MikeBrum.com

Went diving today. Such a great activity to add to a summer long weekend.

The weather was awesome, the water was “warm” and we got to see a lot of critters. Tons of skates and flounder all over the place, along with the usual assortment of lobster and crabs. More than a few lobster were down claws and a few had none left. I think that was due to male sparring due to mating competition.

One of the coolest thing that we came across was a little gang of hermit crabs battling. There was a spare shell that they were all fighting over and nobody wanted to let anyone get a shot at it. The biggest of the bunch was able to get a shot and do a real quick switch into the new shell. He stayed it in only a few seconds and then hopped back into his original shell. All the while, the rest of the gang was still trying to fight for a chance.

I’ve never seen hermit crabs change shells and it was really neat and a lot faster than I expected.

After the switch, the big guy looked like he was going to keep the shell “just in case”, but backed away and let everyone else battle for it. We took off after the other smaller crabs were battling to a stalemate.

Naturally, I decided not to take my camera today because we didn’t get to sorting out the gear until about 11 last night. Not having the camera probably added to the nice relaxed pace of the dive, but it would have been nice to be able to shoot some of the subjects we saw.

Either way, it was a super cool and a fun “crazy random nature” moment.

We went out on a seal dive off the Isle of Shoals this past Sunday and had an absolute blast.

We booked the same trip last year but couldn’t get out there due to bad ocean conditions. Our trip out there was nice and easy but the ride back was rather choppy and we paid for it. That said, it was totally worth it.

Here’s a few images from the dive.

This is probably the best dive we’ve been on in New England and I definitely hope to go on it again next year.

The seals were very friendly, curious and absolutely tolerated our intrusion into their temporary summer home. They seem to love nibbling on people’s fins for some odd reason, but it’s quite endearing to see them slowly swimming after an unsuspecting diver trying to catch a fin in their mouth almost delicately.

Highly recommended for any divers in the New England area!

I was kinda bored tonight so I got a Centos box up and running.

This is going to perform a few important tasks that I didn’t previously have:

• computer redundancy – since my last host died, I only have my laptop (macbook pro). Given how much of a PITA it is to repair hardware issues on a laptop, I need some redundancy should the worse happen.
• SSH endpoint – again, since my last host died, I don’t have a box to SSH into when I’m remote and want to pull files off of my NAS. This hasn’t been a huge issue most of the time, but there’s certainly a level of convenience that’s lost.
• tertiary backups – my NAS is RAID 1 and it has an external HD attached to backup important data to it weekly, but I like spreading my data around as much as I can to make sure that I survive the always painful hard drive crash (it’s not “if”, but “when”!!).
• python/django test environment – I’m considering learning python/django and I don’t want to muck around with apache on my mac. I already have a LAMP setup on the box, but it’s less than ideal. I figure I can set up a real environment that more closely mirrors my server than I can on my mac (which is close, but not perfect).

When my PC died on me a while back, I basically just unplugged everything and left it sitting in my office collecting dust. Given that was its only job, it did so with great effort. I gutted everything except the mobo and PSU and gave it a respectable cleaning. I ran into some problems reseating the CPU at one point and due to some butterfingers, managed to bend like 30 pins. Whoops! Some patience, a steady hand, tweezers, a straight edge and 15 minutes later and I had a working chip again. Gotta remember not to do that again.

The only hardware-related things left to do will be to throw a few spare HDs in it to run backups, but that’s it. From here on out, I just have to set up the HTTP environment and get that squared away. I’m just happy that I’ll be able to immediately SSH into my home network again from remote locations.

It’s amazing how such a little thing can be so amazingly convenient.

I start a week of nighttime upgrades tonight. My schedule looks like this:

Sun: 2100-0200
Mon: 2359-0700
Tue: 1900-0700
Wed: 1900-0200
Thu: 1900-0200

Every night until Friday is overnight work.

It’s just the luck of the draw, and this one is gonna suck.

Corinne and I randomly decided to head to NY this weekend. We just finished getting a place to stay and tickets.

If you’re in the area and might want to see us for a drink or meal, give me a ring.

My NAS arrived today and after some poor documentation and frustration, it’s set up and running fine. I’m currently copying over about 400G to it — which is taking quite a while. I’m sure it’ll be running well past the time I head to bed.

That aside, I’m definitely seeing a lot of junk that I probably can/should delete since I’m never going to use it anymore. As a rule, I don’t delete images that I shoot unless they’re just really bad shots. I also save all of my email and random documents — anything that’s volatile. But I also tend to save lots of apps and installers for various tools.

While I’m definitely a pack rat at heart, I know that I don’t need a copy of PowerDVD 4 for Windows. Nor do I need a copy of 1stPage v2 that has been sitting there for years unused. There’s more than a few examples of stuff like that. SQL Server 2000? Yeah, definitely don’t need that anymore.

Most of it dates back to my more Windows-centric days. My workstation is now OS X and I use various linuxes at work exclusively. I just don’t need this software anymore.

I’ll do a big purge sometime this weekend after I’ve gotten everything sorted and copied over.

I shot this last night while on a harbor cruise in Boston harbor. It’s shot at ISO 6400, which explains the noise. I did a few things to try to remove some noise, but even at 6400, the 5D2 does a great job.

Click for larger.

I have a Windows XP host that’s been serving network storage via a RAID array serviced by a Promise FastTrak RAID card. This has been the way of things for a bunch of years now and it’s been pretty good for a while. There’s been the usual Windows issues, but it hasn’t been “bad”.

I try to be a responsible admin and installed Windows updates this morning. Unfortunately, after the requisite reboot, the host never came back up. Since it’s headless — no monitor, keyboard or mouse — I had to get all that hooked up and figure out WTF was going on. Turns out that the box was just hanging at the loading screen.

Long story short, even with various repair options nothing is going to work.

And since I’m running out of space on my array anyway, I decided that I’m just going to upgrade to a NAS. I planned on doing this anyway (and retiring this box when I did so) but I just couldn’t justify throwing it out when it was working. At least now I’ll have a dedicated NAS that is more efficient, has a smaller footprint and consumes less power than a dedicated PC that’s just serving up files.

My Amazon order was placed this morning (along with a Gig-E switch) and hopefully it won’t be too long until they’re on my doorstep.

Since my RAID array is just type 1 (a mirror), I’ll just take one drive out of the pair and put it in a USB enclosure and copy over files that way. Pretty straight forward and painless. I’ll then take the drives from the array and use them as backup disks (my Time Machine disk will get a healthy upgrade and the disk that was backing up Corinne’s laptop failed a little while ago and will get replaced).

It’s not horrible, but I would have just preferred to save the money. At least I planned on making the purchase in the first place — just not this soon.

Here’s a pano I took this afternoon from my visit to Bald Head Island in North Carolina.

Naturally, click for larger.

I’m happier with the results than the last two panos that I posted.

I’m in North Carolina visiting my mother. Weather is pretty hot with high humidity. We’re talking low to mid 90′s. This evening we had some thunderstorms roll through. They were over fairly quickly, but they were definitely pretty heavy for a bit.

The video doesn’t really show the rain (though you can see it hitting a bit on the rail), but you can hear the thunder and see some lightning flashes. I still don’t really know much about the video setting on my camera — or about properly converting higher-res video to lower res at a decent file size and quality — but this is what you get.

I have work to do tomorrow starting at 7:00am. That’ll last a couple of hours and I should be free for the day. Then Sunday early (sometime between 3:00-5:00am), I should get a call to do another piece of the work that needs to wait on a bunch of other things to happen. The hours kinda suck, but it shouldn’t be too bad… I hope.