Leaves
Oct1
Whenever fall comes and the whole world around me prepares for the eminent winter weather to come, the thing which intrigues me the most are the leaves as they slowly change color and eventually fall to the ground only to meld their existence into that which lies below them. I don’t know what attracts my attention to them, but I find myself constantly gazing into tree tops while I’m driving around town or taking a short break from my day’s activities to casually look through the window. I feel an awkward yet pleasant sensation as I first see the wind move through the yellow, orange, red, and occasionally violet leaves with such ease and then with the same unwavering force, feel it rush by me as well. I wonder if it is because I feel some type of connection with them or if I unconsciously look to them for the wisdom they are bound to possess.
A query: If leaves could tell a story like empty seashells from the beach whisper their tale to the curious ear, what would they say? Would they speak of life and death? Would they weep because of the sadness they have seen or would they speak of the kindness they were able to witness? I suppose they could talk of purpose, passions, and power. Reality, reason, and responsibility. Learning, laughing, love. I think of the greatness that has often been achieved by countless individuals while surrounded by the reassuring shades of autumn.
Were I ever to become a poet, I believe that the simplicity of leaves would require the majority of my efforts to explain.
Chatfield Corn Maze
Oct0
Usually I try and come up with some sort of catchy or attention grabbing phrase at the beginning of any posts that I write (wouldn’t my english teachers be proud!), however, after trying to come up with something for ten minutes, I’ve got nothing. Thus, you have just read the most boring introduction ever. You’ll get over it, I promise.
I have not had a job for about 3 weeks now and I was really starting to get bored and lacking financially. However, last Friday, I finally decided to accept one of the job offers that had been presented to me. I had had plenty of interviews and telephone conversations, but the only ones that excited me were taking too long to be back to me. Specifically, I had been hoping to land a job with Frontier Airlines because supposedly such a job comes with free flying for myself and a future spouse. I can just imagine how great it would be to travel whenever and wherever you wanted. Granted, it would always be standby, but being able to take of each weekend and go to places like DC, or Boston, or even Hawaii would be fantastic. Nonetheless, it was not to be because after waiting 4+ weeks of being told that it most likely would happen, I gave up on it. Another job I was trying to pull in was as an independent consultant doing Network Engineering. This guy I knew was looking to take on a few “students” and be a mentor to me showing me the ropes and getting me clients and contracts, but again, after 2 weeks, I couldn’t wait anymore. I decided to take a job with a company called Solve IT which does almost exactly the same thing I was doing in Provo, general IT consulting.
It looks like a good company, I seem to like the guys I will be working with, and best of all, they are excited to have me join the company. In fact, when I called and told the manager I would be accepting the offer, he said he was a little surprised and had written me off because he assumed I would be taking another job. Plus, he called and talked to my previous boss from Provo and they must have really talked me up becasue the manager said they thought the world of me. Isn’t it great to be wanted! Well, I start on Wednesday and I really don’t know what the schedule will be like, but I imagine I will have quite a bit of flexibility to work my own schedule, just as long as I get the work done. Plus, if any of the other jobs eventually substantiate into anything real, I might be able to do some after hours / weekend work or maybe even say that I have currently accepted a job and if they are still interested in me six months from now, I would be willing to reevaluate my position.
The singles ward I have been attending in downtown Denver recently informed me that because I do not live within their boundaries, I cannot have my membership records transferred there. So, because the ward that I do correspond doesn’t appeal to me and I haven’t transferred them there either, the church only know of me as a student in Provo that has gone missing. Oh well. I’m thinking maybe in three months or so looking for an apartment with some roommates, but I shall see.
This past weekend I on went on a date with a girl named Keri whom I met in said singles ward. I took her to a corn maze Chatfield Reservoir (south Denver) and is actually a part of the Denver Botanical Gardens. We went at night after it started to dark to make it all that more difficult. We got through it in about an hour or so, but I think it happened more of by chance than actual problem solving skills. At the beginning, I did suggest we merely turn right at every opportunity until we made it through but she was not to keen of the idea. Afterwards we went to Chili’s and spent about two hours just talking over dinner. All in all, it was a good date.
It was looking to be a good weekend until yesterday, Sunday, when it started to snow. At about 8:00 AM, it started coming down and began sticking to the grass. I looked out the window and then said out-loud, “I hate winter.” Although it never got cold enough to make the streets icy, the fact that I had to scape off my car to go to church was frustrating. I know life will go on and spring will eventually come, but six months of cold weather is the last thing I would wish on anyone, including myself.
I’m thinking there should be ritual dance that could be performed like the natives used to that would make winter go away. Either that, or maybe if no one talked about winter and never acknowledged its existence, perhaps it would never come. That would work for me. What do you think?
The Greatest Show on Earth
Oct0
This past weekend, the family got together to celebrate all of the birthdays that take place in the month of October (Nelson, 13th; Eliza, 15th; Hayden, 23rd). Everyone was invited to go to the Ringing Bros. and Barnum & Bailey circus that was in town, however, due to lack of interest and cost ($20+ per ticket), only Nelson, Leah, Hayden, and I ended up going. I had never been to a circus before so this event was just that much more special. I think we all enjoyed it and had a good time, although Hayden was a little frightened to begin with but calmed down towards the last half of the show.
They call it “The Greatest Show on Earth,” and it was pretty spectacular. However, I think I enjoyed watching Hayden react to everything just about as much as the show itself. Well, anyways, I thought I would add some pictures and videos below.
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Part of My Dream House
Oct1
I recently made a purchase that most people will never have in their own home. In fact, probably only 1 of out every 100,000 people have one (just a guess). I knew from about the age of 16 that I wanted one and somehow I would eventually have at least one. I know you must be asking yourself right now, “What could such an item be?” Are you ready to find out? Are you sure you want to know? Can you handle the suspense? What is it really? It is a 42U APC Computer Equipment Cabinet and it is just beautiful. Now, I imagine that I just lost your interest because you have no idea what that really is. Basically, it is a large black cabinet on wheels that is designed extremely well to mount, store, and organize different types of computer equipment. Why do I need / want one? My excuse for having made such a purchase it so that I can hold all of my Cisco equipment and use it as a tool while I study for my additional certifications, but, the truth is that it is just social / geek / nerd status thing.
I had been searching on Craigslist for one for about 2 weeks just to see if anything showed up, and then suddenly one evening, there it was. I contacted the guy and set up an appointment to go out and see it in person the next day. He said he had no idea what to charge, so I was thinking I was going to get a steal on it, however, he actually knew the real value of it. I initially offered $200, then $300, and finally $400, but it was a no go. He had some extra stuff included with it that I didn’t really need or care for and was hoping for nothing less than $500. Knowing my limits, I told him that if no one else was interested to give me a call. Later that evening, he called and said he found someone who would buy the parts inside I didn’t care for and if I still wanted it for $400, I could have it.
After thinking it over and trying to scrounge what money I had left after not really working for 3 weeks, I decided to go for it. Saturday came, I borrowed my Dad’s trailer and along with my Mom’s help (thanks), we went and picked it up. It was heavy, most likely around 500 pounds, but it has its own wheels and I brought a hand cart as well. An hour after having left home, we got back and dropped it off. Then, during the next few days, I unloaded it from the trailer, took it apart and then re-assembled it in the basement (it was too big to go down the stairs in one piece, and then added all of my equipment to it.
I actually thought I would have my own home first before I bought one of these, but if this is how it works out, so be it. As for a name (everything deserves a name), I think I will call her Betty, Big Black Betty.
Tera-whats?
Oct0
I now have 1.5 terabytes of disk space in a RAID5 array in my server. Let me explain.
The large computer server that I had which stores all of my movies and TV shows recently ran out of disk space. It was really 100% full and had no disk space left at all. Plus, my laptop with all of my personal day-to-day stuff recently started to make funny noises indicative of a soon-to-be hard drive failure. Having planned for this when I initially built the computer, I ordered some new disks to be able to add them in without much difficulty. I was wrong.
You would think that if you have 6 SATA ports on your motherboard, you would be able to use them all at the same time. Nope. Not the case for the Tyan i5000vs motherboard I had. When running them in what is called “Enhanced Mode,” i.e. the main BIOS detecting the disks and presenting them to the OS, only 4 could be used at once. So, then I tried to enable what is called AHCI and passed the responsibility of discovering the disks to that BIOS. When I did this and tried to start the OS, grub gave me an error 22, which means it can’t find the MBR. I turned off the server and thought about it for an hour or two. I even contemplated having to buy a new PCI-E SATA controller, but those were an additional $250. Finally, I decided to enable the motherboard’s RAID function on the SATA ports, but not create an array (since I was using Linux-RAID already and didn’t want to lose my data.) Grub loaded, the OS found the new serial disk devices (sda, sdb, sdc, sdd, sde, sdf, and sdg). I added the new disks to the array and tried to grow the array to now use 6 disks instead of 4. The mdadm tool got confused and said this could not be done. Knowing this was not true, I did some research and found the mdadm had gone through some major updates during the past 12 months. Since I was running Ubuntu 6.10 and 7.04 had been released for 6 months now, I did a dist-upgrade and waiting for about an half-an-hour while the packages were downloaded and installed. A few reboots later (due to kernel upgrades, I attempted to use mdadm tool to grow this array and it worked! This took around 6 hours overnight but completed without errors so I then extended the file-system which only took 5 seconds or so.
Eventually, everything worked fine and I was able to move most of laptop data over to the server before the hard drive crashed for good. All in all, a good learning experience. I found this website to be extremely helpful in getting things working the right way and was also quite happy that I did my research when I initially built the server because by using Linux RAID and SGI’s XFS file-system, things went quite smoothly once I figured it all out.
So now I have 1.5 terabytes of disk space and I didn’t lose any of the data already stored there in the process. I have to admit the following two images are pretty sweet.
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