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ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING

http://youtube.com/watch?v=k-GaRKDsz-Y

To damn tired to work… To wide awake to sleep :

Ended up stuck workin’ instead of attending Medics live op, and working like a Beaver in the hopes of getting done early lol.

Stuck working the weekend as well… but only light hours thankfully. And next week is a three day weekend for all intents and purposes, no work that Monday 🙂

There’s more then one way to skin a cat baby or in the words of John McClane: yippee-ki-yay, mother fucker.

If I’m going to be stuck waiting until AT&T gets off their lazy butts and sorts the last of it, so that we can get our land lines hooked back up rather then routing everything through the cable modem, until I’ll be able to get all the equipment moved to their final operational positions…

I’m going to access my files !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The servers good to go, ready to rock and roll, except for one problem! OpenBSDs support for WPA is gonna take -CURRENT and using my 3Com Ethernet XL card means the box needs to be near the router, which it can’t right now…

So I had an idea, hook up my digital camera with the extra 2GB SD Card for storage and use the USB cable to mount her on the server. Then jet it all over to my laptop on the camera right?

I packed up ~/code, ~/Documents, and a few .dot files for stuff I use a lot into a couple of archives. The only problem? Trying to mv the archives to the camera on sd0i caused the machine to lock up! So that idea was toast, total waste of time spent fscking my drives.

Plan B.

Working off the advice from Daemon Forum regulars I managed to transfer my NIC over to it’s new home, found my last power cable and plugged the system in on the deck, right next to the router.

Hooked her up and walked off for a drink, booted Dixie and sure enough I was able to ping her, ssh in to make sure she was fully on the LAN. Then I mounted my home directory and set about copying my files over to a ‘makeshift’ home directory in /usr/Projects/Terry,

As long as I have a brain ‘tween my ears, I ain’t gonna be kept from my objectives so easy. Now if I could just do something about the lack of sleep :

There’s more then one way to skin a cat baby.

If I’m going to be stuck waiting until AT&T gets off their lazy butts and sorts the last of it, so that we can get our land lines hooked back up rather then routing everything through the cable modem, until I’ll be able to get all the equipment moved to their final operational positions…

I’m going to access my files !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The servers good to go, ready to rock and roll, except for one problem! OpenBSDs support for WPA is gonna take -CURRENT and using my 3Com Ethernet XL card means the box needs to be near the router, which it can’t right now…

So I had an idea, hook up my digital camera with the extra 2GB SD Card for storage and use the USB cable to mount her on the server. Then jet it all over to my laptop on the camera right?

I packed up ~/code, ~/Documents, and a few .dot files for stuff I use a lot into a couple of archives. The only problem? Trying to mv the archives to the camera on sd0i caused the machine to lock up! So that idea was toast, total waste of time spent fscking my drives.

Plan B.

Working off the advice from Daemon Forum regulars I managed to transfer my NIC over to it’s new home, found my last power cable and plugged the system in on the deck, right next to the router.

Hooked her up and walked off for a drink, booted Dixie and sure enough I was able to ping her, ssh in to make sure she was fully on the LAN. Then I mounted my home directory and set about copying my files over to a ‘makeshift’ home directory in /usr/Projects/Terry, which thanks to vipw is now my current roost for the time being..

As long as there is a brain ‘tween my ears, I ain’t gonna be stopped so easy from reaching my objective… And in the words of John McClane,

Yippee-ki-yay, Mother F***er

Now if I could just do some thing about the general lack of sleep… lol

Ahh shit… been up all night again.

Well, at least this time I *might* get a decent amount of sleep :

*passes out, head hits keyboard, and snores loudly*

Oh man, what a day!

I logged off for some shuteye around 0600 and awoke about 0836 or so when the people from our new ISP/Phone provider (we just bundled with the cable company). Managed to talk a little with the supervisor of the two about the setup involved, you could say the feeling that the other knew their ass from a hole in the ground was mutual >_>.

Because the cable boxes and the computer are on opposite sides of the rooms from the computers — that’s how the apartment was originally setup by a previous provider (Which was thrown out of the complex when the owners cut a deal with another company 0.o). So we had to go out and get some wireless cards, I paid for them as I agreed to if it would (and likely would) come to it.

So far, I’ve been cursed with shopping, practically stabbed in the eye, wondering why the bleeding heck our modems refuse to talk to my laptop or our router, and cannibalizing a pair of PCs, cut my finger, and I’ve been doing it all on ~2 hours sleep and a can of root beer !!!!!!

After drinking a bit of a root beer, we went out to get her shoppin’ done and grab the cards, the plan was to be home in plenty of time to spare to get her and my (gaming) desktop hooked up so I could make it to Medics Live OP.

I was leaning over to put the water down when ma made an unexpected move of the arm and I nearly got the end of the car keys tip in my left eye. It must have only jabbed towards the point closer to the nose because I still have an eye left, it didn’t hurt, and there is no sign of damage — as much as I like MGS3, I really don’t want to end up in an eye patch like Big Boss someday.

Thank GOD for protecting fools and star ships named Enterprise 😉

While we were talking with someone at Best Buy, I asked the guy if they carried any RAM in the store and he sent me over to the Geek Squad (y). I got a 512mb dimm of PC2700 for Ma’s computer along with three LInksys WMP54G PCI adapters and we hit Krogers.

I had a plan, I really did dang nab’it ! Check the manual for the ram speed to make sure the new chip was compatible (I bought PC2700 going by memory). Copy my Wifi data to each PC, setup the router, install each wifi card, and be *early* to the live op but it didn’t work out that way.

First thing I did was plug in the router and try and set it up using DHCP instead of PPPoE but that didn’t work. So I took the CAT-5e and hooked up the modem directly to my laptops on board Marvell Yukon and wondered, wtf is my modems address since it isn’t offering DHCP services?

About 1930-1600Z I remembered the tenth commandment of C programmers*

Thou shalt foreswear, renounce, and abjure the vile heresy which claimeth that “All the world’s a VAX”, and have no commerce with the benighted heathens who cling to this barbarous belief, that the days of thy program may be long even though the days of thy current machine be short.

I ripped apart my desktop setup and hooked SAL up on the floor near the living room modem and plugged her in directly. Booted windows, opened IE7 just to be sure for compatibility, and sure enough got a welcome message from the modem! Oh go fsck yourselfs!!! But it works.

Setup the modem over HTTP, got a really fucking fast connection compared to AT&Ts aDSL line. A quick speed test out of Atlanta showed like 3-5 times the data rates we were getting!

After that I shutdown and used my now cleared desk as a work table. Cracked open Ma’s Dell 4550 for a little cleaning, install the WMP54G, upgraded the RAM from 512mb to 768mb and took the desktops original stick of PC 2100. I found that her PC was running a PC2100 and a PC2700 sprig of 256MB at 266Mhz.

Then I cracked open Vectra (an HP Vli8 500+more PC100 ram) and my brothers junked Dell 4500 PC on the “operating table”. The Dell is missing it’s CD-ROM drives and Ethernet NIC. There were two EIDE hard drives when I first salvaged it, a 40GB Western Digital and an 80GB Hitachi. The 80GB has been in Vectra for awhile now as a secondary disk but I left the smaller 40GB due to lack of space.

I tried the 40GB to see if there was a working install of Windows left on it before formatting it, the BIOS couldn’t boot off it. So I pulled the CD-ROM drive out of Vectra and popped myself in the head. I only had one set of mounting brackets left for the Dell case — which while compatible with the hard drives don’t fit the CD-ROM drive !!!

So I did something that is probably stupid but effective. Hooked up the CD-ROM to the PSU and secondary EIDE port on the mother board, sandwiching the drive between the case and the lid before I booted her. Then popped myself in the head again when the CD tray ejected ‘upside down’, I wondered why the power dongle needed to plug into the wrong side.

Flipped it over, rebooted and loaded Knoppix LiveCD but still couldn’t access that 40GB drive. I know Live CDs are slow (and that drives dated 1999 and 32X max reading speed) but it was actually a _lot_ faster then I thought it would be on 256MB of PC2100. Then I took out Vectra’s root disk an 8.4GB Maxtor hosting my OpenBSD installation and switched mounting brackets.

She still wouldn’t boot, so I tried my boot floppy from OpenBSD 4.1 (I didn’t use a floppy for the 4.2/4.3 upgrades). I shutdown and switched the cable to the other mate on the EIDE line and rebooted, worked perfectly. Then I stuck in the 40GB drive and hooked it up on the previous one. That way I could boot knoppix and scope out the 40GB drive.

I’ve read about Master/Slave issues with (P)ATA/(E)IDE based systems and what not like this before but it’s actually the first time I’ve ever seen the BIOS fail to detect and boot a drive, maybe previous systems I’ve worked on were just well cabled to avoid it ^_^.

There is a legit copy of windows on the drive and some files, so I may as well back that up just in case I need it later. ‘Cuz I didn’t get a copy of the restore disks from my brother when he gave me the PC, several months after he stripped it for ‘parts’ to use on his new custom PC. Right now I’ve got both of Vectra’s hard drives installed, I would have put all three in it as there is enough space but I just don’t have enough mounting brackets.

And while I’m willing to use a CD-ROM drive without mounting it in the case — a hard drive is full of data so I take precautions. So I can dump it later if ever, right now it’s on my desk. I had to get the drives sorted to move Vectras OpenBSD install cleanly over and install the PCI card for the wireless. That system is good to go as soon as I figure out how to get it working on my network, since OpenBSD 4.3 doesn’t support my networks level of encryption and I’m not sure if my network supports the next ideal solution lol.

Afterwards I setup my desktop (SAL1600) with the last of the WiFi cards and for the heck of it, hooked up my spare monitor and configured Dual View on my nVidia 8400GS. I find it some what disorienting especially because the second monitor has very shitty colour compared to my primary. I also don’t have another power cord to use with the other two PCs lol.

If I buy another power cable or two I can get all 4 computers running. I’m just itching for the phones to get sorted on the land lines so I can switch the modems and move the router to my bedroom, that way I can hook up one PC via Ethernet.

About 0000GMT I finally got to sit down and eat, took a nice long nap after that !!!!

* Ten Commands of C Programmers, annoted edition

modify that module wiz wanted worked on 😉 — tonight

finish neo ports manager — on going

write article(s) for BSD Mag — weekend, ongoing

write front end for a pre-processor and template based idea for work. — now

Medics live op — tomorrow

work on kde4 — as soon as people let me

write specifications and carry out planning for project black widow — classified until further notice.

Ahh… home from work.

The jobs about two times the size of our others but it wasn’t really as bad as I originally thought. That’s probably a good thing, now if only it was possible to get more work done when I’m not at work :

Between family and work I’m falling even further behind schedule !!!

The !%*)Y!)% !(%Y)! %)! %)! %)&! (%() !@%!#@!% !%! !!!

I’m sitting here working on C++/Qt4 code and my music is cutting in/out and vim starts to lag. Ok, I figure it is either some process gone wachko eating system resources (which top suggested was not the case) or the router is going fuckers again.

Sure enough, everything relating to my network shares hangs -> I do a power cycle on the AP with no luck. Full reboot and still arguing…

pinging my ap gives < 2ms to > 200ms responses and an apparent average of 20-40% package loss +/- an extra 5-7% and things are still getting rat fucked here. One test, standing right next to the aerials I was getting upwards of 10-15% packet loss for crying out fucking loud.

I’m so going to kill something when I get to the bottom of this….

This level of connectivity starvation is proving to be lethal to the whole write/compile/test cycle, hell even the web browser is dying a laggy death trying to write in this text area. Which means I’m likely to loose the nights work.

That means, if I find the source of this interference, which appears to be costing me over 4 hours of optimal work time remaining on this code base…. there will be a Spidey on the war path — hardware or neighborer related.

Hmm, there is a very fine Italian expression but I won’t do it the dis justice of trying to spell it :.

Day originally was planned as a work day, became a day off, became a job interview — the house from hell so to speak, in terms of having to work in it but otherwise a decent gig.

A friends having a hard time, brings up more then a few… uncomfortable memories but I can generally sympatise.

Spent about an hour talking with Rasa over the colour of the bike shed, only about 10-15 minutes was actually productive 😐

After that, considering that between my family, my work, and Rasa, I was over 2.5 hours behind schedule… On a day I planned to hash through task after task after task. I decided to use some of the time otherwise getting wasted for me, to join the server.

Got in a few good rounds on PG#1, ain’t played RvS in a couple since I’ve spent most of my server time either training Jonsi or camping the SWAT4 server ;-). I was surprised to see that my accuracy is still doing good, each round I did between 70-90% hits and saw most of them through to completion.

After that, I ended up joining Duke for a couple games before I had to drop to finish my chores. Honestly, joining friends on the servers is probably the biggest break from projects I get !!!

Was watching The Abyss after dinner. Pretty good movie but reminds me, you couldn’t pay me to serve on a submarine. At least if a ship goes down, you have some chance if ya don’t freeze to death. But on a sub, it is not quite that easy to get out lol.

One strange thing, while I find the idea of being in such situations some what disturbing. I really think of the idea of space travel as quite fun lol.

Maybe because I never really learned how to swim? I dunno lol. After all, in the vacum of space your dead… In water, well you might drown but you also might get through Point A and Point B alive if you don’t run out of air +S