All posts by Annette

Geek stuff

So you want to be a geek

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Generally, being a geek is not a bad job, even with the snotty people or those who are intentionally obtuse (for instance, those who ignore, three times, the very direct statement “You do not have to make any changes.”). For the most part, people are happy that you’re there, and glad that you know how to repair whatever has gone horribly awry in their technical lives. They are pleasant, civil, and just regular human beings.

Some days, though, can be trying. If you’re thinking of a life in geekdom, let me give you one of those days.

Yesterday ended for me around 2 AM this morning, because my todo list is always rather ambitious and far exceeds the number of hours available in any given day. I signed off, went to bed, and tried to sleep, only to be awakened at around 4:30 AM by our remote server monitor, telling me that there was a vast and wideranging problem and that the servers were not accessible. Crawled out of bed, contacted the NOC, to find that my suspicions were correct: one of the master breakers had tripped, and taken down one of the buss lines, including the circuit where our router was located – for those of you who don’t entirely understand that, it means that although not all of our equipment had lost power, it was in fact entirely inaccessible since our gateway was affected by the abrupt loss of power.

The standby electrician was notified, and in the meantime I had the NOC guys reset the breaker to get things back up. This was done pretty quickly, and things came right back up with very little fuss. With the exception of three servers that suddenly decided their drives needed to be checked. And the exception of one server whose primary drive killed itself due to a power surge.

While we were awaiting the arrival of the electrician to replace the breaker with a spare, I headed to the NOC to address the three recalcitrant machines and the dying server. When I got there, the electrician was there, and unfortunately, they were not able to do the swap without taking out our circuit, so down it went again, for a minute or two for the swap. When things came back up, I took care of the three servers that needed disk checks, started on the one whose primary drive had failed due to the uncontrolled reboot, and discovered that another server’s primary drive didn’t like the bounces and decided to keel over, too. So, I took care of that one as well. Four and a half hours later, I left the NOC, to return to the HQ to finish the restores on the two servers that had their drives replaced – including the one where the primary drive was a mammoth 500G SATA2 drive that will certainly be going back to the manufacturer for a warranty replace as the server is only about two months old and the drive should be within the year they give.

Back at the HQ, I checked in with the staff and began the restores. By 5:30 PM, all the restores had been completed and all the little miscellaneous (non service impacting) issues had been addressed. While those restores were going on, I started on the next batch of kernel updates on about 120 machines, answered helpdesk tickets, had some coffee, and took a break just now to type up this post. My day will probably end once again around 2 AM tomorrow morning.

Most days are not like this, thankfully. But almost every geek will have one (or more) just like it. Keep that in mind when you’re pining away for a career change, and pick something simpler. Lion taming. Stunt work. Eating fire. Something like that.

Food, Gardening, Homestead

It’s the thyyyymme…of the season…

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Bad jokes. That’s why people come here, I know it.

The mini garden made it through the hard freezes without too much trouble (and some 4 mil plastic sheeting helped, too). I covered the garlic, the strawberries, and the snow peas, and left everything else to fend for itself.

The thyme, of course, made it through with nary a peep.

Thyme

I pulled one of the English pea pods, tried to feed a piece of it to the dogs, but neither of them were going for it. The peas themselves are not thriving, which is a little curious, but since several of them didn’t even germinate at all, not altogether surprising. The Italian replacements I dropped into the place of the duds not only germinated but made it through the serious freeze with no cover at all. If both sets come in, then we’ll have some tasty peas to shell.

Peas

I pulled the covers from the plants yesterday and they were a little limp, but perked up nicely after about 40 minutes of watering. It continues to bluff rain here, but we’ve not seen a drop. As we climb back into the 70s, maybe we’ll get a little luck in that area.

The next plan is to get the greenhouse up, or rig a test bed area with some hoops and plastic to try some hothouse items: sungold tomatoes – something you hardly find in the stores, as they are fragile and don’t ship well, but taste fantastic – peppers, and basil. This is Florida! It’s always the season to be growing.

Cats, dogs, chickens, and other critters, Food, Homestead

Gears

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I had big, big plans for the two acorn squash I had picked up at the store: Baked, stuffed with a wild rice mix, and served as a side to a couple of seared balsamic-glazed, bone-in pork chops.

Sometimes things just don’t work out that way. The menu I’m saving for another day. The squash, though, had to be dealt with before they melted into goo on the countertop. That would have taken awhile, but better to address that sooner (when the squash would still be tasty) rather than later (when there would be a rather icky cleanup duty involved).

First things first: gather the ingredients. I decided a honey-soy glaze would work.

Starting out

Cut into rings and remove the seeds. Since we are the composting types, the innards were saved for that.

Rings of gold

Off they go to a baking sheet, awaiting their fate. Since they look like gears, it was amusing to play with the rings on the sheet, interlocking them.

Lined up and ready to go

Sprinkle with salt and pepper.

Light seasoning

Into the oven they go. Every so often, I brushed them with a mixture of honey, soy, ginger, salt, pepper, and lime juice. I also stepped outside to watch the approach of the first cold front that was to bring the deeper cold front a day or so later.

Storm approaching

What a good dog, staying in the doorway as he was told! He’s a handsome devil, too.

Handsome devil

The squash is tender and ready for anyone who wants it. I did. Delicious.

Delicious

Food

Geek food

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I am a huge fan of pizza, even though I rarely eat more than a bite or two these days. What true geek doesn’t like pizza and a nice caffeinated beverage to go with it? Pizzas are the staple of long support sessions, NOC cleanup/realignment nights, and gaming sessions. The fam loves pizza, and generally we do have homemade pizzas every ten days or so. We used to do that with pizza crusts bought from the store. Not now: homemade pizza dough, socked away in the freezer, stretched on a peel, and topped with all our favorite things is now the way.

Pizza!

Cancer

“We know who gets head and neck cancer”

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That is a partial quote from this article. The full quote:

“We know who gets head and neck cancer — people who smoke and drink a lot and tend to be at an older age. The problem is that it’s sometimes difficult to diagnose until it’s at its late stages and difficult to treat and cure,” researcher Dr. Joseph Califano of the Johns Hopkins department of head and neck surgery said in a phone interview.”

I’d say it’s even more difficult to diagnose in people who don’t actually smoke, don’t drink a lot, and who are not of an older age. I’m all for things like this where a large number of people who potentially be aided, and all for making known the primary causes of this sort of cancer. But it also pisses me off a little bit: this is exactly the reason the first question I get from people is “Are you a smoker?” and the reason some of them look at me as if they don’t believe me when I tell them I am not and never was.

Food, Gardening, Homestead

But wait, there’s more

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Our newly revised forecast for tonight and the next couple of days.

Brr

Eighteen. Eighteen? That’s a little extreme. Our little kumquat tree, which has valiantly put out a couple of handfuls of fruit, will definitely need to be bundled up against this. Luckily, it’s just under four feet and won’t pose a problem.

Working backwards a bit: mom loves peach ice cream. Her favorite. Unfortunately, it isn’t peach season (and last year’s peach season wasn’t all that terrific). The solution? Frozen peaches. Not the best, but an acceptable substitute.

Peachy

While we do a huge Thanksgiving meal, for Christmas it’s more of a buffet type of thing. People come and go, and eat if they want (or not, although that’s rare). This dinner was no different.

Merry Christmas

We have ham, roasted turkey, smoked turkey, potato salad, rice, fresh rolls, stuffing, cranberry compote, and gravy on the table. There was not a lot left at the end of the night, so yours truly did not get to nosh on leftovers for days on end.

Food

Good luck for the coming year

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It is a tradition here in the South to eat black eyed peas and greens on News Year’s Day, as a way of ensuring good luck and prosperity for the coming year. We hedge our bets and eat black eyed peas, rice (with some onion – also known as Hoppin’ John) and cornbread on the side on New Year’s Eve, with leftovers on the day itself, usually while watching one or more bowl games.

Cornbread – good cornbread – can’t be beat as a side. The best cornbread is made in a well seasoned cast iron skillet. Swirl some oil in the bottom of the skillet and toss it into the preheated oven for about five minutes or so. Remove it, pour off any excess oil, and in goes your batter. The trick is not to have too much oil in the skillet, or have the skillet be much too hot. This will lead to either a skin of oil on what will be the top of the cornbread (and a mushy top) or to burned cornbread. Neither of those is appetizing. Twenty minutes or so later, we have this.

Cornbread

When it comes out, we like to slather it with butter, top and bottom, before cutting into it.

Cornbread sliced

And yet more butter on the slice you’ve taken.

Mmm, butter

And then: the rest.

Good luck for the new year

My mom takes this a step further: she mixes up everything, chunks the cornbread into pieces on top of it, then eats it in one glorious mess o’ good luck.

Life in general, Sports

Football paradise

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For football fans, this time of year is the best: both college and pros come to the end of the season, which means multiple games throughout the week, and the very end of the year brings the bowl games, with multiple games on the same day, starting early and ending late.

One of the other things all this activity brings is even more strange and bad things from the mouths of the announcers.

Tonight I heard Sterling Sharpe say “I don’t got none o’ that.” while referring to an Oklahoma State fan decked out in his Cowboy duds, complete with large belt buckle. This is as bad as anything Emmit Smith managed to stumble through in what I hope will be his one and only season on ESPN.

During the Minnesota game yesterday, I caught this gem: “How many defensive touchdowns has Minnesota scored on defense this year?” Well, that would be all of those defensive touchdowns, just by definition, since the offense can’t very well score a defensive touchdown. I’m sure he meant “How many defensive touchdowns has Minnesota scored this year?” (six interceptions returned for tds for 2007, in case you’re curious), but that struck me as quite funny while I was checking through all the games.
I know it must be hard, speaking extemporaneously during a live broadcast, but at least in the first case, I would hope they would be able to speak in a grammatically correct way.

Food, Gardening, Homestead

Three days of freeze

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To be more accurate, that should be three nights of freeze, but it comes down to the same thing: we will be dipping down into hard freeze temperatures for more than a few hours come the first few nights of the new year.

It's gonna be cold out there, baby!

Altogether, that isn’t terrible, and certainly nothing compared to the tales that could be told by people in other parts of the country or world. But I don’t live there, I live here, and after almost a week of temps in the 70s (over 80 one day), the crazy nature of Florida weather once again rears its head for a reminder that there are actual seasons, even if we don’t see them all that much.

It’s that crazy nature that has the milder temp things popping up all over the place in my frames. Last year’s garlic was wiped out by the nonstop rains of a tropical storm, but this year’s garlic is motoring along with nothing more than an initial watering after planting and the occasional rain we’ve had – including the strong line of storms that moved through late last night as a precursor to the coming cold snap.

Garlic shoots

The strawberries are a bit off their schedule, too, with multiple plants flowering and putting out berries. They are everbearing plants, but this isn’t exactly the sort of thing we’d expected from them. And yesterday, we pulled the first pod from the snow pea trellis.

Snow pea pods

Mom judged the first one quite sweet, but alas, it didn’t taste like much of anything to me other than green. The smell, though, was fabulous: there is nothing quite like the fresh, earthy smell of something you’ve just pulled from the vine.

Tomorrow will be a test for me, to determine how best to cover the entire fenced area for the overnight hours. Some of the plants would survive a nuclear attack – thyme, I’m talking to you – but overall, I’d like to give all of the plants every opportunity to make it through the cold stretch and back into the more normal mild weather we usually enjoy down here.

Gardening, Homestead

Going green

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In more ways than one. Followers of this homesteading saga probably recall that our soil, such as it is, mostly contains clay and on this lot in particular, sand. The sand is predominantly the result of this house being built after others were built; it was used as a dump site for fill dirt, excavated sand, and it’s rather remarkable the trash that continues to wash up as we receive rain here and there.

The problem with this of course is that beyond the scrub, the hardier weeds, and saw palmettos, which seem to thrive no matter what, it’s difficult to coax anything else from the ground. The guajillos loved it, the thyme I’d probably only be able to kill by setting it afire given its hardy nature, and the cowpeas (black eyed peas to those of you not from around here) were fine as well. The tomatoes couldn’t do much of anything, the bell peppers tried valiantly but only mustered two, and most of the seedlings just couldn’t hack it.

Getting grass to grow also proved to be a huge challenge: with nothing nutritious in the sand and the hardpack of the clay/sand combination making it virtually impossible for grass seed to take hold, it almost seemed that it would take many, many loads of topsoil for us to do anything with the barren front of the property. I’d rather spend the money for the topsoil to be put in the areas where we’ll be growing more productive things, really: four of the five loads we had trucked in went to the back, not only to give us something more to work with, but also, like the one load that went up front, to level out some of the hollow areas in order to give us better drainage.

That left us – or, rather, me – with the problem of the front of the property and getting grass in. It isn’t primarily to have a nice lawn. After all, if I thought no one would object too terribly much, I’d just as soon plant vegetables and fruit trees all around the front of the property. No, the primary reason to get something down out front is erosion. The wind here blows mainly from the plain…I mean, from the east to the west, and there is rarely a day with no wind. This results in the sandy part of the soil mix flying off, leaving only the hardpack. This further results in flooding, as the hardpack of course does not drain particularly well, as the older photos from our rain and tropical storms show. What is an aspiring farmer to do?

Lots of backbreaking breakup of the hardpack. Lots of organic additive to get something nutritious into the soil. Lots of grass mixes (fescues, perrenial ryes, bahia). And lots of hay, spread by hand after getting the seed down. This what it looks like on November 16. Some small patches of grass are there from the first attempt to just see what would grow with with seed put down and no other real work done beyond the addition of a bit of topsoil (not much).

Grass beginning

With a lot of other work, on December 2, it looked like this.

Grass, finally

And this is today.

More grass.

The edges of the area are places where no work has been done on getting grass down, as other work needs to be done first. The far area in the above image has a giant mass of blackberry bushes that need to be dug up and burned so they don’t reroot and come back. The pile near the left of the picture behind the tree is the debris, including saw palmettos, that Wade the tractor guy cleared out from these trees so we didn’t have to spend the time digging them out by hand. There is something to be said for doing that sort of work by hand, but there are also limits to the amount of time available when there is also a huge list of other property-related work that also needs to be done (and that is also much more fun, even if it is still hard work).