"Pills are goooooood" - L. Christmas

Some of you may know I have been sick for a few days now (over a weekend so I haven't missed much work but I'm sure some people view that as an extended weekend) and just got some medicine to help the symptoms.   I open the package of nasal decongestant and with no surprise popped two out of their bubble wrap and easily swallowed them with a touch of water.  If Dr. Hart is reading this it might come at some surprise to him that I was able to accomplish this task, swallowing a small tablet.  Michael was not always a MD mind you, he was once my roommate.  After one of my stunts which hadn't ended quite as I expected, I was laid up with a need for taking what I would consider some large pills.  It seems fitting that he has gone into Emergency medicine you see, no warm fuzzy bedside for him, he just tells you what he sees, tells it as it IS!
As I said, there we were, roommates, I in the kitchen over the sink and he lazily reclined on the couch trying to drown out my whimpers of dreadful anticipation as I stared down this behemoth of a pill.   It must have been the size of my thumb, my thumb to the 2nd knuckle!  It took me about five minutes to summon enough courage to conquer the compressed powder foe sitting there in my hand.  I drew in a deep breath so I would have 30-60 secs before I loss consciousness once this horse pill had lodged itself permanently in my esophagus.   I put the pill on my tongue and began to slowly fill my mouth with water.  I hesitated, swallowed, but alas, the pill was still in my mouth!   Now beginning to taste the sickening bitter flavor of medicine I wondered if it was worth it.   I decided to just go for it... I started gulping wildly at the water which, as expected, took up residence in my throat atop the now partially swallowed and stuck pill.   Water spewed out of my mouth with the rush of air from my lungs, so quickly out, so so slowly in.  I wheezed in some air and let out a yelp which went unanswered.  I mustered the ability to weep, "I'm dying" to which Mike replied, "You're not dying if you can talk"...  I guess he had a point as I'm here writing this today.
Fast forward to present day. I open my 2nd pack of drugs and the aforementioned story and emotions came flooding back!  There they were, a "tin foil" backed package of overly large pills mocking me.  Sure these are different drugs, but locked in the same infernal delivery system!
Not wanting a repeat of the scene of nearly a decade earlier, I decided to ready myself.  I closed the door to the dishwasher so I could make a clean break out of the kitchen, I moved a chair near the phone so I could attempt self abdominal thrusts before dialing 911 on the land line hanging on the wall. I decided it would be best to use milk to escort the pill down as opposed to water since the harbinger of death came sans gelatin coating from this drug manufacturer!   I then gave it the first go... same result as ten years ago, my tongue filtered out the foreign object.  I decided to add some distraction to the mix, a bowl of cereal, Honey Bunches of Oats to be exact.   The theory of all the little sharp edged half chewed flakes and clusters would allow the pill to pass my tongue seemed like a perfect solution!   I pored the bowl, coarsely chewed the cereal, drew a similarly deep breath, loaded the pill onto my tongue, grabbed the drink and gulped with all my force.
What happened next is so anti climactic I contemplated not writing any of this at it.  The pill was swallowed without drama. The second pill followed the first with even less effort.
Once my breathing slowed and the adrenaline had passed I calmly replaced the chair and sat down, happy to be alive but dreading that 12hr dose recommendation.

Journals in 2010

I can see the value of keeping a journal for my kids, and their kids, etc... But how best to keep one in 2010? Do I use this, a blog, as a journal or maybe some other sort of software to make a digital one, or do I go "old school" and use paper and a pen?

Parkour... really

1st of all it's Free Running (mostly cuz I'm not french) because Parkour is basically the same thing and 2nd all "extreme" sports carry risk of death, hence "extreme"! For heaven sake, one of the pioneers died doing it... it's dangerous. But it doesn't have to be!

I've done just about all of the "extreme" sports growing up and was landed in the hospital only once (roof of a 3 story building jump) when I missed my air bag... dumb luck that. And after learning that you can quickly get into a lot of trouble and get hurt or die free climbing I turned to boldering and top-rope climbing for added safety.

So some 15yr old kid falls from a parking structure and the news jumps on this as the latest deadly fad propagated by the evil internets! Sacramento News Seriously?! It's sad that the kid died, any loss of life, ESPECIALLY of youth, is tragic. However, if it was due to a poor choice then why wouldn't the responsibility fall on the youth who made the bad choice and not on the fad? What if the next fad was juggling flaming chainsaws and some kid thought it would be cool to try and killed or dismembered himself. Would it be the fault of the fad, or the internet... nope, the person who thought it was a good idea to light a running chain saw on fire and toss it up in the air, followed by two just like it... duh!

I think the best way to pay respects to this kid and all those like him would be to learn a little of his sport! Next time you're walking somewhere take a detour over a park bench or up the retaining wall. Jump around like a little kid, jump and roll off of something tall.

Why would anyone do anything like this you ask? The best reason was given by my then 4-5yr old nephew, "It makes my hair go up!"

Really LVM, really...

So we're doing some work on a server, and like always, the work must be done in the wee hours of the AM. So I'm working away creating LVM2 volumes and everything is going well. I'm even following what seems to be "best practices" by not using the raw device (dev/sdb) but instead creating a partition first then using that for LVM. On one of the servers I created a 600GB partition on (/dev/sdb1) which is basically the entire "disk" (its really just a fibre volume that can be expanded later but whatever). I create the LVM side making a LV of only 500GB to give me some wiggle room in the future... when the users say "oh no, the drive is full" I can tell them that if I work really hard and they pay me lots of OT I can maybe find another 100GBs in there somewhere... like that episode of ST:NG when Scotty is beamed aboard instead of some expendable crewman, long story short, Geordi tells the Cap. that Problem_A will take x hours to fix, Scotty asks "how long will it really take to fix" and is amazed that Geordi didn't pad the time (x * 3 or x * 5 etc.)...

Like I said, one server worked fine with a 600GB disk, the other server however, is getting an upgrade from 1.8TB to 3TB. Well, as you know, you can't use fdisk to make a 3TB partition, you must use parted and the partition has to be a GPT. Well, when you make the PV everything seems fine, then you make a VG and do a pvdisplay and everything goes FUBAR!

You see, we're forced to us an OS version that is a little old... okay, REALLY old. We are on Fedora Core6, the current version (as of this writing) is 13, and they don't use the "Core" anymore! So there is this little "bug" in LVM that has been fixed since 2007ish (yeah, it's mid 2010) that is causing me some troubles...

A pvdisplay shows that only 1024 GB are usable and 8647 EB are not usable... I know it's late but it actually says EB (exabytes). To put this in prospective, it is postulated that the whole world (including iPods, Digital Cameras, laptops, Google, Microsoft, IBM, Amazon, etc.) in total is using less than 1000EB. So there is over eight times the world's total digital storage not currently usable on my server! I'll admit I was a little shocked it was not usable ;)

After some googling I found a bug report (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=365741) over at RHLE saying they will fix it in future builds. Well the bad news is, to use a newer build (one where that problem is fixed) I will need to completely rebuild both systems... now where am I going to get that kind of user downtime?! The good news is the bug report says it should just be an error in reporting and there is a work around (the work around didn't seem to work) so I decided to move forward and finish building out the volume. I'm writing this as I watch 700GB of data get copied over to the new volume... wee.