January 2006

30 Jan

engineering rock stars

Posted by Jeff in deep thoughts, geekiness

Amy is gradually getting better. With that, life begins to get back to the normal routine. We watched a bit of TV Saturday night, and the anniversary of the Challenger disaster meant that the History Channel was running a lot of space-related programming. We watched part of a program we had both seen before about the Russian space program. I set up TiVo to record the next program, which was repeat of one I had somehow managed to miss. It was a 2-hour special based on Gene Kranz's book Failure Is Not An Option. The special is all about Mission Control at NASA from the beginning of the space program all the way through the Apollo missions. I was riveted. Read more »

22 Jan

house health report

Posted by Jeff in Amy, life events/news

This has just not been our year so far. Not 2 weeks after I recover from the flu, Amy is now sick with some kind of virus (doctor says probably not flu, but symptoms are similar). For those that already know, she's doing okay. She's resting a lot, drinking plenty, and ibuprofen is keeping her fever and aches under control pretty well. I'm just hoping I don't pick this one up. After already missing a week of work, the last thing I need is to miss more. Anyway, the important thing is that she's doing okay.

In much less interesting news, I've also been dealing with a sick computer this weekend. It's a long story, but the gist is that somewhere during a major upgrade I did recently, a hardware or software bug crept in that was occasionally causing random corruptions when trying to read data from the hard drives holding the RAID array. After much head-scratching and trial and error, it looks as if replacing the controller card running those drives with a different (newer) model worked. I don't know if it's the Linux driver or the card itself at fault, but I really don't care any more. It's working! It's been pretty frustrating lately to not be able to trust the very mechanism I put in place to help guard against data loss.

09 Jan

resolution: don't get sick next new year

Posted by Jeff in life events/news

Wow. I think I just found one of the most efficient ways to lose a week of your life: catch the flu. To be honest, once I went to the doctor and got meds, it's not like it was that uncomfortable, but I sure didn't do much other than sleep. That, and I drained the TiVo dry enough that I actually was starting to figure out when shows came on again. That's scary all by itself. :)

Thank you to those that called and checked on me. I'm much better now. More importantly, it looks like Amy dodged it altogether. It's one thing for me to take some sick time from work, but can you guys imagine if Amy had gotten sick the week before PHE? *shudder*

Oh, and the doctor said that the flu shot I got probably was useful. He was actually surprised how much kick I had left when I showed up at his office. So, yes, I will be getting the shot again next fall, thank you. :)