I haven’t posted an update since December 2015 and that’s a long time. It is time to remedy that! Therefore I’m going to start posting on a regular basis again, yaaaay!

Generally, I’m gonna be posting the same mix of stuff, filling in some of what has gone on in the 15 month gap, and then posting updates on my projects.

Sounds like fun, right? I’m stoked! Can’t wait to get the next post up. See you then!

What to do, what to do? That’s always the question, isn’t it?

Let me first qualify: I recognize that I’m lucky that I have the luxury of enough time that I have to deliberate on how to spend it. But this just means that I have the luxury of choosing from many things I actually could do; I just don’t have enough time to do them. Of course, this really is just me realizing some of the angst People Of A Certain Age start to feel: What do I want to have done? How would I like to have spent...
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I have a tragedy to report. Last month, one of the bastions of history has melted away. Southern Lumber, the most awesomest place to go for wood in San Jose, has closed its doors after 110 years in the business. The worst thing is that the business was still profitable; the owner just wanted out and, instead of selling the store to someone who would keep it open, just sold it to some real estate folks.

It was a shock; I was going there to price out some stuff and I get there and see “Permanently closed” on the door....
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In the last installment, I brought up the fact that I was trying to save time because one operation was going to take a couple thousand minutes to complete. Let me describe to you what I did.

Based on my original experience with RAID (albeit, with RAID 1), it didn’t take too long to complete, and I could use the file system while it completed. One of the complaints I had in the last post was that I wouldn’t be able to use the file system while it was resizing; I didn’t know that until I went down this path....
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Let’s see, where did I leave off in the last installment? Oh yeah, setting up the level 5 array with just the two disks; this is before adding the third and growing it. We had just started the new array and it was resizing/repairing/whatever. Weeeellll… a lot has happened since then. Let’s go through it.

$ cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10] md0 : active raid5 sdb1[2] sda1[0] 1953381888 blocks super 1.2 level 5, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> 

This is what is seen...
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So, I didn’t get started with this on Thursday. In fact, it wasn’t till Saturday that I decided to actually take the plunge. And now I’m stuck in the middle of it, waiting for… a long time. Since I’m stuck, I’ll tell you what I’m doing. Hell, maybe later I can just look this up and see what I did if I ever need to do it again!

First off, I made sure my data was backed up. The backup to my external hard drive is complete, but not to online; that will still take a couple weeks, and I’m...
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I’m sure we all have one of those “there is NO WAY I could possibly use that much hard disk space” moments, and I’m sure that for each one of those moments, we all have a matching one where we say “wait… what? 95% full???” Personally, I’m still reeling that I purchased a microSD card for my phone which has several orders of magnitude more storage than my first “there is NO WAY” moment with a 1.44MB 3.5” floppy.

Side note; I HAD TO do the math. One 3.5” floppy is 90mm x 93.7mm x 3.3mm. One microSD card is...
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On Monday, August 6th, 2012, we all stood with anticipation, talking, excited. Champagne is being prepared, and some is being drunk somewhere. Anxious glances at the countdown clock, at JK, at each other. We hear (faintly, because it’s coming from a laptop) Europe’s The Final Countdown start as the clock dips under :30 seconds; the video is up on a screen. The gong mallet is prepared. 10! 9! 8! Everyone is counting down the clock. 7! 6! 5! 4! 3! 2! 1! Cheers as the song kicks in, as the gong is struck, as the champagne...
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Since I got a new phone (Samsung Galaxy S5) and since it’s my first foray into full-time android use (I dumped my iPhone for this one), I get to learn all about new apps! Sometimes this is exciting, sometimes not so much because I don’t want to spend all my time learning the apps, you know? Any rate, one of them was enough of a paradigm shift that I thought I’d write about it.

The app is simply called “Mailbox” (www.mailboxapp.com) and, just like its name suggests, it is an email client. However, there’s...
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Hey all, since I gave you the Tumbler timelapse two days early, I’m taking this opportunity to do a little upkeep and behind-the-scenes modifications. All I’ve done is update the OpenGraph meta tags so my posts show up better on Facebook.

That’s it.

Nothing else.

No, seriously.

Hey all, in lieu of finishing the field encapsulation series, I thought I’d bring you this announcement: I made my site prettier! Woo! Please take a look around and tell me what you think!

I based this on a couple sources. The main structure and many of the accoutrements are based on KenMercusLai’s theme BT3-Flat and the color scheme came from Templated.co’s theme Mongoose. The pictures on the main page are all ones I took; I’ll be changing them up from time to time as I go through old images or take new ones I like.

It took...
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Get productive!

Over the last few weeks, I’ve decided to become more productive by doing things rather than not do things. One of the biggest time sucks I pinpointed was browsing Reddit, so I decided to just completely stop. Suddenly, I found HOURS per day to do things that I’ve been beating myself up for not finishing.

Now, the next big question: what should I do?

Task Management

The big problem here is that I have a bunch of different things going on (as you might glean from this blog): software projects, woodworking projects, home repairs and improvements,...
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I know I don’t talk about work or work-related subjects very frequently, but considering how much of my time it takes up, I’ve started to wonder why not. I mean, it can’t be all because of NDA’s and trade secrets and the like. After all, let’s face it, nothing I’ve done in the last 5 years has been highly cutting edge or completely unique. Perhaps I’ll discuss why that’s not depressing to me later. In any case, I have some thoughts to share on lots of different subjects: why things matter and/or why they don’t matter, mostly.

To kick things...
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Just wanted to put this down as the first post in my new daily journal! It’s far too late (12:23am on Friday morning) for me to write much, but I will say that Friday will be another day with much tired happening! Hopefully, one of these days I’ll actually start getting better sleep. Until then, there’s coffee!