Monday, October 15 2007, 12:22 AM

First things first. The Star Wars Family Guy episode is absolutely freakin hilarious. It is, hands down, the best episode of Family Guy ever. EVER. Moving on...

This weekend has been an exercise in patience. It was the first weekend in a while where I didn't have some preexisting commitment, so I decided I'd try to get a few projects knocked out. I've been meaning to upgrade my Xen server here at home and make use of some of the half-height SCSI drives I mis-ordered a few months back. It turned into a much larger headache than I would have expected - mainly due to my stubbornness. I started the process of setting up the new environment in one of the machines Justin so graciously donated to the Mike Neir Hardware Fund a few months back. It's a nice server piece with a lot of space for drives, so it worked out well with the four SCSI drives I set up in RAID5. The problem lied in the fact that there were only four power leads coming out of the power supply. That meant no CD-ROM and no easy install. Sure, I could have put another power supply in the machine, but I was lazy yet determined to impose my will upon it, so I decided to make due without replacing the power supply. The machine gave me a good fight though. I ended up using cluster knoppix in terminal server mode to PXE boot the problem machine so I could copy the OS from my current Xen server to said problem machine. That worked, but I had a lot of trouble with the custom Xen kernel I had on the old app server. So, in the interests of laziness and getting everything working, I decided to uprade the whole thing from CentOS 4.4. to CentOS 5, which has a pretty and non-difficult Xen kernel right out of the box. Twelve hours after I started, I prevailed. I probably could have had everything working in less than an hour if I wasn't lazy and/or stubborn, but doing things the hard way always seems to yield more knowledge than the easy way. I'm a fan of learning and honing my skills, so it's all good.

After my difficulties with the Xen server, I performed the long-overdue task of cleaning out my fridge. I really need to get better at the task of managing left-overs methinks. There were some items in there that probably dated back to the first Clinton administration. After my cleaning task was complete, I put together a shopping list in the attempt to refill the fridge. I hadn't been shopping for more than anything but a gallon of milk or mountain dew in close to two months. I made a strong focus on acquiring a lot of raw materials instead of pre-made items since I've been experimenting a lot more with actually preparing food instead of just warming it up. I picked up just about every spice I've ever heard of, and the receipt reflected it. $276. Yeah. Two hundred and seventy-six dollars. Now I need to put the recipe book I have into action and make some tasty food.

Now I'm unhappy and less motivated to post. The Star Wars episode of Family guy displaced Metalocalypse, which isn't a good thing. Grumblefest.

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