The Manic Mechanic

Oh, me! Oh, my! A meme! Via furr_a_bruin:

Comment to this post and I will give you 5 subjects/things I associate you with. Then post this in your LJ and elaborate on the subjects given.
-= OR =-
Comment with five things you associate with me, and I'll expound on them in my journal.

He associated these five items with me. Hopefully not in descending order! ;)

1. Hard Drives: Okay, I guess it's tough not to associate these with me considering all the recent geekery involving two insane servers I created, one of them alone containing a total of 21 hard drives with enough storage that one time would have matched a medium-sized datacenter (Approx. 12TB in various redundant arrays). The reason for this is my insatiable appetite for digital media, and the unfortunate loss of some of said media in a couple drive crashes. The drives in the two servers, plus several external drives make up redundant online and offline copies of the music, photos and video I have, a great deal of which is irreplaceable. Does not help that it's a huge expensive hobby for me.

2. Performance Tires: I love 'performance driving'. While straight-line acceleration is fun and lots of fun to build for, I also like to take turns at amusement park-like lateral forces. So, much of what I drive now and in the past is/was fitted with some sort of better-than-factory rolling stock. Aside from the fun factor and humbling of those trying (and sometimes failing, even spectacularly) to keep up in turns, the safety factor was conveniently increased. Given all the idiots I have to share the roads with, it's been nice to be able to make some serious evasive maneuvers to get out of trouble being caused by inattentive or just plain bad drivers.

3. Burly Bears: A favorite of mine well before I was able to suss out the actual reasons as to why, big, burly, muscled guys always got my (inordinate amount of) attention. In my early years I was fascinated by big guys with big muscles, with beards being extra spice. Wrestlers, powerlifters, strongmen, just about any sort of thickly built dudes were often the subjects of fantasy. Not much has changed since. I'm just happy I eventually found myself to be part of the 'club'.

4. Music: One of the most important parts of my life, even before #3 above, music has always accompanied me through just about every part of my life. Songs from my past serve as memory landmarks. Hearing some of my old favorites will transport me back in my mind to those days. I am not limited to a narrow number of genres either. I find something to love in every imaginable type of music. Frank Sinatra to Frank Zappa. Mozart to Metallica. Blues to bluegrass. I tend to have progressive rock and heavy metal/hard rock as my favorite genres, but I don't automatically reject any type of music, since I have found gems in just about everything. As I get older, I find myself gaining appreciation for stuff I might not have particularly cared for when I was younger.

5. Motor Oil: Who doesn't love a well-oiled machine? I can practically say the stuff runs in my veins. Having been covered in the stuff more times that I could ever count, I could say I am somewhat fanatical about having the best oil running in all my engines, big and small. Some might attribute kink factors to motor oil, especially visions of me being covered in dirty oil and grease after spending all day working shoulder-deep in an engine compartment. But knowing how much of a mess it is to clean up, it's not one of my favorite 'scenes'. ;)

Nothing too specific on the happy front, I finished up the garage door opener installation and programmed everything, fixed up the alarm system and installed the battery I had sitting around for ages. I will be able to install the second opener a lot faster knowing all the little details and changes I had to make. Jeff encountered icy roads on the way to work early this morning and ended up slammed sideways into a muddy embankment; a cursory check of his truck found no obvious damage or weird alignment issues, so that makes us both happy, especially since he did not get hurt.

Some computer happiness now that I finally got around to fabbing up a power harness for the last batch of drives in the megaserver, so now all the drives are functioning either as arrays or standalones. I also tweaked settings to get the external SATA stuff running in hotswap modes. I now have just about available connection method available save for Fibre Channel and Infiniband. I am not about to go that overboard. Just a healthy dosage of geek-happy.

And to make the rest of you happy, I have only one more of these posts to make.

It's Friday! It's part of that generally accepted universal happy. Unless you work in retail around this time of year, or your name is Jeff, who has to work tomorrow.

I am not off the hook either for tomorrow, it'll be a busy day for me. I take Kodi in for grooming, have to take care of business at the credit union, have some garage work to do, and I have to go back and help my friend with his house renovations. More electrical work, plus some carpentry/trim and upgrades.

I sure hope all the help I've been giving to everyone else will eventually come back to me in the form of reciprocity. I mean, I got a ton of stuff to do here and I really could use some help. However, it has never really been much in coming. I guess I have to be comfortable in the idea that the gift is in the giving, which, honestly, works for me.

It's a happy-by-proxy day today. Jeff had a good day at work, culminating with a nice (and very deserved) xmas bonus. When Jeff da Chef is happy, I'm happy.

I'm also sitting here with a recently acquired Intel Core2 Quad 9650 CPU. I have to remind myself, "no more god boxes". Well, that was two god boxes ago. This is not just happiness, it's insanity. LOL

Fuck the MPAA! Fuck the RIAA too! Sharing is not stealing! The only thi...

oh wait... wrong kinda pirate.

Avast me hearties and all that good poopdeckin' stuff. Now where's my eye patch and parrot. I could get hooked on this...

So there is a meme running around LJ lately (imagine that). This one asks for a picture of one's self from sometime in the 1990s. I figured it was time to outfit this new backup PC with the scanning software and this was an opportunity to give it a shot.

This is from 1991, when I was building the deck on my house.



In the 80s, I taught myself AutoCAD, which I would run on my whopping 286/12MHz PC. I still have the PC! My major project was this deck. I need to search for the disks containing the drawings. The deck is made with pressure-treated framing, with cedar decking, railings, posts and pickets, with a redwood top cap. I must have done something right, the deck is still standing and solid as ever. It's in dire need of refinishing, however. And only one board in it's over 60 feet of length is showing any signs of rotting. I have replacements.

Yeah, I looked like quite the meathead back then. I guess I still do. I cannot get over how much I was brimming with enthusiasm and energy back then. I thought nothing, nothing at all about undertaking the deck build. But prior to that, I only had a bit of a pause when I decided to take on building my own house. With encouragement from friends, I gave it a go. And, I must have done something right, it's still standing too.

I wish more than ever to be able to have this level of enthusiasm again.

Seems there is a meme going around the ol' LJ. I am finally getting around to parsing out pictures taken in the last several months that I have been without my main workstation PC. I've also finally upgraded from my original Photoshop 5.5 to PS CS2. As it stands, I got a bit more learning to do with the new features, and the new backup PC has an utterly trashed color profile that puts up warnings every time I start the program. while poring over the many hundreds of shots, this one popped up, and I figure it met the requirements outlined in the aforementioned meme, which is for those cycle-riding bears out there to show off their calves. This was a shot I took of a smallish scratch I got on my leg that nonetheless hurt like hell for the first couple days. I got it during one of the many times I had been riding the bike around town.



This shot will also serve as a reference after I recalibrate the new PC monitor profile. What comes out of CS2 is a washed-out version of what goes in.

As an aside, watching the Olympics tonight, I saw a job I'd like, which is to be the guy who has to lift the shortest of athletes up on to the high bar.

Now that March has draw to a close, it's time I run down the list and start answering the questions. You guys are a prolific bunch, I got a grand total of, well, one question. That's fine, most of you guys couldnt care less about this meme (or even about asking me anything), and besides, it make life a lot easier on me. :)

bearlover asked: What was it about Jeff that made you take the plunge?

Jeff was a total sweetheart to me at a time when I really needed one. After a couple rocky relationships I essentially gave up trying, and Jeff just, well, 'happened'. We met for the first time in person at the Susquehanna Valley Bears' "Bears in the Park" held at Hershey Park in PA. Prior to that, we would talk to one another online, and had for quite a while. Later that year (2000), we met again during another bear gathering at Rehoboth Beach. We hit it off, with Jeff coming down for a weekend to my place after that, and the rest, as they say, is history. While we are almost diagonal opposites in many ways, we rarely disagree on things. Jeff has been with me through the hardest days of my life, and somehow he manages to stick around despite my often disagreeable nature and mood swings. I never want to lose him.

So, that wraps up my question month. I know, lots of you are dying to ask me something, but unless you can get it in under the wire, you'll hafta wait till next year.

?

So, it's March Of The Penguins Questions time again. Okay, give it your best shot. Ask away, I will answer in separate postings. Comments here are screened, and if you want your question posted anonymously, just say so.

Ask away!

Unlike the (very cool) graph-the-song meme which would force me to fire up Excel and make my Friday feel too much like work, the other meme making the rounds is quite a bit easier. Especially since I already had the pic handy.