Category Archives: Fallen Warriors

She’s a little dog

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Lexi is a little dog, but that doesn’t mean she can’t deal with toys. I think that she actually dislocates her jaw in order to deal with some of them, but Lexi is our first dog that actively seeks out and plays with her toys.

Tennis ball under Lexi's control

Tennis ball under Lexi’s control

What stuns me is that she manages to bark with that in her mouth!

For Marcia and I, this was a fairly uneventful weekend. Marcia got some quilt assembly done, I patched some systems. Chores and cooking, shopping and cleaning. Life.

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Our condolences to the family and friends of Lance Cpl. Matthew R. Rodriguez, 19, of Fairhaven, Massachusetts. He died on Dec. 11, while conducting combat operations in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

Back To Work

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Icing on the tree

Icing on the tree

This morning, I’m back at work. The roads were in okay shape, but there’s still a bit of ice hanging about, a tenth of an inch or less on trees and such.

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Once again, I’m happy to relay that DoD reported no US Military casualties during the last week. Ciao!

 

Nearly So

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Paul guessed that the pictured object was a vertical file holder. Ye..ess, depending on what you’re filing. What I’m filing with it:

Cutting board holder

Cutting board holder

Pushed back to the edge of the counter, the holder keeps the boards from using too much counterspace, while still easily available for use. I made these two boards to replace two bamboo boards that cracked. We’ve also moved our two large boards (including the one made by Marcia’s dad many moons ago) up off the counter and above the fridge. We don’t need those too often.

We hope y’all had a nice holiday (if you celebrate). I’m celebrating by taking the upcoming week mostly off – I’ve got a couple of work tasks during the time, but only a couple at this time. The balance of the time is taken with house cleaning and other indoor chores. For example, I’m pivoting my *NIX system over to the Illumos-backed OpenIndiana distribution. I’ll have some Linux running as virtual machines, but this Solaris fork is going to be an interesting and useful platform for me. Today I’m migrating data onto it from backup disks.

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I’m happy to relay that DoD reported no US Military casualties during the last week. That’s definitely something to be thankful for! Ciao!

 

Week Off – Objective Completed

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Well, I got a fair bit done, and some reading, and learned a bit about Puppet, too! I also got the fence sealed:

Left Side

Left Side

Right side

Right side

They’re coated in Olympic Maximum stain/sealer, “Natural Cedar Tone.” From this vantage, it looks a bit like spray-on suntan, but I’m sure it’ll weather in well. I’ll probably recoat in the spring.

There’s more of course. I finished reading The Hydrogen Sonata. I wish Banks were with us still – there are plenty more tales in Culture Space. I also got through John Arundel’s Puppet 3 Beginner’s Guide. I’ve been wanting to get into Configuration Management for a long time, and haven’t had the cycles to address the issue. Very cool stuff. Overall, a good week. I’ll be doing another one, starting next Saturday, after a “3-on, 1-off, 1-on” work week. Then it’s the death-march to the end of the year, with a brand new project and short timeline deliverables attendant thereupon.

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Our condolences to the family and friends of Staff Sgt. Alex A. Viola, 29, of Keller, Texas, who died Nov. 17, in Kandahar, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when his unit was attacked with an improvised explosive device while on dismounted patrol.

 

 

Holiday Week

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I’m burning off a couple of weeks of leave between now and the end of the year. As usual in such times, I start one of those weeks off with a stint of physical labor to kick off the front end.  Yup, it’s time to finish up the fence. Last month I did the left fence sections. Yesterday, I started by cutting the fence sections away from the posts, and setting them aside nearby:

Starting more fence work - fence sections set aside to left

Starting more fence work

The two free-standing posts are problematic. One of them has a 45° twist in it, the other has a serious lean. So they’re coming out. How difficult that’s going to be is a crap shoot. Doing fence sections at the bottom of the yard a few years ago, I had rotting posts set into concrete, and it was a long painful process clearing out the debris. These two? No concrete at all. A bit of waggling, then I screwed a crossbar to each and lifted them clear of the ground:

Post removed in a single lift

Post removed in a single lift

That was followed by stringing a mason’s line from the two end posts, measuring to the place on the line where each new post goes, and using a plumb bob to locate the center of the new holes in the ground. A long, slightly exhausting stint with the post hole digger (pictured above) netted me two 14″ diameter holes, each 42 inches deep. I poured a couple of inches of crusher rock in the bottom of each hole for drainage, and placed, measured, cut, and replaced the posts. After plumbing and securing the posts, more rock went in to secure the bottoms of the posts, then a sack of mixed concrete each for longer term stability:

Posts in place, with concrete.

Posts in place, with concrete.

By this time, the light was starting to fade, but I got all of the 2×4 rails (aka stringers) installed before the day was gone, and then moved the old fence sections back roughly into place and screwed them in to close off the yard for the night.

This morning, after shopping, I hauled the compressor out, and attached all of the pickets. I then marked and cut the arches in the three sections:

Right front fence section nearly done

Right front fence section nearly done

What’s left is to pressure wash the old front facing components, let everything dry for a couple of weeks, then apply a cedar natural tone stain/sealer. But the difficult parts of this job are now done.

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Our condolences to the family and friends of Staff Sgt. Richard L. Vazquez, 28, of Seguin, Texas, who died Nov. 13, in Kandahar, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when his unit was attacked with an improvised explosive device while on dismounted patrol in Panjwai, Afghanistan.

Choresday

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That’s my new name for the `day formerly known as Sunday`. Today was full of shopping, laundry, car washing and paint maintenance, coffee roasting, and computer rebuilding.

Only the latter was really interesting. I had a new motherboard/CPU/RAM combo, courtesy of work, to be able to do more VM work here at home. Now the processor is faster and hyperthreaded, and the RAM is faster, and more (32G). I took advantage of the rebuild occasion to remove the old Linux MD device, and installed the ZFSonLinux module and tools. Now my data store is a ZFS raidz1 pool, built from three 1TB drives. Snapshots are better and easier, etc, etc. This makes me very happy.

Moving lots of data at once appears to make ZFSonLinux a little unhappy … freezing the system unhappy. More to explore there.

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Our condolences to the family, friends, and unit of Sgt. 1st Class Forrest W. Robertson, 35, of Westmoreland, Kansas, who died Nov. 3, in Pul-E-Alam, Afghanistan, of wounds sustained when enemy forces attacked his unit with small arms fire.

Winter inbound

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We’ve had frost on the ground the last three days running. It’s not been much below freezing, since the hanging baskets and roses on the front porch are all still alive … but Winter is coming.

A productive weekend: remote work and chores ate almost all of it. All standard stuff I’ve talked about a dozen times. Boring, but productive.

Tonight I had a nice chat with my oldest friend (not elderly: but I’ve known him since I was four). Highlight of the weekend, really.

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Our condolences to the family, friends, and unit of Lance Cpl. Christopher O. Grant, 20, of Richwood, Louisiana, who died on Oct. 20 while conducting combat operations in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.

Fencing, continued.

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Yesterday, I got all of the left side front fencing replaced. Today, I executed the decorative arches on those sections:

Arching the fence sections.

Arching the fence sections.

I set a horizontal string line across the sections, and measured down, sinking a screw at each bottom end of each arch. I then used a quarter-inch thick, 7′ long cutoff from a piece of cherry, braced against the screws and pressed upwards in the middle to describe each parabolic arch. A quick swipe with a pencil marked each arch. I cut them with the circular saw, first plunging in the middle, then working along the curve to each end. The final bits I completed with a jig saw. That side of the fence now awaits stain/sealer.

I’ll also pressure-wash the gate and posts on this side, and the posts on the other side, to get a better match with the stain/sealer when that’s applied.

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Today’s Solaris patching went off without any hitches. The best answer for the task is Martin Paul’s Patch Check Advanced. I can audit my systems for needed patches, apply them to snapshots of the root filesystem (these are called Boot Environments, and I can patch the copy while the system is still running, yay), and then make the patched copy the next Boot target. This makes Solaris patching a much less impactful event, compared to the days when a patch set was downloaded and staged, then the system was brought down to single user mode (no services running) for the entirety of the patch cycle. Much better service uptime this way.

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Also this week, I picked up an Edimax EW-7811Un USB wireless adapter from Amazon, for use with the Raspberry Pi. An excellent, miniscule little product, works like a champ for my purpose. It’s also worth noting that setting up wireless on Linux distros these days is shed-loads easier than it used to be. I added two lines configuring the WPA settings to the /etc/network/interfaces file, and on reboot the network came right up. It makes the Raspberry Pi a much easier thing to work with, since I don’t have to tether it to a wired LAN connection.

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Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • Staff Sgt. Patrick H. Quinn, 26, of Quarryville, Pennsylvania, died Oct. 13, in Paktika Province, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained when the enemy attacked his base with small arms fire.
  • Sgt. Lyle D. Turnbull, 31, of Norfolk, Virginia, died Oct. 18, in Camp Arifjan, Kuwait, from a medical emergency.

Downs and Ups

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In one sense, it was a really bad week. Hours after I posted last Sunday, I became violently ill, almost certainly due to something I ate. After about 24 hours, I was able to start re-hydrating, and taking in such challenging foods as soda crackers (in small quantities – I had ten crackers, all of Tuesday). Wednesday was slightly better, and that night I slept through the night. So I went to my one day of work on Thursday, and got enough done.

The upside of the week was Capclave, which I attended on Friday and Saturday. It was going on today as well, but I am still not fully recovered, and decided to lump Sunday and holiday Monday together into another period of recuperation instead.

Capclave was, just like last year, awesome. I had a lot of fun hanging out with a bunch of really smart people, many of whom write F&SF or work with writers, from editors to artists to publishers. Clearly, I’d get even more out of the conference were I in the biz, but time for that sometime later. Because I’m not nearly as much of a George R. R. Martin fan, I was able to spend more time learning about new writers, and other fun stuff. Last year, with John Scalzi as GoH, I frankly spent more time in squee mode, to the detriment of the balance of my conference. Capclave peeps, I thank you for a wonderful Con, and I’m already looking forward to next year.

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Mmmm, rain. I almost left this out. Since last Monday, we’re just shy of 5 inches of rain in our back yard. That brings our 11-1/2 month total to 44.06 inches, just over the 30-year annual mean rainfall for our area.

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My message to Congress: Do Your Freaking Job!

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Our condolences to the families, friends, and units of these fallen warriors:

  • Lance Cpl. Jeremiah M. Collins, Jr., 19, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, died Oct. 5 while supporting combat operations in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
  • 1st Lt. Jennifer M. Moreno, 25, of San Diego, California, died Oct. 6, in Zhari District, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained when enemy forces attacked her unit with an improvised explosive device.
  • Sgt. Patrick C. Hawkins, 25, of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, died Oct. 6, in Zhari District, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device.
  • Sgt. Joseph M. Peters, 24, of Springfield, Missouri, died Oct. 6, in Zhari District, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device.
  • Pfc. Cody J. Patterson, 24, of Philomath, Oregon, died Oct. 6, in Zhari District, Afghanistan, of injuries sustained when enemy forces attacked his unit with an improvised explosive device.
  • Spc. Angel L. Lopez, 27, of Parma, Ohio, died Oct. 5, in Zabul province, Afghanistan, of wounds suffered when enemy forces attacked his unit with small arms fire.

Fall II = Summer?

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Hmmm. Six plus hours working in the yard yesterday, and nearly broken as a result. Why? It was nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit  out. I was slamming the H2O and got through it. The garden beds are cleared, turned and mulched with leaves harvested from the front yard:

Gardens put to bed before winter

Gardens put to bed before winter

After that was done, I mowed both front and back.

Today I got the shopping done, then roasted coffee and cut my hair, and wrapped the day’s chores by washing the car. That’ll bring rain. I should probably wash the car more often if it does, since we’ve had only about 3/4″ or so since late June.

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Many of the evenings recently, I’ve been working my way through Michael Jang’s RHCSA/RHCE certification study guide. While I’ve been using Linux for a long time – about 18 years now – there’s lots of features that I don’t know because I don’t use them. I want to know more both because I might learn something actually useful in my day-to-day work, and because the certification will be useful to the business when it comes to proposal responses and such. Right now I’m about a quarter of the way through the book. I’m taking my time and doing even the stuff that seems obvious on the face of it, because there are likely details I’ll want to grok. Michael Jang knows his stuff and communicates it well – Recommended!

My other connection to Michael Jang is this book: Linux Transfer for Windows Network Admins: A Roadmap for Building a Linux File Server. You can see that while Michael is listed on the cover, Amazon still lists me as the author of the book. I was in negotiations to write that, but declined to sign a contract that required me to write the book on spec with no advance. I hope the book did well for Michael.

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I have no condolences to offer for fallen warriors this week, as DoD hasn’t claimed any casualties in the last week. It’s possible that reporting is sluggish due to staffing issues during the US Government shutdown. But let us hope for the best – that there were no US casualties to report in the last week.