Happy Birthday To Me...
I turned 25 at 1:26am Eastern Time today. I was born at (I think) 12:26am. I know it was between 12:20 and 12:30. Why 1:26 today? Because in 1982, DST started on the last Sunday of April, well after I was born. The first Sunday of April was the law from 1986 until 2006. I hate DST.. time is such an abstract notion and we should simply adjust our schedules to match the Sun, not our clocks. But I digress.
Why am I up at this ungodly hour, you ask? Well, it's simple really. I couldn't sleep on Monday morning, and had to get up early Monday. I took Draco for his neuter surgery and both of my cats got their vaccinations updated. They should be good until 2008 at least, maybe even 2009 since they never go outside (should I feel guilty about this?). Anyway, I fell asleep around 7:30pm last night and slept until 1:30am. This is exactly why I hate going to sleep so early.. because then I'm still tired when I go to work the next day, since I got up super-early.
My brother accepted a job in the Denver Tech Center area, so he'll be moving here soon. Whee!
It's been almost two years since I started keeping this LiveJournal and I'm rather glad I did. Nothing like having a self-written history to reflect on. I'd like to believe I've grown as a person in those two years. There's still so much emotion bottled up in myself though. Every year I break it open a bit further. I'm happy the way things are going now.
A few weeks ago I did some serious exercise and managed to keep it up for a few days. I was burning 850-1000 calories in an hour. I need to get back to that.. I don't know why I stopped. I was feeling pretty incredible after those sessions. But it really does require being rested even after a full day's work. And lately I haven't been able to convince myself that I'm physically prepared for that, and haven't been willing to go for anything less. :-/
I bought a new server as I described in a previous post. It's running very well. I encountered an issue with the Intel Gigabit onboard LAN.. I'd get "watchdog timeout" from FreeBSD every time I tried to do real traffic on it in gigabit mode. So I talked to Scott Long, who referred me to Jack Vogel, the guy at Intel who's maintaining the em(4) driver. Turns out, it's not an OS issue. Supermicro ships these systems with a broken EEPROM in the Intel PCI-E Gigabit chip and you have to patch the EEPROM to fix the problem. Since then, I've been getting incredible performance from my new server and am very happy with it. I highly recommend the Areca SATA RAID controllers if you are looking for a new one.
I took the opportunity to shuffle some of my hardware around and got a Windows box up at home again. Unfortunately it gets very poor performance in Counter-Strike (which is pretty much the only reason I have a Windows box at all) due to having an old processor (Athlon XP 2200+). Blah. I don't want to spend more money on computers right now. At least the windows computer runs smoothly now.
I haven't had much success in getting people to go with me to London. Since I first looked at the cost of going, the price of tickets have jumped from $800ish to $1200ish, for a mid-August sojourn. Given the need to re-establish my savings account after draining it to buy and perform basic fixup work on my house last year, I'm thinking about making it a domestic trip instead. There are still several places I'd like to go in the United States. Hmm.. perhaps Seattle, Las Vegas, Washington DC, San Diego.. I'm still planning to go to New York in October. Timeframes, respectively: August 11-19, October 20-28. I'll be on vacation with the family June 9-18.. sailing on Lake Erie near Sandusky, Ohio. I'm going to be sailing with my dad and generally having a relaxing vacation while having fun and seeing some geological sights in that area.
Spring weather's arrived in Denver lately. It was 70-75 Monday, should be in the mid-to-upper 70s Tuesday.. clear skies. Mountain peaks still have snow on them. Ahhhh! Of course, Old Man Winter will still be pushing us around a bit longer. Frankly, I never thought I'd say this, but after having had snow on the ground for 60 consecutive days in Denver this winter, I'm quite happy to see the warm weather.
About a month or so ago I signed up at okcupid (again).. I'd been browsing Denver CL w4m for about a year at that point and not had much success. Since then I've met several very cool women.. and perhaps something will develop from that. :)
At the least, I have some new friends. Life's gotten more interesting lately. Yeah, baby. I went to a bar two Fridays ago and played pool with some cool people I'd just met.. then later I was trying to meet somebody at a club (never happened) and because I was still trying to figure out where the club was, I was wandering around. I ran into some more people that happened to be going there and we walked along to it. That was funny... just too bad I didn't feel like dancing at that point.
Anyway.. I'd better try to catch a couple Z's before getting up again to go to work.
Why am I up at this ungodly hour, you ask? Well, it's simple really. I couldn't sleep on Monday morning, and had to get up early Monday. I took Draco for his neuter surgery and both of my cats got their vaccinations updated. They should be good until 2008 at least, maybe even 2009 since they never go outside (should I feel guilty about this?). Anyway, I fell asleep around 7:30pm last night and slept until 1:30am. This is exactly why I hate going to sleep so early.. because then I'm still tired when I go to work the next day, since I got up super-early.
My brother accepted a job in the Denver Tech Center area, so he'll be moving here soon. Whee!
It's been almost two years since I started keeping this LiveJournal and I'm rather glad I did. Nothing like having a self-written history to reflect on. I'd like to believe I've grown as a person in those two years. There's still so much emotion bottled up in myself though. Every year I break it open a bit further. I'm happy the way things are going now.
A few weeks ago I did some serious exercise and managed to keep it up for a few days. I was burning 850-1000 calories in an hour. I need to get back to that.. I don't know why I stopped. I was feeling pretty incredible after those sessions. But it really does require being rested even after a full day's work. And lately I haven't been able to convince myself that I'm physically prepared for that, and haven't been willing to go for anything less. :-/
I bought a new server as I described in a previous post. It's running very well. I encountered an issue with the Intel Gigabit onboard LAN.. I'd get "watchdog timeout" from FreeBSD every time I tried to do real traffic on it in gigabit mode. So I talked to Scott Long, who referred me to Jack Vogel, the guy at Intel who's maintaining the em(4) driver. Turns out, it's not an OS issue. Supermicro ships these systems with a broken EEPROM in the Intel PCI-E Gigabit chip and you have to patch the EEPROM to fix the problem. Since then, I've been getting incredible performance from my new server and am very happy with it. I highly recommend the Areca SATA RAID controllers if you are looking for a new one.
I took the opportunity to shuffle some of my hardware around and got a Windows box up at home again. Unfortunately it gets very poor performance in Counter-Strike (which is pretty much the only reason I have a Windows box at all) due to having an old processor (Athlon XP 2200+). Blah. I don't want to spend more money on computers right now. At least the windows computer runs smoothly now.
I haven't had much success in getting people to go with me to London. Since I first looked at the cost of going, the price of tickets have jumped from $800ish to $1200ish, for a mid-August sojourn. Given the need to re-establish my savings account after draining it to buy and perform basic fixup work on my house last year, I'm thinking about making it a domestic trip instead. There are still several places I'd like to go in the United States. Hmm.. perhaps Seattle, Las Vegas, Washington DC, San Diego.. I'm still planning to go to New York in October. Timeframes, respectively: August 11-19, October 20-28. I'll be on vacation with the family June 9-18.. sailing on Lake Erie near Sandusky, Ohio. I'm going to be sailing with my dad and generally having a relaxing vacation while having fun and seeing some geological sights in that area.
Spring weather's arrived in Denver lately. It was 70-75 Monday, should be in the mid-to-upper 70s Tuesday.. clear skies. Mountain peaks still have snow on them. Ahhhh! Of course, Old Man Winter will still be pushing us around a bit longer. Frankly, I never thought I'd say this, but after having had snow on the ground for 60 consecutive days in Denver this winter, I'm quite happy to see the warm weather.
About a month or so ago I signed up at okcupid (again).. I'd been browsing Denver CL w4m for about a year at that point and not had much success. Since then I've met several very cool women.. and perhaps something will develop from that. :)
At the least, I have some new friends. Life's gotten more interesting lately. Yeah, baby. I went to a bar two Fridays ago and played pool with some cool people I'd just met.. then later I was trying to meet somebody at a club (never happened) and because I was still trying to figure out where the club was, I was wandering around. I ran into some more people that happened to be going there and we walked along to it. That was funny... just too bad I didn't feel like dancing at that point.
Anyway.. I'd better try to catch a couple Z's before getting up again to go to work.