Thursday, September 29, 2005
The cure for frustration is called MEPIS
I should mention to begin with that I was not feeling too good this morning; I think I was running a fever and my nose was all stuffed up and my throat was sore. I usually wait until after my shower to make a decision whether or not to call in sick as I have been known to feel much better after taking my shower. Unfortunately, today was not one of those days. So I decided to stay home and rest. I did not go back to bed as my head felt better if I stayed upright.

I therefore sat in front of the computer and contemplated what to do about the Linspire problem. After looking through all the live CDs that I have around, I decided to try SimplyMEPIS. After booting it, I was impressed to see that everything was working as it should and it was actually not too slow even though it was running off of a CD. It even did a couple of things that no other Linux distribution had been setup to do. I decided right then and there to install it on the hard disk.

SimplyMEPIS simply works! The distribution is put out by a US company called MEPIS. I had most everything up and running by 10am and since I was feeling better I decided to work from home. I was able to do all that I normally do at work from home; now I have been able to set Linux to do that before (after all, I am running a Linux workstation at the office) but now less than 2 hours after deciding to install the distribution. I have now used it for almost 18 hours and I am still very impressed about SimplyMEPIS. And on top of that it is a test version that I am running. If you are looking for an easy distribution to install - give SimplyMEPIS a good look.

I (I really should say we) was not able to talk/chat with my wife today. She sent an email and it sounded like it was a frustrating day for her. It must be hard on her to have to see her fading away. Well at least her sister and husband are coming down for a visit so it will be easier on her since she will have reinforcements.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:19 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Linux frustration
Last year, when I was looking for a Linux distribution to replace Fedora on my home machine, I tried Linspire 4.5. At the time I really liked it and I would have run it on my home PC had it not been for the fact that they want US$50/year for support. Since I had never paid for support before, I decided to look elsewhere.

Fast forward to last week. After replacing the motherboard on my computer, Linux was acting up. So, since Linspire now has a cheaper support option, I decided to install it. Except that since last year they have put out Linspire Five-O. So of course that is what I installed. Unfortunately, I have had nothing but frustration at this OS install. Sound works then does not work. Web browser is very unstable. So I installed their version of Firefox. That works much better but the printing is all screwed up. If I had hair to spare I would pull it out... I think I am ready to just consider this episode as an experiment gone bad and just move on. We will see how I feel about it this weekend since I do not have time to re-install before then.

Today was my wife's birthday so "Happy birthday, sweetheart!". Sorry you had to be away from home on your birthday but we will make it up somehow.

Not much else to talk about so I will close for tonight.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:21 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
I obviously needed a break
Oops, looks like I took a few days off blogging. Not really on purpose, but I installed a new version of Linux on my computer (Linspire) and I have been busy working out the kinks out of the system. The biggest kink was the fact that one of the things that was not working was playing games on Pogo. Of course, this happens to be one of the main things my wife does when she is on this computer - so it definitely had to be fixed before she came back. For some reason I am still not getting any sound while playing the games, but at least now you can play the games.

I had also been feeling pretty tired the last couple of days - probably a combination of all the extra activities I took part last weekend and the fact that I have been staying up until 1:30am the last two days. Last night when I went to bed I was feeling so weary that I knew I would be no good at work today so I decided to take one of my vacation days. I sent work an email letting them know I would not be in and slept until 9am. I have been feeling better, even more so now that I had a nap this afternoon.

I was telling my wife (which if you remember is out of town visiting her family) that I obviously was missing her voice of reason - I obviously no longer can take care of myself by myself :)

Good Night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 6:03 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Saturday, September 24, 2005
Too quiet
Today was a tiring day because I actually did some physical labour - usually the only work I do on the weekend is intellectual so this was a big change. Not that I did not use my brain, but my body got a workout that it does not usually get. I spent a good part of the morning with my younger daughter and a few other people (200 of them) spread all over Esquimalt, Vic. West, and View Royal handing out free stuff. See Love [Your City] if you want to know what it was all about.

I am here by myself tonight - my wife as I mentioned is off visiting family, my older daughter is off doing something related to a certificate (really showing off how little I know of what goes on here), and my younger daughter is off at a sleepover at a friend's house. Which just left me and the animals at home. It was lonely when I was young and single and it still is now. I may not be a big conversationalist, but I like to know there are people I could talk to if I wanted to. Oh well, my daughters will both be back home tomorrow so I will then only be missing my better half.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:46 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Friday, September 23, 2005
Courses are over
The two courses I was on this week have completed and, although I was aware of a lot of the information presented, I did learn quite a few things which I hope will be helpful in our day to day operations. I will have to spend some time in the next few weeks digesting what we learned and seeing if it can be applied to the office.

The course Friday completed at noon so I was able to take the afternoon off - which gave me a chance to work on the slide presentation for tonight church service.

As I mentioned yesterday, my wife left today to go visit family. We were able to call her tonight to chat and find out how her day went. It sounded like it went pretty well even though it was long and tiring. She should be enjoying her stay at her brother's house for the next few days. It goes without saying (even though I will say it anyway) that we all miss her here.

My older daughter is also out of town this weekend, so the animal population in the house is outnumbering the human population!

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:58 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Yet another quick update
I guess I should stop leaving the writing of an entry for the last thing to do before bed, because I usually end up being late for bed and wanting to quickly write the blog. Tonight is another one of those since basically I have to get up just before 4am to take my wife to the airport as she is leaving to visit her family. Her flight leaves at 6am - which means she should be there by 4:30am and since we live 30 minutes away from the airport....

We started another course today - NetBackup Advanced Client. This one is more interesting - for me anyway - than the troubleshooting one. It is therefore unfortunate that the mobile lab that was brought to our building for the course is not really set up for this course; which means we are not getting the full effect of the course.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:03 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Little to write about
Another uneventful day. The day was only momentous because it is the day when, 26 years ago, I got married. I am happy to report that I am still married to the same woman (Love you Trish!) and I have no intention to change that state of fact.

Work was work - fixed the disk errors on one of our servers - now only have to check and make sure that the images database is not corrupted.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:01 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Training worth the time?
I am trying to figure out whether or not the amount of stuff I am learning on the course I am on is worth the time I am spending on the course. Most of the stuff we are covering I know already; so I wonder if I am getting my (or the government) money's worth. Hopefully the "Advanced Client" part of the course will be more interesting - but I do expect it to be.

Quiet evening at home - so not much to talk about.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:37 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Monday, September 19, 2005
Another quick update
Well I was planning once again to get in bed by 11pm. Obviously this is not going to happen, but at least I will be going to bed earlier than yesterday.

Work was a little hectic, but not for me. I am on course this week so a lot of the day to day happenings do not concern me as I am spending all of my day in the classroom. So although there were problems with disks and tape drives, I had little or nothing to do with it.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:04 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Quick update
Well I am supposed to have been in bed 90 minutes ago so this will be fast. This being Sunday the usual happened this morning: Church. The rest of the day was pretty much me sitting in front of the computer just reading mail, playing games on Pogo, and surfing the web. The only exceptions to that were the two car trips: one to take my older daughter to work, and one to bring her back home after work.

Well my second toe is definitely swollen and looks bruised, but it certainly did not prevent me from sleeping last night or from wearing regular shoes all day today. It does like to hurt from time to time to remind me of my less than elegant exit from the store (if you did not read yesterday - I kicked a planter that was right outside the door with my right foot).

Well tomorrow should be fun: it is the first day of a 5 day course in troubleshooting techniques for Veritas Netbackup. I guess I will be attending the course with less than my usual amount of sleep - and I cannot be late since it is a course that has a set start time.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 12:46 AM | Permalink | 0 comments
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Accident prone
I have been accident prone these last few days, and today was no exception. Fortunately, it is nothing serious. I guess it started a week ago, when I got a blister on my hand while working at church. The next day, I gouged the knuckle of my left index finger. And the next day, I got a paper cut on the same finger. A couple of days later I was cutting some cardboard with my pocket knife and made a slight cut on still the same finger. Today, I stayed away from my finger and accidentally tried to move a large planter by kicking it with my foot. Needless to say, my foot has been sore ever since. I am not looking forward to taking my sandal and sock off to see how bad the toes and foot are bruised.

Other than that, it has been a pretty uneventful day. We went to a new discount store in town, XS Cargo, and came back with a GE DVD player for $49+tax. They were supposed to have one for $19 but of course it was sold out. I actually feel better about getting one where I at least recognize the brand.

I spent the rest of the day doing one of two things: working on the powerpoint slides for church and setting up the new-to-us computer in the basement. The computer was going to be disposed of at the church and, since it looked in decent shape, I wondered if I could have it and they nicely let me take it home. Turns out that was a good thing for the church since it turns out that the hard drive had not been wiped and the church data was still on it.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 12:20 AM | Permalink | 0 comments
Friday, September 16, 2005
On the mend
Both of my daughters were at work today so they were feeling better (either that or the drugs had kicked in). This was another evening where all of us had to be at two different places at the same time. I had a meeting to go to at church (which was at the same time as choir practice) and my wife and daughters were going to their choir practice. So it went like this: 3 of us had supper at home, and then went to pick my older daughter at her work. There I was dropped off at the bus stop so I could catch the bus to the church while they drove out to choir practice. They then came back after their practice to pick me up at church as my meeting ran very long.

We have had our first day of using the new disk. Everything seems to be working okay and a side benefit is that our catalog backups (where we backup all the backup information/indices to tape) took only 4 hours as opposed to the 7-8 hours it took before. And this is with the same amount of data! I guess there is a big difference to having mirrored stripes as opposed to a hardware RAID5 filesystem (which is much faster). Whatever the reason we are certainly very happy that the daily catalog backup is so much faster.

Good day!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:45 AM | Permalink | 0 comments
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
And we waited and waited
Following up on yesterday's entry: we did finally get the disks swapped. Of course, it took a lot longer than I thought it would. It went like this: the original copy that I thought would take 24 hours only took 19. So when I was checking before 8am and saw that it was completed I decided to run the copy again so that we would catch the changes that had been made by the nightly backups. That went pretty well, and finished around 10:30, but failed to copy a couple of files because they were too large. Turned out that we needed a newer version of the rsync program.

After upgrading rsync, I re-ran the copy one more time this time to get the large files that were missed. That took until almost 2:30 as it found a lot of files that had changed while people were perusing their backups. So after shutting down Netbackup, I re-ran the copy one last time to make sure everything was the same. Of course, some more people had perused their backups and there were many more files that had changed (the files are kept in a compressed state to save space - and they were uncompressed to view - therefore they changed). The last copy did not complete until 5pm - which was an hour later than when we were supposed to be finished.

Because of other changes, we had to reboot the server - a couple of times it turned out - so it was almost 6pm by the time we got everything back in working order. There is still more to be done (I do not think we will ever be done) and we will try and get some of that work done tomorrow.

On the home side, not much to report. My younger daughter felt well enough to go to work today - although she said that she was not feeling good. My older daughter did not have to go to work today - a good thing because apparently she was feeling worse today than yesterday. She did go grocery shopping with my wife, but she said she enjoyed it. She probably tired herself out while shopping as she looked listless afterwards.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:31 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Sickness spreads
I felt well enough to go to work today, but neither of my daughters did. I guess whatever bug is making the rounds is currently running around in our house. Let's hope it leaves quickly. The sickness led to a need for comfort food though, which meant that since it was Tuesday we went out to eat at Boston Pizza for their "Pasta Tuesday" where all of their pastas dinners a much cheaper than usual. It would appear, however, that the service is also much slower than usual on Pasta Tuesdays as we had to wait over 30 minutes for our food to arrive. I do not remember ever having to wait that long for our meal before.

Work was interesting today as I finally set into motion the change of disk for the backup catalog. We have been very lucky in the last few weeks that we have not run out of disk space. Of course, it has meant moving or deleting all non-essential files off of that filesystem to make sure we did not run out. The plan is to switch over tomorrow. I must confess to having doubts that we will be done moving the almost 500Gb of data from the current disk to the new one. We have a copy going right now - it would appear that it will take about 24 hours to complete however. And once that one is done we need to shut all activity on the old disk so that we can copy the final changes to the new disk. We are all hoping that the final copy will take less than 4 hours since that is all the time we have to complete the changeover. We shall see.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:41 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Monday, September 12, 2005
Not feeling so great
When I got up this morning I was not feeling too great. I decided to work from home for a while to see if things would get better. They did and I finally decided around 10:30am to go to work. In retrospect, it probably was not the best idea as I did not feel well all day. I was not feeling bad enough to leave, but I certainly felt less than great.

On the other hand, it was a good thing that I did go to work as my co-worker had called in sick and did not come in at all. It was not all bad though as the day was kind of quiet and there were no crises to deal with.

I am going to cut this short as I am planning to go to bed earlier tonight so I can get more sleep before tomorrow.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:10 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Sunday, September 11, 2005
More serene day
I must say that I was not anywhere near as sore as I thought I would be after having done all this physical work yesterday. I did wake up early - probably because I was too tired to take a shower last night and really needed one. The day was pretty uneventful once church was over.

I have been trying to get a look at an iPod nano, the new iPods that were just announced this last Wednesday. None of the stores in town have any. So I have only been able to look at them online. The reason I want to look at them is that my Sony Clie (PDA) is starting to fall apart and instead of paying about $200 to replace what basically turned out to be a glorified address book/calendar/to do list, I figured I could pay $250 and get that in addition to a 2Gb music player. But if the screen is too hard to read I guess I will have to go a different route.

As usual the weekend was too short - of course the fact that I worked most of Saturday at the clean-up day at the church made the weekend even shorter than usual. Oh well... I wonder when the next 3 day weekend is. Thanksgiving probably.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 10:51 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Saturday, September 10, 2005
Tired and sore
Today was the Sunday school clean up at church, and now I am really feeling it. I guess I should do more physical labour on a regular basis so that I am not so sore whenever I do physical labour. Most of the day was spent doing church related stuff - except on visit to Wal-Mart - so there isn't much to say.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:57 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Real good day
I have been in a really good mood today. It was probably a combination of things: it is Friday, I finally have gotten over my cold, things are going well at work. I did get tired towards the end of the day, but I am still in a good mood. There is not a lot to say about today; oh yeah, it was payday as well.

I bought myself a couple of new pairs of shoes. They are actually the same style of shoe, but one pair is black and the other is light brown (more like beige I guess). I have been using sandals for most of the summer and since fall is on its way I figured I should get shoes better suited for the weather ahead. We also went out and bought my wife an early birthday present (well only 18 days early): a SanDisk SDMX1-512-A18 512Mb MP3 player/FM receiver/Voice Recorder. They are currently on sale at Staples for the next few days for just under $100 (after $13 mail in rebate).

Well that's about all the news for now.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 12:00 AM | Permalink | 0 comments
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Shhhh! Things are working out
I am sure I am tempting fate by putting in my blog that things at work are just working as they should and we have been able to make advances on the things that had been piling up. The Vancouver DRP site is now ready to go with the last piece of the fibre upgrade having been installed today. The only things left to do are the re-deployment of some hardware and the disk replacement. Those were supposed to happen this week, but as I was sick and I am the one running with them they got postponed to next week.

I actually got up late this morning. Well what really happened is that my wife woke me up since I obviously forgot to set my alarm last night. I was an hour late getting up, but thanks to my wife again who drove me to work, I was only about 30 minutes late to the office. But again since things are just rolling along swimmingly (shhh) it did not matter that I was late.

And because things were so quiet at the office I was able to leave before 5pm - probably the first time in a month - and could relax at home a little before having to go to a meeting tonight. I was actually double booked this evening with the meeting as well as choir practice starting up again, but decided to go to the meeting as it is easier to get caught up with the choir stuff.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 9:29 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
Back to work too soon?
I was not feeling too bad this morning so I decided to go ahead and go to work. I was all going fine until I had to hurry to catch a connecting bus on the way to work. From then on I felt like I had no energy left, as if whatever reserves I had were expended just to walk from home to the bus and then to catch the connecting bus. I was certainly feeling like I should have stayed home when I got to the office. I got a couple of offers to drive me home, but I figured that I would tough it out since I was there already. It turned out to be a good thing I went as there was a bad disk in one of our disk arrays that I had to arrange to be replaced. The bus ride/walk home in the afternoon went a lot better than the one in the morning so I think I was gaining strength all day.

Well I better go to bed now so as to give me a leg up on the day tomorrow.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:01 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Home sick
I did not go to work today as I was feeling bad enough last night that I decided it would not be prudent for me to go to the office. It turns out I was right as I again slept right through the morning until noon. I must say that I feel much better right now; well enough in fact that I think I will be going to the office tomorrow unless I feel really bad in the morning.

This was another day where I did nothing except sit in front of the computer and vegetated. I played some games, read some of my book, and watched the second half of the "Revelations" miniseries. I quite enjoyed it. So if you are into a good mystery with religious underpinnings I would recommend it - even though it is 6 hours long.

Not much else to talk about so I'll bid you all...

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:04 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Monday, September 05, 2005
Still sick
Not much to say about that; I have been taking cold medication and I still do not feel too good. I hate to think how I would feel had I not taken the medication. I slept until noon and woke up with a headache (since the medicine had worn off). So I got up and took some more medication. If I feel as I do right now tomorrow, I will not be going to work.

For those of you who are planning your lives around my blog (like that happens) I should mention that the dates I gave for my son's visit are currently very tentative. He said that he only put those down since he had to put something there and that he will know more as the actual date approaches.

Once again I was riveted to the computer all day - helped by the fact that I did not feel like doing anything at all. I therefore stayed home whenever the family went out and stayed at the computer. On the positive side, I was able to finish the weekly challenges on Pogo. I must confess that getting the Jungle Gin badge goes a lot faster when you play another person that is after the same badge instead of just playing the computer.
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 7:22 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Sunday, September 04, 2005
There is no "coming" anymore
Yes, the cold has arrived. It has gotten bad enough that I am going to start taking cold medication. I normally hate to take medication as I feel that every time you take some you become a little more immune to it; which means that you need to take more the next time around to get the same effect. This is probably all in my head (well in this blog too now) but that is the way I feel. In any case, I am not particularly interested in feeling miserable during my days off.

This was another day of doing mostly nothing. I did go to church in the morning since I had been asked to sing a couple of songs. Since then, however, I have been sitting in front of the computer playing games on Pogo and reading my mail. One of the things I ended up doing after reading my mail is join WAYN as I received an invitation from my son. I do not think that I will be using that a lot but it was interesting to find out that apparently my son intends to come visit from September 16 through the 19. Hopefully I am reading that right.

My wife figured out what was wrong with the car window (you might want to look back a couple of days to read about that); it turns out that someone had pushed the button that locks the windows in place! So the motor was never broken in the first place and all the creative work we did to cover the window was all for naught. I feel really bad now that I never took pictures of that creative work.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 9:48 PM | Permalink | 2 comments
Saturday, September 03, 2005
Coming down with a cold
I slept for about 9 hours last night - partly to recover from the last week, but mostly because it would appear that I am coming down with a cold. I woke up with a stuffy head and sore throat. Hopefully this is as bad as it will get, but I will not be holding my breath.

I have, once again, spent most of my day on the computer. I would guess in equal parts of recreation and working on slide presentations. I did little else so I guess you could say I got plenty of rest - well physical rest anyway.

Not much else to say so I bid you all: Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:22 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Friday, September 02, 2005
Announcing the weekend
The weekend is finally here and not a moment too soon. Although today was not as stressful as yesterday: we got the duplex issue resolved on the new servers we installed in Vancouver as well as getting the catalog merge completed. This only leaves the re-deployment of one of our media server and of its tape drives as the last major hardware change for a while. Then it is onto the Disaster Recovery Plan testing - the main reason for installing all that new hardware in Vancouver.

I went and bought some clear vinyl to cover the half-opened window of the car. Lest you think that it was my idea, this was suggested by my wife and older daughter. This is a temporary fix until we get around to fixing the window proper. We must all be suffering from the same cold as everyone in the house either has the sniffles, or has headaches, or both. This makes for a quiet home as people go to bed early to get better.

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:58 PM | Permalink | 0 comments
Thursday, September 01, 2005
Weekend can't come soon enough
I sometimes get the feeling that I am swimming against the current and losing ground with each stroke. For whatever reason, this is how I am feeling tonight. I can't wait for the weekend where I can relax, particularly considering that this weekend is a 3-day weekend so I get to relax on Monday for sure.

There isn't much particular to say about work; the Veritas consultant is here to do the second of two catalog merges. Once that is done, we will be ready to complete the re-deployment of the hardware that has been pending for quite a while now. Of course, there is still some stuff to be done, but this re-deployment will greatly increase the capacity of our main backup environment. I really need to get the disk replacement on our busiest backup server done before we run out of disk space and all kinds of bad things happen.

Looks like one of the power windows on the car has stopped working. Now that would not be too bad if the window had been closed when it happened; but no, it is half opened and with fall almost here we cannot leave it like that. One cannot help but wonder how much a replacement power window motor costs and how much it is to get it replaced....

Good night!
 
posted by Christian Thibodeau at 11:32 PM | Permalink | 0 comments