Journal of a Sysadmin

Updated all of my hosts here and at the coloc.

Created a redundant LDAP server using slurpd replication.

Had Friday and today off work as we were going dog camping on the weekend. That went well(ish) and today we had to go and do something about phones…

See, we wouldn’t have had to today really except that I had to wash Jaime’s with the HE washer. I guess it washes phones as well as it washes cloths, as it washed the good out of it. The phone is now only usable as a wedge type door stop (the razor is too small to use as a coaster).

Of course, as soon as her phone went missing my phone decided too completely croak so a good part of the day was spent digging around finding papers and deciding what phone and plan to get Jaime. We then proceeded to go to the Fido store and pickup a new Z310 for me (to replace the dead one) and an iPhone for Jaime…

All the hype I think is worth it. The phone seems solid and she’s posted to flickr, facebook, and now her journal. Mail works, we works and most importantly the phone actually works. Visual Voicemail btw is kind of cool, integrating the iPhone with voicemail so that you can navigate your voicemail from the phone menu instead of having to call it. Nice feature.

Data plans still suck here. Currently we are on the limited time offer $30 6G plan. Hopefully it goes down from that.

Tonight I upgraded all 4 installs of WP here. I’m happy to report that my diff and patch method still works!

Yay, it means 3 minutes instead of 15 per journal!.

Fathers Day 2008 came and has almost gone and it marks something I think is special to me.

I’ve been a father for 20 years.

It was a great day, with a breakfast at my favorite breakfast establishment in the city (Nellies in the Loop), a good bike ride, gardening, and a quiet evening (so far).

As a dad I’ve been OK. I’ve been there at least, well mostly, ish. It was hard early on with 3 boys and me having so much luggage. Now it’s completely different.

I only wish I could change things that I did not do then. I would have tried much harder to be more responsive for them, and to play, and to take them out, and to camp and fish and hike. Things that I have always enjoyed but at that point in my life couldn’t even begin to think of. To me it was all hidden and there was very little Joy except I must admit from them, from my kids.

I worked, sometimes 20 hours a day (mostly from home). I didn’t really cook for them, I let them play outside on their own and sometimes they got into trouble. It’s not that I was a bad dad, I just had a lot of issues myself and to work through them took time… It has taken time.

By the time I realized what I was doing wrong it was too late for the two oldest boys, they had their ways set and although I try to get past damaged bridges which were not completely burned it’s hard. The third son, maybe it’s OK maybe it’s not but he doesn’t have some of the issues his older brothers had. They are now growing into more thoughtful beings although they are still a distance from that magical “34″, the supposed age where people actually become mature. I wonder if I’m even there yet…

Now it’s time for a forth son and a lot of change has happened since 1988. My world has gone from chapter 1 page 12 to… Well I’m not really sure but I hope it’s someplace south of the middle still.

We evolve so much as we age and travel down our chosen paths, and sometimes those changes take years and years. Finally at the end we will be able to SUM() our life’s changes and when all the ++’s and –’s are done we will know our score. From the time I first held Anthony until Jonah was born I had become a different person twice, once diving in and another coming back up to the surface in total taking a course of 18 years with many of them in places I will never visit again. And never have want to.

And I still evolve. I still try to evolve.

Jaime has helped, and continues to help. She sees things in a vastly different way then I and shows me as best she can how things don’t have to be “this way” or “that way”. She really does deserve most of the credit for the changes I have surprisingly sometimes taken over the last 2 years. As a father my attitudes towards parenthood have evolved from very “old school” to a far more holistic view; My entire being has been evolving that way for years.

This could be called Adult Education Unschooling.

And we know so much more now then 20 years ago.

And I will continue to learn, I must continue to learn.

And Jaime, Anthony, Richard, Connor, and little Jonah will continue to teach, I do hope they continue to want to teach me.

I love you all, and thank you all so much.

That’s a crap load of pictures.

Jhb informed me last night that the number wrapped on the camera. In true to life Jim style I went, “wow that’s neat” grasping what was going on but not quite getting it completely.

Then today it dawned on me. The shutter on the D200 has shot over 10k pics in the past year.

Go go gadget camera!

jhb!

For the first time since she was preggers with Jonah we were able to go boarding together today. Since she wasn’t working, I wasn’t working, and little J was in daycare we went west and got a few runs in. She’s getting good too. We had lunch in the rather cramped lodge (a lot of people out today) and put a few runs in then drove home again. Long drive, well worth it.

Any time we get to spend time boarding together it’s great!

Speaking of Jonah and presents he’s changing almost every day right now. jhb and I couldn’t figure out why he has been so restless lately and now we know.

He is learning to talk.

It’s preoccupying so much of his brain at the moment that he couldn’t even sleep right for a while. Now it’s getting better but it is so funny and so cute to see him imitating us and his big brother while we go about our daily lives. On Sunday before I took Connor up, he was helping Connor with some shoes. Connor was saying, “Dads shoe, Jaime’s (to which jhb yelled MOMMY’s) ^W mommy’s shoe, Connors shoe” to which Jonah replied, “SHOE!”.

There have been other things, Mommy and Daddy are more frequent and correctly targeted, puppy, kitty, num num (food), counting, up a couple of times. A lot of other things.

So many things.

Christmas today was a blast.

Little J had so many presents I think he was overwhelmed. So much so he didn’t get to open all of them and there are still 3 wrapped and under the tree, he could be saving them for tomorrow =).

jhb loved what I got her, though I knew she would. Only problem is there’s a little hack you have to do to the iPod Touch in order to get it to work with Linux and that hack requires the use of iTunes.

Did you know, iTunes won’t work from within a xen VM? It can’t see the USB device I guess. It also won’t work from within wine (I tried both of these). It also will not work on a PowerPC Mac with Darwin, that’s too old. You need at least Tiger to run iTunes and Lepard won’t run on a 733MHz G4… It also will not work on Windows XP base install, which jhb found out about tonight before she was forced to install SP2, just to run iTunes…

Did you also know that we have a grand total of 3 copies of windows in our house. One which is for middle C’s computer, a copy of XP home. I have a copy of XP Pro which was a free (as in beer) copy distributed by M$ at a seminar I went to on storage but it is damaged to the point of being unusable at the moment. The third is for adelle, which is jhb’s old Dell Optiplex, the one she moved here with.

It’s a good thing she had that CD, but cause now (after about 15 hours) she is installing adelle and she will use that to load the 1.1.1 firmware and crack the Jail on the iPood, then upgrade it to 1.1.2 again and we’ll be able to copy data via wireless using gtkpod. Can’t wait to see that work, since it’s been all FREAKING day getting to this point…

Makes me want to *never* purchase anything running any proprietary software on it, evern. I mean why the hell can’t Jobs get them to write a Linux iTunes or at least release enough specs so that the community can flash their iPood without resorting to booting Tiger on a G4.

But jhb likes it, so I guess it’s worth it.

BTW, after the Sony root kit BS, I still haven’t bought much if anything in the way of Sony hardware. I unfortunately can’t see doing that with Mac right now even though they desperately needs their heads pulled out of their asses… Please someone at Apple, make them port some of that to Linux!

For my Christmas present jhb bought me a new snowboard which is exactly what I asked for. We’ve been riding now since March of 2004 and I bought the board I had, second hand from a pawn shop 2 years ago. I did about 25 days that year, about 20 days last year and now that board has more gouges and gashes than Van Gogh’s ear.

So she let me take the pick of a few different boards, all in the mid-range and I picked out a K2 Select Wide.

On Saturday Connor and I woke up early, and drove the 1.5 hours to Sunshine (the closest decent hill is where we have our passes) and I took it for it’s first outing in the snow.

Now, I have to say coming from a 156 narrow to this thing is a big change. I’m having a bit of trouble in the switch ride department but it is more stable, which helps me to be faster, it’s more difficult (at least at this point) in the deeper snow but I think that too will be just a transition thing. I have really noticed the stability though, wow. Smoking along, you can hit a bit of a drop and catch some air without worrying about wiping out, as long as you can stay standing up :).

We’re hoping to get out again on the 27th, hopefully that comes together, then again maybe on the 31st or on the 1st. The more time on the hill the better =).

At posting that is. I never seem to have anything really that good to say so mostly I suck.

I am also behind my wife, who is on the portal still (I’m in the at home category now) and I seem to have fallen behind as well.

Hehe, oh well. No need for a 50 word minimum now at least!

Today is my first ever holidailies posting, and in a style which is true to form, it’s a day late.

I only came to know about holidailies after I met my now wife Jaime. Some things this woman didn’t tell me about are the piles of yarn she will accumulate, the knitting needle sets she will have to buy, or the way she is part of this online cult^H^H^Hlub which posts miscellaneous bits of their lives for google to index and remember until the matrix swallows us all. I did know that she was an avid journal-mistress but I was unaware of the extent of her mistrossity.

Every other year she has made a fairly solid effort but last year she had problems doing holidailies as she was also dealing with being a new mommy, which is a lot of work in itself, and trying to organize all of us for a vacation to paradise to see her parents for Christmas. She had lots to post about, just no time or energy to manage it. This year I thought I would help.

I made a deal with her that I would attempt to also post every day, kind of a "keep up with the husband’" thing because she secretly loves to be challenged that way (at least in my mind…). So it came to be that yesterday was December 1, 2007 and it has slipped my mind how I was going to post and get my post out first and then use that the bait her into getting her post up before midnight…

So far it’s backfiring when last night around 1am I was reminded that I needed to write my post. I saw her post scroll past my RSS ticker line in my browser while I was at work, so now I’m playing catch up.

Her mistrossities online journal-world is now formally introduced to her husband. Please, have mercy on me and accept yet another journal owner who can’t meet his own self imposed deadlines.