We've had FIOS internet service from Verizon now for about 3 months. I have to say that it's turned out to be a really reliable service. I haven't once had to power cycle anything on my network because of an unresponsive connection as I've had to do in the past with IDSL and cable. The speed is very nice as well (image to left from Speakeasy.net which is representative of our 15M down, 2M up service), faster than Comcast but at the same price as their lower tier service. The only draw back is that most people don't have access to this service yet, but that will change eventually. New cabling has to be trenched into your neighborhood which is a chore in some places. It also makes for angry neighbors when the grass dies.
Five and a quarter, floppy.
I recently had some stickers cut for my car. They're 5.25″ floppy discs. You can download the .PDF here.
The Harvest Moon
Saturday Oct 7, 2006 was the harvest moon, the full moon occuring closest to the autumnal equinox. I used a telescope with a Canon EOS mount with a Rebel XTi camera. The focus isn't great around the edges and I'm still exploring why.
How to quickly make iced tea.
Here are the steps that I follow when I want a glass of iced tea quickly.
1. Fill a glass measuring cup with 1 cup (8 oz) of water. Heat in the microwave for 2 minutes. Obviously, YMMV.
2. Add one tea bag and step for 3-4 minutes.
3. Meanwhile, fill a 12 oz glass with ice cubes or half fill with crushed ice.
4. Add sweetner if desired to hot tea.
5. Pour hot tea over ice and stir until most of the ice has melted.
You can also double the water and tea bags for two glasses of tea. Please don't drink bottled tea, even if it's the only thing available. It's rotten.
Free Printable Lens Hoods
I won't go into the debate about why printing your own lens hood from paper is a good idea or bad idea. I'll be printing a few for fun and leave the rest up to the link to speak for itself.
Identify this bug, please.
I found this bug on one of my tomatoes in the garden. I'm not sure how I avoided touching or knocking it off one the way into the house. It's really small but brightly colored and highly detailed. Looks like some sort of caterpillar to me.
NitroAV Vanguard V RAID Near Heart Attack Failure
When I turned on my trusty NitroAV Vanguard V RAID box this morning, I wasn't greeted with it's normal two-toned happy beep. Instead, it began to beep over and over with a matching red LED for drive bay 4. This is not how I wanted to spend my Sunday morning.
Luckily, I've had this happen before with the same drive about two months ago. When it happened that time my heart also sunk below my feet at the thought of loosing all of the data on that drive. But at the time, I “fixed it” by simply re-seating the drive in that bay (with the power off).
This morning would be different. I re-seated the drive several times without success. The drive wasn't mounting either (it didn't the last time this happened). But I was prepared for this sort of thing– I have a new spare Seagate 300GB drive ready to go that matched the current drives exactly.
I popped the old sled out, replaced the drive with the new one, slid it back in and.. nothing. The event log acknowledged I removed the drive and reinserted a new one but that's about it. No automatic rebuilding, no flurry of activity, nothing. Going through the menus on the terminal via the serial port trying to find a rebuild function was fruitless. Choosing functions like “RAID Set Information” said there was no RAID set defined. This is not good.
I took a deep breath, turned the box off, swapped the drive again, putting the “failed” drive back, power on, same symptoms. Instead, this time I choose “Active Raid Set” which now shows there IS a raid set defined. “Are you sure?” it asks with an eyebrow raised. I was scared, but said yes. The drive appeared on my desktop like normal (albeit minus one drive functioning). But this is the way it's supposed to work. No data lost! Yes! But I still need to get the new drive in there.
With the power on, drive mounted, I slide sled 4 out, swap the drive again, putting the new drive in. Now, I'm greeted with rebuilding information (which set, % complete, time elapsed, etc).
So, the trick is, your RAID set needs to be activated, mounted (in a degraded state) before the controller will rebuild to a new drive. I expected the drive to do these steps for me, but maybe it's a safety feature.
UPDATE: The rebuild completed successfully after a little over 6 hours.
Link to the NitroAV Vanguard V RAID box from Firewire Direct.
Cutest Printer in the World?
Oh Canon, you make the best imaging products in the world. I cut my teeth on your Rebel SLR 35mm camera line and continued with the oh-so-familiar EOS DSLR line.
Recently, we needed to purchase an easy to use photo printer that could easily print pictures right from the camera requiring no computer. I happened upon the Canon Selphy CP-510 (Selphy being a Japanese cutisification of their Elph camera line). This printer is great; dye sub 4×6 prints at about the same price as the drug store (28 cents/ea). And no ink jet mess, just real continuous-tone prints!
I recorded a movie of the printer doing it's thing, watch it here: 2.4MB Quicktime MP4
PhillyMINI Four Dogs Run
Jim and I participated in PhillyMINI's Four Dogs Run on July 9, 2006 for a spirited two hour run through some twisty backroads of PA ending with a great lunch and good company at the Four Dogs Tavern. Molly and hazel did very well both on the run and at the restuarant, even garnering some comments “you have very well behaved dogs!”
Photos from the event:
** Kathy's Flickr set of the event (33 photos).
**Joe's (mini2nv2004) Shutterfly set of the event (28 photos).
**Stella's (VelocityGirl) Shutterfly set of the event (133 photos).
**James' (jaMEs) Shutterfly set of the event (18 photos).
Pookmail.com: Disposable email addresses
Pookmail.com is a free email service that offers you any email address you'd like (@pookmail.com) to send email to and keeps the inbox contents around for 24 hours. This is great for anyone who has created a website with email registrations and needed a batch of email addresses to test with. Of course, expect to see quite a bit of spam in the inbox, but who cares. What a great idea!