCain's advertisements was that he seemed to be falling into the uncanny valley where things that are close to human but not quite really human look really creepy. In some of his ads, he looked like a stiff puppet with shoe-button eyes and very chalky, weird-textured skin. There were a couple of ads that showed stills that were especially bad for this. And these were Republican ads, not Democratic ones that might have been deliberately trying to make him look bad subliminally. Is it Chucky that is the evil doll in the horror movies?

It occurs to me that I do much of my TV watching in HD these days. It's possible that images intended for regular definition didn't get processed properly for HD. Or they got the makeup wrong.

Or his lighting crew sucked.

Or they were using very heavy makeup to cover ill-health and couldn't hide it from the HD. I really wonder if he will be alive in 2012.

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Election Day

Posted at 10:52 am MST to Current Events

Gah.

Stress and anxiety attacks. I was going to blog about past elections (the first one I remember was Kennedy/Nixon) but I'm too jittery. I don't think voting early has helped my stress levels as much as I had hoped. It's one disadvantage of working at home: I've been bombarded with radio ads all day every day, and having already voted means there was nothing more I could do about them.

Today is the election. Less than 5 and a half hours until results start coming in.

I just got off the phone with my broker (I'm consolidating 401k and IRA money from various places, and we were discussing investing the first third or so of it.)

Tomorrow I travel to Boston on an 8:15am flight. Returning Sunday. I may or may not blog between now and Monday. I'll be staying two nights with relatives who don't have an active net presence.

My oven is not working right. I will try it again later, and if it still doesn't behave right, I'll give the repair guys a call so that I can have an appointment early next week.

I need to make a quick shopping trip to stock up on St. John's Wort before the trip. Possibly with a quick trip into town if more IRA checks arrive in today's mail to be rolled over.

The server is backed up, but I feel too jittery to be safe reconfiguring it. I think this evening I will do a direct backup of the laptop to the terabyte drive, and wait until I get back to play with the drive settings of the server.

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Mon, Nov 03, 2008

Terabyte

Posted at 9:55 am MST to Technology

The new external Terabyte drive (a myBook from Western Digital) came with cables for Firewire and USB, and has connectors for Firewire, USB and eSATA. The server's Firewire on the motherboard is working nicely, so at least the backup will run faster than USB speeds.

The drive comes up as a Windows file system, so I'd lose the permissions and symbolic links if I didn't reformat it. It is now ext3, and the backup is running.

I should eventually be able to set the drive up as eSATA: my motherboard has 6 SATA channnels, of which I am using 5 (4 hard drives and the DVD-ROM). But I will need another cable for that, and an internal-to-external adapter.

I'll look into that after I get back from Boston. I don't want to order anything that might be delivered while I am gone. Getting at that other motherboard SATA connector is going to be a pain -- it is pretty well buried -- so I may look at putitng an eSATA card into one of my empty slots. They seem to be reasonably priced, depending on how many ports I decide to get (a one port card would be silly).

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Sun, Nov 02, 2008

Mozart

Posted at 6:56 pm MST to Media

Yesterday was the last farmers' market for the season. The weather was beautiful -- like early September -- and unlike some past years when we froze at the last market. But it was hard getting up in the dark to get there in time to help set up.

In the evening I attended the second Boulder Philharmonic concert of the season, which had a pure Mozart program.

According to the program, Mozart wrote a letter describing one of his concerts in 1787. He started with the first movement of his 35th symphony, played some music from various operas, including arias with soloists, then a violin concerto, more opera music, some dance music, and finally the rest of Symphony 35.

The concert last night followed the pattern of Mozart's concert, which made a fun contrast to the structure of modern concerts. The vocalists (a soprano and a mezzo) were very good and the violinist seemed to be having fun, which I think always improves the energy of a performance. And, possibly because it was Mozart, the energy levels were high enough that I did not fade out, despite being tired from working at Market. The concert itself was excellent.

The theater, on the other hand, seemed to be having a meltdown: there were problems with the restrooms, they didn't start letting people into the theater until about 15 minutes before the performance was supposed to start so things started late, and there were odd delays at both ends of intermission. I wonder if someone who usually manages the theater was unavailable last night.

There were, as usual, people who left at intermission and did not return. I have to say I don't understand doing this: it seems very rude to the orchestra to leave right after the guest artist performs. Also wasteful: if you have spent the money for the seat (and my seat is in an expensive area so the seats in my row that get abandoned midway through most concerts aren't cheap ones) and taken the trouble to drive to the concert, why not stay for the whole thing? I say this even though is was convenient for me not to have people moving past me into the row -- my seat is near the aisle.

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