Whoopsie. I've got the distinct pleasure of working with one of the most hideously powerful computers I've ever seen. One of our clients got a dual processor, quad core, 16 GB RAM, monster with six 146 GB 15,000 RPM serial-attached SCSI drives in a RAID-5, and sent it here to be set up. It's an enormous black monolith, capable of uplifting civilizations and converting Jupiter into a star. Seriously, it's huge. It weighs more than 60 lbs. It's sickeningly awesome, especially since it's main duty will be to run Samba and a MySQL server for our inventory control software. Yeah. A system nearly as powerful as FurAffinity's new server, and it's going to have almost nothing to do. I've got permission to install whatever OS I want on it, and, tempted as I am to put Gentoo there, I think I'm going to go with Debian... Not that I like Debian better (I've actually become increasingly frustrated with Debian, and I love Gentoo), it's just a bit friendlier to the novice. My most difficult goal is actually getting MySQL to use the whole system. We're discussing trying to use ndbcluster and setting up a single system cluster, but our first try will be with MySQL 6, to test if Falcon can actually do it. So I go and get an install of MySQL 6, IA64, shiny and new...Which is when I discover I wasn't thinking -- I used the install disc for our mail server...an i386 box. It'll be tough to use 16 GB of RAM, when your OS can only address 4 GB of it. So...It looks like I'm going to start over, and give this thing a try with an IE64 install, like it should have had before. Ooops. Oh well, more fun time with the box. At least I won't make this mistake with the other identical server that a different client is ordering. That one's a rush job -- this one I can take my time and savor.

Labels: work

The Oatmeal Ale was off... I think that my house might have been too warm and the yeast mostly died. I'd have tried to coaxed it back alive (and was trying, actually), but I discovered last night at 3 AM that the fermentation keg was leaking rather badly. So my choices were to bottle and hope for the best or toss it all out. So I bottled it... It looks like it's actually going to carbonate, so we'll see how it turns out in a couple weeks.

I'm going to hold off on the stout until I can get something to keep the temperature down and stable on it. If this was too warm for the ale yeast, it's way too warm for the stout yeast. So it's time for horrific pepper beer, the beer everybody but me seems to want. I'm thinking I may want to do a cider next while I wait to get a fridge for the fermentation. Cider likes the temperature I keep my house at.

Labels: beer

I've been complaining I need a new saucepan for beer making for some time now. I've got a two quart, but it's just too small. I've seen the ones I want, but I decided I'd try to save some money and make the Boysenberry Wheat with my little pan. Yeah...I managed to spill the wort all over my counter when I was trying to pour it into the fermentation tank. *sigh* So this particular batch is going to be a little low in alcoholic content. Oh well, hopefully it'll still turn out okay. I'm getting increasingly worried that the temperatures are too high for my fermentation, but I can't afford to buy a fridge just for fermenting the beer yet. Hopefully soon. But after that new pot, darn it!

Hoping to bottle my Oatmeal Ale on Friday or Saturday. I probably won't have the energy for it tomorrow after the open house, or I might see if it's ready then.

Labels: beer

Well, I think I'm going to try to get my next batch of beer started. My Oatmeal Ale isn't bottled yet, but one of my coworkers, Em, happened to have a fermentation tank, and she hadn't used it in forever, so she's let me borrow it. Running two tanks at once is the only way I'm going to be able to get all the beer made that everybody seems to want. One thing's for sure -- I'm going to need a lot more bottles. *grin* Some of the guys at work are talking about brewing now, but honestly, I doubt it'll pan out. They might get one batch done, and then lose interest. (And I kind of suspect it won't turn out well, but maybe that's my jealous desire that they not steal my thunder speaking.)

Sapph finally got himself a new computer, so he won't be looking at the darn thing overheating on him any more. It's a solid enough rig. It won't stay high end forever, but it'll do pretty nicely for a while at least.

I should mention, you'll see in the side bar a new comic. One of my friends from TwoKinds has started up a webcomic with (I presume) her boyfriend (they won't say, but I think it's plainly evident). It's going to be a little "slice-of-life" furry comic. Regardless of whether you think that's a very interesting premise, you should totally Head over to AnaKuro.com and check it out for her spectacular artwork. She's really phenomenal.

Also, Tom, the guy behind TwoKinds has hit kind of a rough patch. His father passed on the fourth, finally giving in to complications due to his lung cancer treatments, I think. I've been meaning to put something somber and respectable here for a while now, but the words just haven't been coming. I just don't know what to say. My father's mountain is not nearly so steep. It will probably claim him in time (especially if he keeps mixing up his insulin dosages), but that day is probably far off. There's be a huge outpouring of support for Tom and his family from the readers of TwoKinds, which is good. I hope he realizes how much we're all behind him. But other than keeping him in our prayers and giving him our condolences, there's not much we can do. It's very frustrating. I hate not being able to do anything. But, if you get the chance, wish him well.

Labels: beer, comics, life

I cracked open my first bottle of my first batch of beer this Friday to try with my folks. It's now Monday, and I'm down to four of eight bottles left. I've let everybody who wanted some at work try it, and I took it to a family get together, so that's where the four liters went to; I didn't drink it all myself. *grin* I'm planning to do a big "keg tap" party to celebrate, but I don't want to even try to schedule it until after the open house at work this week. So far everybody's said it's very good, though who knows how much of that is to appeal to the angry office furry's feelings. *wink* Anyhow, I was very pleased with it. For not quite following the recipe and messing it up just a bit, it turned out really good for a first try. And it's fun to do, so I think I'm going to stick with it. I'm marking it down, "great success."

Labels: beer

The folks come down tomorrow, so I'm doing a lot of cleaning to get ready. And I've moved all the bottles from the first batch to the fridge; they should be pretty much all done carbonating, and this'll mean I've got a lot more cold beer on hand. I got my glass bottles today, so I'm ready to bottle the second batch: my first attempt at oatmeal ale. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if the beer tastes quite ready yet... I'll see what it's like this weekend. It's certainly more alcoholic than the first batch. The temperature at my house is a little warm for proper fermenation, and I used a liquid yeast for this batch, so I'm expecting it to take longer than the first one to ferment. So maybe it'll be ready in a few more days. I'm excited to get started with my boysenberry wheat, so hopefully it won't be much longer.

Labels: beer

Didn't do much for the Fourth this year -- I just couldn't afford it. Maybe next year when my credit card debt isn't quite so crushing. I saw my mom and cousins on the third, and was at a pool party with one of my cousins all day on the fourth, but Dad couldn't make it up (with the wheat harvest, he had to work), so I left the beer at home. Probably for the best -- it'll taste better this weekend when I'll see the folks for sure. I'm thinking I'm going to have the design guys at the building (Play Creative) print me up some decals, if they can, that I'll start putting on my beer bottles. Maybe I'll have Sapph work up the design for me. I'm strongly tempted to call it "Alpha Moon Breweries," but I remain somewhat undecided yet. When I do decide for sure, I'll post up the lovely design. *grin*

I got the DMZ implemented at work this afternoon, and everything looks like it's going to work exactly how I want it to. I'm so excited, since this will pretty much guarantee better network performance all around, keep the people who bother me happy (or at least less unhappy), and let me really test my QoS setup. I'm very proud of it; and I think it's very clever, but I don't actually know how well it's going to work with everyone behind it. At least with the VoIP. I just don't know enough about VoIP. But at least with the DMZ in place, everything's just tweaking numbers now, and we should be looking at having about the best performance that the fiber link is able to provide, so any more performance is going to be gains with the local setup.

Also I just came up with the best idea for Sapph's birthday (it's in a couple months). I've been joking about getting him a furby, because they're creepy as all get out, and you can get one for a song. But I realized that's completely inadequate. I mean, he's turning mid-twenties now. He needs more than something that you can cup in your hands. No, the perfect gift to land him in therapy would be a full-conversion of a bean-bag into a three-foot-tall furby-esque monster. And then, when he's deep asleep, it'll snap open its horrible, staring, grapefruit-sized eyes and bellow "I HUNGER!" Because if you're going for a horrible monster like this, only Sinistar can do it justice for a voice. Imagine waking up to that thing looking at you and flapping its appendage-things as it screams "RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!" in a voice spawned from the very depths of Hell itself. Sapph's going to murder me for thinking this thing up.

Labels: beer, life, work

Sorry that I haven't been posting. I've been busy, and kind of lazy about this sort of thing.

I'm brewing beer now. The folks got me a Mr. Beer and I finally got it out and started using it. My first batch, a pale ale of mostly stock, is carbonating now, and I think I'm going to move at least some of the bottles into the fridge tonight, so that I'll have some beer ready when the folks come down for the holiday. It should be pretty much ready. I've got my first batch of oatmeal ale in the fermenter right now. I consider it something of my life's work, so it'll be interesting to see how it turns out. I don't have high hopes for these first batches, but they should teach me a lot. I'm actually very excited.

Another "exciting" part of my life is that, after a good part of a year in production, I finally released the first part to my epic TwoKinds slashfic. Yeah, I know, it's disturbing that I'm writing slash, and it's caused a lot of people on the forums to give me weird comments about my sexual orientation, but I had to do it anyway. What can I say? I'm an attention whore and this is the sort of thing the forumgoers crave. It's very, very long, and what you might call shockingly detailed. It wasn't easy to write, per se, but it certainly was less difficult than a person would imagine. They want me to write it in smaller chunks from now on, so that it releases more often. I'm trying, but I haven't really felt inspired to write in a while. If you're really desperate to read it, you can find it in PDF and HTML (though it looks like Firefox 3 doesn't like it very much; I'll have to fix it when I have a chance). Again, it's a slashfic, and a fairly explicit one, so reader discretion is advised: it's for mature audiences only. Let me tell you, it's quite the experience writing your own ticket to Hell. By the time this is done, I'll probably be on the express train. *wry grin* I'd link you to the forum thread for the thing in case you wanted to comment, but TwoKinds (and the forums) have been down all day.

We've finally gotten our new fiber optic connection at work, and I've been here every day since last week, even over the weekend, switching us over and trying to get everything work. It's close, but I need to find a way to add a proper DMZ to the setup, and that's one of my big goals. It's driving me insane. But oh, man, the fast Internet...It's so good...

I get to go home tonight to keep at trying to resuscitate Xotz. It bricked last night; causing me to discover that setting the flag for safe mode in the boot.ini file would send Xotz into an endless string of rebooting (the aforementioned "bricked" state). I tried a reinstall and still it remained doing this. I did finally learn how to edit the boot.ini file from the Recovery Console, but now I'm at another "bricked" state -- my reinstall is hanging during the device driver install. So when I get home from work, I get to spend more time in Recovery Console, removing all my drivers so that Windows might reinstall decent-ish ones. Then it's going to take all night to update to SP3 again... *sigh* And that's assuming everything works. Worse-case, I bring my server, Exarch, back home and grab as many of my files off of Xotz as will fit on Exarch's hard drives and do what I should have done with Xotz a long time ago -- a full reformat. But here's hoping I don't have to; because that would seriously, seriously suck.

Labels: beer, life, work, xotz