Well, after weeks of planning, sweating, laughing and swearing the barn is complete, and I am just thrilled with the way it turned out.
In terms of “sweat equity” we did pretty well. All of the lumber is rough cut and came from a sawmill in Sloansville, NY. The front door was something we found discarded along the road, and the windows are old reclaimed sashes from my brother the contractor. The vintage hardware for the big sliding door is a garage sale find for fifteen bucks. The most expensive part of the whole project was the roof; we ordered custom lengths of tin so there would be no cutting involved. Pretty cool!
Barn Raising Part 3
October 28, 2008 at 7:01 am (Life)
Barnraising Part 2
October 19, 2008 at 11:15 am (Life)
Work on the barn is moving along at a pretty good clip, and the three day weekend last week was just what we needed to get the majority of the work done. A few weeks ago our little barn was just a platform….
Then it was a skeleton….
And now it is something resembling a barn!
There is still a fair amount to do. The overhang for the potting bench needs to be built, and the windows and doors need to be installed, but I’m very excited about what we have managed to accomplish so far.
The Debate
October 1, 2008 at 12:04 pm (Rants)
Like a lot of people, I watched the debate last week between Barack Obama and John McCain, and I never would have written a blog post on a topic like this, but something about the debate drove me absolutely nuts. It was something that none of the media postmortems made much mention of which bothers me even more; it was the fact that during the entire debate, John McCain rarely looked at Barack Obama.
A lot of people are going to think I’m crazy, but where I come from you look someone straight in the eye when you speak to them. Like a good handshake, it’s one of those visceral, show-you-what-I’m-made-of clues that speak volumes about a person. In spite of Jim Lehrer’s prompting to get the candidates to talk to one another, McCain wasn’t going to budge preferring to look anywhere but at his opponent. McCain’s whole demeanor was at odds with what he was supposed to represent; he was condescending, often appearing to talk down to Barack, and yet the lack of eye contact made him look as if he was afraid of Barack or worried that what he was saying was not ringing true. All I could think was, if he was having this much trouble with a Senator from Illinois what was he going to do when confronted by someone as formidable as Vladimir Putin? Even at the end of the debate when they were shaking hands, McCain was still looking at the floor.
McCain’s attitude about Roe v Wade, paired with his pro-life presidential choice of Sarah Palin was pretty much a deal breaker for me and the debate clinched it. Maybe I’m wrong to base my presidential choice on body language, but actions often do speak louder than words.
Legalized Robbery
September 22, 2008 at 6:58 am (Life, Rants)
School has started, and as a college student I am preparing to be robbed by my college bookstore again. I never fail to be astounded by the cost of textbooks, and the devices used by professors to get students to fork over huge amounts of money.
This semester I am taking two courses requiring textbooks that are large enough to elevate a small child at the dinner table. Because they are technical manuals, they are phenomenally expensive. My strategy is to enroll in the class early enough so that I can get the ISBN of the book and purchase it elsewhere, preferably used, in time for the class. Half.com is my current favorite textbook supplier; one of my textbooks this semester was $126.00 at the bookstore and $43.00 on half.com….a substantial savings.
Occasionally my textbook strategy has backfired on me; if I get the title too early there is always a chance that the professor will change the text at the last minute, which has actually happened. It’s not too bad if they just change editions, but I have had classes that end up being taught by a different professor at the eleventh hour, and they invariably have their own textbook requirements. This necessitates finding a way to unload the unused book and I have a couple of favorite textbook buyback places that pay pretty well; facultybooks.com and valorebooks.com. Both websites give real time buyback quotes and free shipping for the textbook you are selling which is super convenient.
Even more irritating than paying big money for a textbook, is buying a textbook that is never used. It’s one thing to require a big money text, but requiring one that is never used should be illegal. You can imagine that I make a pretty big fuss about this on the end-of-semester survey!
Barnraising Part 1
September 7, 2008 at 10:53 am (Life)
After living here for eight years and hating my two rusty tin Sears sheds for all eight of those years, I am finally building a barn; it’s a small barn, but a barn all the same. The plan has been formulating for years in my head with regard to size and shape, and I decided on a 10×16 saltbox with a sliding barn door, tin roof and rough cut board & batten siding. Hopefully that should be enough room to house the detritus of our outdoor lifestyle; the riding mower, three kayaks, a snowblower, a rototiller, numerous garden tools and two bicycles. Since we are do-it-yourselfers, the professor and I have been collaborating on the project, and he came up with a lovely drawing of what it would look like. He even added a little extension on one end for a potting bench which is very exciting for the gardener in me.
With the building permit secured, last weekend was the pouring of the concrete footings; nine sonotubes buried 42″ in the ground. Surprisingly, that’s a fair amount of ready-mix… sixteen 80 lb. bags in all. Ken borrowed a cement mixer from a friend and I was quickly reminded of what a messy job pouring concrete is. Having done some of that kind of work in a previous life I knew what I was in for, but it’s been a while. I forgot that no matter how far you try to stand behind the wheelbarrow, you’re going to get splattered in a big way. And a wheelbarrow loaded with cement is a very heavy item; my dinky little homeowner wheelbarrow was visibly unhappy about this task and looked ready to collapse at any moment.
After about three hours the job was complete, and we were both sweaty, filthy and exhausted. There may be a little masochist hiding in me, but one of the best feelings in the world is being totally drained after a day of hard, physical work. The bonus in labor like that is almost always tangible; a completed garden, a freshly painted house or a forest of cement piers ready for a deck. It’s productivity at its very best, and always makes me feel as if I have earned my space on earth.
iSCSI Woes
August 27, 2008 at 2:32 pm (Uncategorized)
Warning…technical language ahead!
One of my summer projects was a new server for one of my elementary buildings, with an iSCSI SAN to go along with it. I started using iSCSI technology last year and just love it; it’s handy to be able to add space to a volume on the fly and the cost is substantially cheaper than fiber channel. The volumes that you create can be formatted any way you like, so it’s compatible with any file system; we are a Novell shop, so NSS is our standard.
The server setup was fairly straightforward after I discovered that Netware 6.5 SP6 was not going to fly with our new Dell hardware; the 6.5 SP7 overlay disk worked fine, however. A little side rant here…Dell does not make enterprise quality servers. Their pricing is good, but you get what you pay for; give me an IBM or HP any day.
With the server setup complete I added the volumes for staff and students, then migrated the home directories to it and rewrote the login scripts; everyone was happy and joyous. Three days after the server was installed I got an NSS popup notification on my workstation announcing that one of the volumes had dismounted. A quick look at the console confirmed this, so I issued the command to restart the iSCSI session and the volume mounted. Weird. I opened the management console for the SAN and things looked okay with the exception of the occasional flicker of “failed” next to an iSCSI session. That was bothersome, so it was time to hit the knowledgebase.
Every reference to iSCSI suggests that solid comms are in order; because of the way the protocol is designed there is little tolerance for duplex mismatches, flaky switches and bad cabling. Our core switch is a big Cisco 6509 which is fairly new and a check of the ports did not turn up any duplex issues; the cables were new as well. After checking the most obvious things I began to compare this new setup with the SAN that had been happily humming along in my data center for over a year. The Broadcom drivers that had been installed were out of date, so I upgraded them along with the latest winsock files from Novell. A couple of days later the server dumped another volume.
I was starting to get really worried, because school was starting in a few weeks and people get annoyed when they are suddenly disconnected from their files. A call to the SAN vendor was an exercise in futility because while the unit is Novell YES certified, Novell support is tough to get from most vendors. That’s a rant for another day. After another comparison of my known good server and SAN combination I noticed that the iSCSI drivers on the Novell server were old! The latest version out was 1.06 and my brand new server set up with the latest service pack was at 1.03; how in the world did the old drivers manage to make it into the latest software download from Novell?
After digging around a bit, I found an iSCSI update on the Novell site and downloaded it. Part way through the install it quit with a message about only being written for Netware 6.5SP6, so it was apparent that I was not going to be able to use the scripted install routine. After weighing my options and getting a good backup, I decided to replace all the files on my server with the files in the update package by hand which is definitely not for the faint of heart. That meant unloading the iSCSI sessions, renaming all 19 of the files and replacing them with the new ones, then restarting the sessions. There was a moment of alarm when I realized that I needed to edit the newer ion.ncf file, but once that was done the volumes mounted properly and have been solid for several days.
I realized with some amusement that you would never get away with doing something like that in a Microsoft operating system; swapping files around by hand in Windows usually leaves you with a paperweight. Netware can be a nuisance, but its modular nature makes it easier to deal with in some ways.
Let the school year begin!
The Issue No One is Talking About
August 6, 2008 at 12:41 pm (Rants)
I saw John McCain’s YouTube video today where he was asked by a reporter why women had to pay for birth control while viagra was covered under most prescription drug plans. It was interesting to watch his reaction. There were numerous facial contortions and you could clearly see him weighing what was about to come out of his mouth against the media spin that would result. In the end he opted to say that he didn’t know enough about it to comment, which is politician-speak for, “I’m not going to risk pissing someone off on such an unimportant issue.” Nice going, John. Except it’s an important issue…very important.
Unless you have been living under a rock you know that unemployment is at an all time high, education is in crisis, and we are facing serious food, water and fuel shortages. Our cities are becoming hotbeds of crime, our highways are congested and prison populations are exploding. The common denominator for this (and an awful lot of other world woes) is the fact that there are just too many people inhabiting this earth. I am a firm believer that the long term answer to a lot of society’s ills can be found in birth control; free, readily available birth control.
It’s no surprise that unwanted children stress our welfare systems, fill our prisons and overtax our school systems. People who can’t afford birth control are the ones who need it most, and it continues to amaze me that welfare programs can pay out eight to ten thousand a year for a welfare recipient, but be unable to shell out the hundred bucks a year it would cost to provide birth control. As a country we should not only be providing this, but we should be marketing it instead of this Abstinence Only program which is a post-Victorian joke foisted upon us by the Republican party and religious right.
Until we can become as evolved and as pragmatic as countries like Denmark and Sweden who understand the social ramifications of unplanned pregnancies, we are going to continue to fill our social ranks with people who are part of the problem and not part of the solution. Their vastly lower crime rates, higher standard of living and better educational system is an indirect result of having fewer people on the dole.
I think we have yet to realize the long term effects of our head-in-the-sand approach to population control, and when we do it will be devastating…and much too late.
Upgrade Hell
July 30, 2008 at 6:11 pm (Rants, Work)
There is a white board in my cubicle upon which I keep a list of major projects that need doing; one of those items on the list is “Upgrade Websense” with a little sad face drawn next to it. The reason for this designation is that it is an upgrade that just never goes well. Ever. It always results in several long phone calls to San Diego where they are almost as mystified as I am.
You would not think this would be so difficult; I always dutifully print out the upgrade instructions and follow them to the letter, making certain that the event viewer is not open and that the Enterprise Manager is not running. The install manages to stop all the services properly, the file copy goes well and then bang! An Error:128 appears and I know I’m done; stick a fork in me, it’s time to call tech support.
Websense tech support is variable; sometimes you get someone phenomenal, and sometimes you get a dud. The tech I got was okay, but you would think the error messages I was kicking out would have been enough to go on, or documented somewhere. Instead he had me trying all kinds of things like reinstalling the old version and then upgrading to an incremental build, etc. My gut tells me that the root of the evil is a config.xml file that has been through too many upgrades and ip address changes.
I suppose I could just do a clean install of the latest version, but the problem with that plan is that I would lose all the policies I have created along with my massive white list. When asked if it was possible to send them my config.xml file and have them convert it, they told me that they don’t do that; the only time they will convert a config file is if a customer migrates from Windows to Linux (this is very tempting since I have always felt that having “workhorse” services running on Windoze is a really dumb idea).
Anyway, after hours of being glued to the phone, the tech asked me if I had a spare server laying around so that I could set up a secondary policy server and migrate the xml file to it. The idea was that the secondary server would do the conversion, I could update the original and plunk the converted config file back in. I have been down that road before and got licensing issues and other mayhem, so I decided that for all the support money we pay those nice folks each year they could do it for me.
A couple of hours later the updated config file arrived and it worked fairly well after a bit of search-and-replace; all that pain for an .xml file that’s been around the block a few too many times!
I still wish I had gone with Linux.
Confession
July 25, 2008 at 2:30 pm (Life, Rants)
I hate my teapot. So why the confession? Because I always wanted a leCreuset teapot, and now that I have one I absolutely detest it.
Anyone who is a cookware aficionado knows that le Creuset is considered pretty good stuff, and it’s fairly expensive. So you can imagine how happy I was to get one from my daughter for Christmas. She had seen me ogling the red whistler in Different Drummer’s Kitchen, tucked it into the back of her head, and bought it for me last year. It promptly took up residence on my stove where it looked just beautiful.
Its beauty was really only skin deep, however; the leCreuset has turned out to be the most unhandy teapot on the face of the earth. For one thing, after heating the water you must pour excruciatingly slowly into the cup or the water will sputter all over you when it hits the hot sides of the teapot. The fill lid is very snug and a nuisance to remove; you must leverage your palm on the handle and pull the lid straight up with your index and middle finger. Any attempt to simply grasp the knob on the lid and pull will result in bashed knuckles. And the handle is extremely stiff, requiring a lot of force to fold it to the side for filling.
I’m going to keep the teapot until I find something more functional. Maybe I’ll find something I like better right before Christmas.
Pea Season
July 16, 2008 at 6:55 am (Life)
The month of July is a nice time to be a gardener because most of the real heavy work is done, but there is still some anticipation of things to come. The first flush of roses has come and gone, but the dahlia blossoms are fat little buds of promise waiting for the heat of summer. The asiatic lilies liberally sprinkled throughout the garden are displaying their gigantic waxy blooms, and vegetables are starting to arrive signaling the start of what must surely be the origin of “salad days”. (I can’t take credit for the vegetable bounty; that is the sole domain of the Professor who has two small vegetable gardens which keep us supplied all summer.)
July is also a good month to take stock of how well things are working (or not working) in the garden. My first notes about things that need to be changed are made this month, scribbled in my gardening notebook for later reference. One of my worst gardening habits is that I always plant things too closely together, so by July it’s quite apparent what things need to be moved. It’s also a good time to take notes about what things just aren’t doing well and make a decision about whether or not the plant should be moved or deaccessioned.
My garden is constantly undergoing this kind of editing, and an awful lot of the time it’s due to some force I have no control over. For example, my neighbor removed a very large oak tree from his front yard last fall which completely changed the sunlight patterns on the west side of my yard, necessitating the move of several plants which could not tolerate this sudden onslaught of sunlight. Conversely, I now have areas of shade in my yard that I didn’t have during the preceding three years because of the massive worm damage which partially defoliated several of my trees.
It’s always something in the garden world; I like to call this “hobby security”.
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