Mike’s World

Aaah, what an amazing day.

The day started off with me sleeping in until about 9:30am. I am starting to get use to my cpap thingie, so when I woke up after a page at 5:00am or so, i went back to sleep, on my back. something I have not done in years. With a normal morning, I would wake up at 7:30am or so, but not today.
After sleeping in, I had the hard decision to make. go to work (ick) or spend the first 60 degree day at home. Tough decision to make. Called up my boss, told him i would not be in.

Today was going to be my first grilling day, and I wanted to make it special. I started off looking for a meat market. I found one in the Calhoun area of Minneapolis. Headed out, and found they are closed on Mondays. Bah. Second choice, I went to Cub to find some dinner. What did I find, but a package of fillet Mignon. Well, perfect for the grill.

I came home with my steak, potato, and ear of corn (how I found an ear of corn in Minnesota in march, I do not want to know) and fired up the charcoal. Last year I attempted to cook a steak dinner on the grill, and was less than successful. The fresh corn and potato came out amazing, but the steak, I ruined with seasoning.

Got my potato prepared (cut open, put butter all over the place, wrap in foil). The problem with this method of cooking, is that it takes forever. The coals take a good 20 minutes to get going, and the potato takes 45 minutes to an hour. This time I tried the potato right on the coals. In the end, I did not like this, as the skin did not taste very good at all. I think I will leave it up top.

The corn, I peaked the husk back, got rid of the stringy stuff, put some butter in, and on the grill for 30 minutes.

Now for the steak. All I did was cut a tiny little bit of fat off, and put it on. I was thinking that it would be 6 to 8 minutes for medium (160 deg) but I was wrong. The coals had cooled down quite a bit over the hour they have been going, so the Weber was only at 350 to 400 degrees. Because of this, the steak had taken 15 minutes or so. I think next time I am going to start up another set of coals when the corn goes on.

Well, in the end an amazing meal, just what I wanted. The potato was ok, the corn was good, but the steak was simply amazing. It did not melt in my mouth, but it was just very, very flavorful.

Now, the steaks come in packs of two, so it looks like I might need to try this again on Friday.

Today was a nice relaxing day. I woke up at about 6:00am, tootled around until about 9:00am, then went back to sleep until about 12:00pm. The afternoon, talked to my mother, my father, my sister, while watching some TV. Turns out my mother might be coming to town next month, She has not been in Minnesota for several years, should be interesting.

This afternoon I did some driving down black dog road around the MN River. I think I am going to look around for some walking paths.

Birthday part 2 was at a friends house this evening. had some very good chili, a nice cake and some nice gifts. I got an ikea gift card, which will be useful for some side tables I have been looking at, and my friends also picked up a bottle of captain Morgans private stock rum. I do enjoy the rum and coke, and I tend to use the coke to cut the captain morgans rum taste. With this private stock rum, the rum taste is much less apparent, and the wonderful collections of spice is tasteful, so it is a very nice drunk just on the rocks.

My friends thought it would be nice to continue the cake joke.

Well, I am getting older. Saturday is my 27th birthday. Today we did birthday stuff with my family (sister, father). We went out to Famous daves for some dinner, something different, then came home and had cake. My sister made a very nice cake, that was 1 year ahead of me.

For a nice gift, my father got me a lamp for my dining room. Something I have needed for a bit.

As I found out when I canceled my cable service and went to DirecTV (mmm, HD DirecTivo), I learned that Time Warner bills a month in advanced. This made it an interesting experience when getting rid of my cable. today, 6 months after I ditched cable, I got a check in the mail from Time Warner for $46.00. Nice fast service there folks. I should send them a bill for a $5.00 late fee.

Well, my ISP switch is complete. This morning at around 3:30am my ATM connection dropped, and came back up, but the virtual dialer interface stayed down as expected. I woke up at 6:30am, and started reconfiguring everything, starting with the router config and ACLs, then DNS, and then web server config. an hour later. the switch is complete.

I have had the TTL dropped down to about 10 minutes on all my zones, so that will go through quickly.

well, even after yesterdays issues, I managed to have today off. I did a bit of work, but spent most of the day watching tv and relaxing.

in a newsgroup, mn.general, my ISP is coming under some fire. Things have been rough, and people are starting to notice. Should be interesting.

Today was all about file corruption on a large production server. the app folks found some files that where corrupt, and we went from there. opened calls with veritas, and started looking in to things. a lesson learned was fsck. With UFS in the past, i had been able to do a fsck -n devname. I did this with vxfs, and did a fsck -F vxfs -n -o nolog,full devname. Got about 3000 errors, so i thought the filesystem was corrupt. doing some checking on a dev box, this was a symptom of the filesystem being mounted. Doh!

Several months ago, the folks that have ran visi, a local ISP up and running jumped ship, and started a new ISP, iphouse. VISI is still a solid, reliable ISP, but the customer service is just not there anymore, something that made VISI one of the best ISPs in the local business. VISI was a true home for geeks, but managed to remain competitive, so it was also a good home for your grandparents. Over the last several months, everything that has made VISI special has gone away, and now it is time for me to go away. I have placed my ipHouse order, and my DSL switches over next Monday.

Well, today I managed to break my server i use for backups. Had read errors on the root drive, system hung, I rebooted, and fsck removed /dev. Makes for an interesting boot. Looks like I get to spend tomorrow rebuilding it.

Well, ran across a product called CherryOS. It looks to be a Mac G4 emulator for the PC. I have downloaded the demo, and I am installing it now. For now, I have read quite a bit of comments about how it may be a ripoff of the open source PearPC project. If it is, shame on them,