The Bigger the Eggs, the Bigger the Fun...

Hi all,

Well the funeral for my grandpa went "well" last week. And besides a few awkward situations/chats I enjoyed talking to the rest of my family to which communications ran dry when my grandma died 10 years ago.

So I fully recovered from my flue and had a great easter weekend... Nope we didn't search for easter eggs, but we had a lot of fun last sunday when we went to the traditional easter fire and the following party ;)

Well I didn't drink anything since I was still on antibiotics, but I already made a pact with Elmar to catch up next saturday when Michael is throwing his birthday party :o)

What else happened:

Featuring "Whaaa...?"-Technology:

We discovered "The Daily Show" as one of our new favourite shows. It is fully stuffed with sarcasm and (or not so) funny stuff about how - along other things - Mr. Bush is handling his job as President of the USA or whatever else is going on in the World/USA.





I finally claim two black 3ware RDC-400 (PATA) Hot-Swap Cases my own to complete my Hardware Raid setup with my 3ware 7810-8 Controller. And People remember: jumper all your HDD to "Master, without Slave" since I almost cried and started to kill people, when this baby booted up and my 1.27TB Raid was gone and the Contoller didn't see any HDD ;o)


Man! They look so great in my black Yeong Yang 0420 Cube. Here is a nice review (german) about the Cube, which finally made me buy it last year.


Now the two remaining Projects will be to make it more Silent - since currently it is loud as hell - and to work on the redundant powersupply (including a UPS in the final stage). Here is a nice article (german) which covers how to insulate the chase, but I will even go further with an automatic fan controller and maybe a complete set of new fans, since those are the real nose makers as you might have guessed.

Besides that I really didn't do much besides playing games and watching TV, since I'm totally into my holiday mood...

That's all for Today... Maybe more on Thursday when I'm back at work.

Overdue like....

Well, so much has happened lately and I didn't write anything...

Okay lets catch up - recent Events first:

• My GrandPa died last week.

Well... I don't know how to say this: sadly but true I don't really miss him (yet?).

This might be caused by him being a total dick over the last 4-7 years or the fact that I stopped talking to him about 5 years ago for being that manipulating bastard he always was. Though... I adored him wayback in my youth, but after my GrandMa passed away - when I was about 14 years old - he quite soon wasn't really able to handle stuff himself and from one week to another he required a nursing service.
That alone struck me a bit since until then he was a guy I looked up to and enjoyed spending time with. But over the following years after the death of my GrandMa, I discovered a couple of bad habits - or whatevery you might call them - how he exploited peoples feelings for him to get what he wanted. That really hit me hard...
What hit me even harder, when he finally tried to play off his two sons against each other to get even more attention/whatever it was he wanted to get in those days. That was the Time I finally decided that I don't need to keep up this burden to be one of his little chess figure he liked to push around/hurt their feeling.

Maybe this was also why I stopped talking to my Dad about two years later, when my parents got divorced and I - at least thought to see - similarities between him and my Dad.

Well, my Dad jumped - not the whole way, but a fair amount - over his own shadow and I decided that it was not worth it cuting the connection forever. Lets say there is still much to
do and we're not really back to where we were before, but I'm trying to get along with him again and it seems that he is trying to keep up with my bullhead.

I still can't really stand being with him for more than a week in a row ;o), but that might be also caused a lot by our different believes about life and how to handle things. Well, I made my point clear that I don't want to force myself into something which is not within my believes unless I want to and it worked for myself.

Today I'm going to visit my Dad to see how he is handling the death of his father. I think not too well, which is why I'm kinda depressed that he is not feeling well :o(

• Ill at home... Reloaded!

It hit me again on last Saturday evening. This time it was different, I felt ill and weak, but it didn't struck me down at first. So I went to my Mom's on Sunday and even went to work on Monday.

I felt it in my whole System on the monday evening and it knocked me out that evening, but on Tuesday morning I didn't feel ill enough to stay in...

Well that didn't really worked out well... at 15:00 I was through with it and went home early. Not a moment to soon, because when I arrived home I basically just dragged myself into bed and was unable to do much else besides switching the channels on the TV.

So on Thursday I managed to get to the Doc, which ordered me to bed until Tuesday... So now I'm slowly recovering and have quite sometime to my Hand since after that my leftover holiday from last year is starting :)

• Burning down the House

Last saturday the kitchen in the flat below mine caught fire! I was totally into some good old saturday morning hacking linux stuff while listing to some great tunes of music - aehm... at a might be not quite saturday morning capable sound level ;o) -, when I heared the door bell.

At first I thought, what asshole is ringing the door bell at this "night time"'ish hour- almost 12:00 so most people would get ready to eat lunch ;) - and why can't they call me on the cell phone so I can put on some pants first... Well, after tuning down the music I noticed quite some noise outside in the yard.

So I went to the living room windows and saw two firemen throwing in windows... That was quite a picture.. LOL!

Well... what should I do next? So I ran to the front door and opened it in my boxer-shorts... Smoke... the whole hall was full of smoke!

So I did was almost everybody would have done:

• jumped into pants
• grabed a pack of cigarets
• grabed a jacket
• ran back to the PC and said everyone goodbye on ICQ and what is happening ;o)

LOL! Ain't that stupid if you think about it afterwards?

Luckily for me nothing besides the stenchy smoke happened to my flat. They didn't even had to cut the power supply to it... Wheeeh, so my equipment was safe... ;o)

Insomnia....

Argl... This is now the 3rd day in a row that I wake up early and can't get back to sleep.

This sucks!

Ah what the heck... So what happened lately:

• I succesfully setup an unattended Windows Installer at work, which I'm currently integrating in our "Bare Metal PXE Installation" Infrastructure.
• Adepted a few new features we gain from the new RHNS 3.6 into our current Red Hat Installer. Like automatically getting the pxeboot images the satellite server has in sync for kickstarting.
• Had a look at grml, and realized that at least the miniroot you find outside the cloop image doesn't have nfs/netboot support (yet?).
• Stumbled across WPKG - a Windows Packager, which might also round up a few of the Problems our Windows Guys are complaining about.

A word of advice about cryptsetup, It doesn't support waiting for a timeout yet. So if you don't want to have your debian system sitting at bootup for ever while you are away and needed to reboot your system, you might consider not automatically mounting your filesystems.

I just had a look at my bank account and it is telling me "Buy the Powerbook... NOW!". Well... I was never good at listening so I guess I will wait just a little bit longer :)


I wonder if this is an offer or a fact :-D


That's all Folks, maybe "Soon more[tm]"...