2007: Already Going Gangbusters

01/04/2007

It’s not even the first week of 2007, and it’s already been a harrowing… journey:

• Due to The Blizzard^TM, Service Pack 2, I moved my flight from Friday the 29th to New Years Eve, arriving into SFO at 8 pm PST; this would’ve been fine, except…
• The plane, out of LAX, was three hours delayed, due to a passenger freaking out while the plane was in line to take off, necessitating their deplaning.¹ Don’t even get me started on that whole thing…²
• Upon arriving in SFO and waiting for my luggage-which-never-came, someone saunters by and says “Oh yeah, check in that pile of luggage over there,” as I was filling out a lost baggage claim. Sure enough, in a stunning display over overcompetence, United had put my luggage on the earlier (on time) flight to SFO… the one the agent said I couldn’t get on because my luggage would never get transferred from the late flight to that one in time.
• After the lateness and the luggage-waiting, I rang in the New Year while traveling down highway 101 at 80 mph. Welcome, 2007.
• Arrive home. “Screw it, I’m going to bed.”
• Next morning, I found that whenever I tried to do anything I/O intensive on my workstation at home, it either froze up or immediately rebooted. It was like a fun little “Let’s make a Deal!”-game… but that’s not all!
• Upon rebooting, the ethernet card only sometimes honored me with its presence on the PCI bus. Replacing the card with a spare (of a different brand) I had lying around did not help.
• Since my workstation had crashed once while I was away³ and I kinda care about the data on that machine, I decided to not screw around and replace the whole damn thing.
• Got a barebones box from Fry’s; wasted a day finding out that its power supply and/or mobo was dead. “Your best buys… are always at…”
• Finally got a machine up and running last night, and starting transferring everything over; didn’t notice that I hadn’t compiled the specific chipset support into the Linux kernel to handle IDE DMA… so my 140 gigabyte music collection was puttering along at a stab-me-in-the-face 3 megabyes per second, as opposed to a I-won’t-be-dead-before-it-finishes 170 megabyes per second.

On the upside, I took this opportunity to make my machine complete RAIDified, so crappy hard drives should no longer make me stabby-stabby, and I also used the opportunity to get all paranoid⁴ and encrypt my /home partition. I must admit, with the 2.6 kernel this was intriguingly easy to do on top of RAID. (Some people actually run encryption on top of LVM on top of RAID, but those layers are all in software, and… I just don’t know if I trust my read()s and write()s going through oh-so-many layers before hitting hard magnetic filings.)
I don’t really do New Years Resolutions⁵, but I’m throwing down the gauntlet now: 2007: Stop. Sucking. Now.⁶
I want this year to rock… and I actually think this one has quite the potential to do so.
More on that tomorrow, though.
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¹ And, because “That’s how the terrorists would do it,” their luggage, too… which, since it’s not, ya know, organized in any particular way, means tearing the baggage compartment apart to find it.
² This passenger freaking out caused about 20 people to miss their connection in SFO, including (I overhead) people going to Seattle, Honolulu, and Sydney. Man, I was pissed, but if I had been going any of those places, I would’ve lost it right there on the concourse in Denver.
³ And I had to have a non-Linux using friend reboot it; “Type Slash-eee-tee-see-slash-init… no, INIT… eye-enn-eye-tee… INIT… no, not slash, then a dot… dot-dee… slash…” But he was a good sport, and we got it rebooted.
⁴ Maybe I’ve just been watching a little too much Law and Order lately…
⁵ I much prefer Personal New Years, aka birthday resolutions…
⁶ “I don’t want any more BS during the year… from anyone… that includes me!