2nd day of Basic Riders Course

We started out early, and we had finished our range evals by 1230. I aced the 20ft u-turn box, and only lost 5 total points because I stopped in 16 ft on the fast stop. I also missed 1 question on the exam for a 98. I think that the biggest contributor to my success on the range was the Dual purpose KLX-250 . It sat really high, infact, even standing over the bike, I was in complete contact with the seat. The instructors recommended that because of my size, I should be able to easily handle a 400-650cc bike. Now if I can just make myself wait until I can afford one.

I've also found that TX DMV accepts the MSF BRC as a motorcycle course, and I should be able to get a Motorcycle endorsement.

1st day of Motorcycle class

I attended the first day of the Motorcycle Safety Foundation's Basic Riders Course. After lunch we went out on the "Range" which was an area of old runway with lines painted on it. I had a Kawasaki enduro bike, which was the tallest one there. We ended up getting comfortable enough to take it up to third gear when we drove them back to the shed. It was damn hot out there, but it didn't feel so bad after getting used to the heat.

Emerging Meme - Banana, the Athiests nightmare.

Thank god we have Kirk Cameron to add some credibility.


Circular reasoning anyone? If anything, taking this clown seriously, you could argue that since apes like Chimpanzees like banana's so much, we must share a common ancestor. Lets not even talk about the fact that the Cavendish banana is a result of hybridization (all are clones) that has rendered it so vulnerable to disease that it is on its way to extintion. And only humans open bananas by the stem, an easier way is by pinching the end, which is how primates eat them. Taking his logic in another equally absurd tangent, you could argue that the banana being the perfect fruit designed by God, represents the phallus so much, that god wanted all of us to be fellatious.

Clearly this guy must have scored high marks in the Presidents faith based science classes.

Chris' Wedding

I've uploaded some Wedding pictures. Check them out on my Flickr photoset.

NAS Build progress

IMG_1265
Originally uploaded by cfpresley.

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Originally uploaded by cfpresley.

I've found a solution to my space crunch, and it involves standing 5 drives up in a improvised IDE cage, similar to this. I used the metal blanks from unused 5.25 bays. Three would have been better, but I only had two. After running them for a while, I noticed that they got pretty hot. I ordered a 119cfm 92mm fan and some 36" rounded IDE cables to reach the top of the tower. I setup a 5 drive array through Windows 2003, but aborted the format after 3 hours, getting up to 27%. Perhaps the fan and new cables will help.

Building a NAS

Last week, I purchased 6 refurb 250GB hdd's from Woot.com for $50 each. They only have 2MB cache, so they aren't that fast for main drives, but raided together, they should do the job for Network Attached Storage. For anyone that doesn't know, A NAS is just a fancy way of saying File Server. Anyhow, in addition to the 2 other 250gb drives I have, I will be able to build a 1.5TB RAID 5 array and still have a drive left over to upgrade my ReplayTV PVR to 250 hours of storage.

The cheapest way to implement a NAS is to use an existing older computer, and network it. I have a full tower chieftec style case with 6x3.5 bays and 4x5.25 bays. What I would like to do is set up 2 120GB drives as a Raid1 System Drive, and put the 7 250's as the Raid5 drive. This only leaves room for one extra device, A floppy, or the DVD-burner. The only reason I would need the floppy is for Firmware updates and OS installation. The HP DVD burner has a wonderfull 'feature' that prevents it from working in an external USB enclosure.

Besides how I'm going to fit all the drives and find enough power connections for 10 drives (I have a quality 450w PSU), I have to shuffle data around my existing hard drives across two machines, without much room to spare.

What seems like a simple install has consumed two days so far, and probably will take up the rest of the weekend. Hopefully, everything will workout, and I will have plenty of storage to last for the next 3-5 years.

Things and stuff

I've just gotten back from Illinois. I'm finished with classes, so I've got more time to spend at work and at home. I've been really busy at work lately, having to standup an exchange 2003 site capable of handing x509 Fortezza encryption. All of this done from dense 10point font tech manuals written by an Aerospace company that gets paid by the page. Its really fun. At least I've been rocking out to all of Jack Johnson's albums while waiting around for the servers to reboot. I'm in a big hurry to get it operational so that I can play around with virtualizing it all onto one or two servers, instead of the four it currently runs. We have power constraints due to the glacially slow pace of the government procurement of a new Power Distribution box.