Ah, the recording industry.

I have the Pulse release on vinyl from Floyd. It's on the list of "cherished stuff." But today when I was checking out their boxed set, Oh By the Way, I notice that there is now a DVD. How, exactly, does one make a DVD from a vinyl box set? If it's a concert, why not call it something different, like they did with Live in Pompeii, or Dave Matthews' Live at Red Rocks?

Bill Hicks once asked an audience, "Are any of you in marketing? Oh? Yeah, okay. Kill yourself."

This sort of thing makes me sad, especially since Gilmour seems to be so passionate about the music, not overly concerned with money, and wanting to leave a legacy for the younger generations (the undertones of death and bodies becoming more fragile are incredibly apparent on On an Island).

One from the list of stuff I thought I'd never have

A raid striped across nine disks, which formatted down to about two terabytes. Half of it's for media (rich or otherwise). The rest, well, nature abhors unused storage. I'll probably start making netboot images, and I know we're certainly going to have virtual machines.

In other news, we're kicking the tires on Leopard Server. Man, this is nice stuff. Last time I used OSX Server was 10.0, and back then it was pretty ... uninspiring. I can't wait to see Snow Leopard. I've even been contemplating putting LS on my Air (silly as that seems, right?) because I like the interface for controlling services so much more. It's like the software understands there's a network out there, and it even wants to be a part of it. And, crucially, it's not anti-Windows.

Oh, and as for cutthroat bitch over there, don't ask. It's a long, long story.

Is breaking a stripe bad luck?

I know you're not supposed to break mirrors, but is it bad luck to break a stripe? I've just finished migrating data from two stripes onto one monolithic (concatenated) volume so I can repartition and restripe across all the volumes from both stripes. Of course, it's terrifying. But wait! Those are my Redundant Arrays!

I hate data migration. Even when we're working with a corporate budget and I have eleventy billion dollars to spend and can spend two weeks with rsync and random file tests and the like, it feels like you always miss something.

Here's hoping.

(for those wondering, I'm building an hfs+j+cs stripe across eight disks for home directories and media storage – we're waiting for snow leopard server to buy Big Storage like one of the LaCie S2S boxes, and hoping that Apple will give us zfs then, and I can do this all over again)

Well, a track suit for less than a thousand dollars.

It looks like Alpinestars makes a 1-piece track suit that should fit me just fine (I have the measuring tape here, and if newenough and kneedraggers have their sizing charts correct, I'll even have room for a kidney belt and better back protector). This is good because I've wanted to track the bike, but all the trackday organizations require that you wear not just leather, but a racing suit with appropriate armor. I suppose that's not unreasonable, but the cost of admission then becomes the bike (depending on where you start; a friend of ours started on a 250 because it's cheaper, but I might want to race my own bike, the ZX7-R, and now you're out more than a few thousand dollars) and the leathers. Add to that tires, brakes, the inevitable new set of fairings, and so on.

But where else are you going to learn how to contain the fury in that sub-one-litre mill? Certainly not on the street. How about tire adhesion? Or how far you can push the brakes before it locks up? With cars, it's pretty easy to take an HPDE. You buy a helmet, maybe a harness, and get a car capable of doing it (well, this last part is optional, but it's a lot more fun in an STI than it is in, say, a Fiesta). That car can and usually is your daily driver. But nobody's asking you to wear a full nomex suit or anything.

At any rate, I'm pleased to see A* has a suit I can wear. Now to get a set of those Pirelli Diablos on the bike, some galfer pads, lines, and rotors, and go to town. I've got all winter to work on the bike, hopefully by the time Summer comes around Summit or VIR will have track days.

Admittedly, I'll look as funny in a track suit as I do in a full wetsuit, but when you're tucked on to the bike, it's pretty hard to tell who "that guy" is.

gonna be nice tomorrow

you've been living in the mid atlantic too long when you look at the weather, see that it's going to be 39°F at 0700 and that there's 0% precip during the day, which will reach about 47°F, and you remark, "hey, cool, it's gonna be nice tomorrow."

so on the bike we go at 0700, across the death trap that is 110, at just-barely-above-freezing weather, to toil in the salt mines, only to do it again at 1700. (hey, wait, isn't that more than eight hours??)

snot

It appears the snot is clearing, after four days of being unable to speak. Lots of soup and theraflu.

On Bikes and IRAs

After checking in on Fidelity this morning, I'm not especially surprised, but the number is significant. At this point, I could have pulled all that money out when it was over a hundred percent ahead (about two years ago), and paid the early-withdrawal and income taxes on it and still be ahead of where I am now. At the moment, I'm torn between pouring a bunch of money back into it, with the hopes that it will recover, pulling it out (it's now worth almost nothing, but would let me buy that nicer bike I want), or just letting it wither to nothing. I suppose losing that entire sum of money is not going to hurt me too much either, and weighing the possibility that it's going to evaporate entirely vs recover to something resembling what it used to be has me leaning on the "probably will recover" side.

But if I ever wanted to pull out all my savings and buy a motorcycle with it, this would be the time, given motorcycles are not going down in value (and indeed will be going up in value in the next few months), and I'm not going to lose any money pulling this out – I'm taking a loss.

heat, use thereof

I metered out about 30ml of the fluid from my pulped habaneros yesterday into 16floz (2c) of vegetable soup. Yes, it was tasty. Yes, it was incredibly spicy. My original thought was, but I like vegetable soup to be spicy. However, this was not really "heroic" or "in the interest of science," any more than laika or the various other test animals throughout history have been either scientists or heroic. It was spicy like crazy. I may step back to 10ml next time I want to add "that habanero flavor" to something.

I've never actually had enough peppers to subtract out the liquid from the flesh before. This year we were "blessed" with something between thirty and fifty peppers (I think some over-enthusiastic bees found our plant, but she continues to bloom and fruit! now that she's been brought inside, so I'm not sure what is going on), so we've been trying to come up with ways to make use of them all. We've also never had the luxury of "pure essence of evilhabanero" distilled into so much water [and bourbon].

The first thought was pizza. Usually that takes 3-4 peppers. And then chili. That takes another 4-5 peppers. Then mac-n-cheese. Another 4 peppers. But between the pizza, chili, and mac-n-cheese, that's like three weeks' worth of food. What do you do with the other twenty peppers on the plant?

I've had to come up with some way to preserve them. Strangely, perhaps fittingly, adding Jack Daniels has proved a pretty good way of doing it until they're needed.



In other news, you know how sometimes you feel better when you eat a bunch of spicy food and you have a cold? Well, sure, even with this "scary goddamn hot" food, I felt better for an hour or two and woke up still feeling awful. So today I shall spend the day rearranging the raids on my mac and moving my iTunes library around. Because if there's anything that accompanies minimal brain functioning, it's complex tasks.



edit: 5ml in a cup-o-noodles is about as much as i can stand, and is indeed pretty decent. ahhh, it burns, but in a good way.