Fearthepenguin.net

After some serious soul-searching and internal struggle, I returned the new TV, BR Player and Xbox 360 I had purchased. I’ve long been thinking that my life has too many needless complications in it, and could use some simplification. As a result I’ve decided I’m going to minimize the amount of time I waste doing unconstructive, mindless things. Too much of my life has been spent zoned out in front of the TV when there are certainly many more interesting things I could be doing. I will also be cancelling my cable and most likely selling my Tivo. I’ll get rid of the large entertainment hutch I have currently, and replace it with a smaller table containing only a stereo. This should also give me more room for bookshelves. I can’t quite give up the computer, since I do work with them as a career, but I’m also dropping down to a single desktop [plus my work laptop], and will be selling/trashing the rest of my unnecessary gear. I will be trying to use the computer as a tool instead of “something to do when I’m bored”.  I do still intend to do *some* gaming. Some of my friends don’t live nearby and gaming together online [usually coop] is one of the few ways I can ‘hang out’ with them. Plus there’s no way I’m going to be able to stop myself from playing Diablo III when it comes out. :) Still, it is my hope to avoid mindless web-surfing just as much as mindless channel surfing.

I have no doubt that there will be a period of adjustment [aka withdrawal], so I’ve decided to preemptively list some things I could do instead of watching TV.

• Read – I love reading of course.
• Family – I’d love to spend more time with the kiddo actually doing something instead of zoned out in front of the tube.
• Photography – I’ve got a nice camera and enjoy taking pictures. I enjoyed the Photography class [B&W Film] I took a couple years ago, and would like to continue improving my technique.
• Learn to play Guitar – I have 2 guitars and it’s high time I actually learned to play the damned things instead of mashing buttons on Guitar Hero.
• Learn to play Drums – This will probably come later, but it is something I’d like to do eventually.
• Learn to Program – Another thing I’ve been wanting to learn for many years, and never felt like I had to time to dedicate.
• School – I’m still [very] slowly working toward a degree
• Exercise – Yeah, it’s time to drop a few pounds, no? I can go work out, or ride my bike at the lovely park that’s across the street. At least when it stops being a billion degrees out!
• Write – While this rambling blog post may not serve as much of an example, I do have the ability to write fairly well and I’ve been told repeatedly that I should write. Perhaps I’ll actually participate in NaNoWriMo this year.
• Cook – More time spent cooking will probably help with the pounds vs eating fast food.
• Hang out – The few friends I actually have, I hardly ever see; even the ones that live nearby. I’d like to spend more time hanging out, and doing stuff with friends.

This is one of those “It’s funny cuz it’s true” things…

How people see me when I fix their computer

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Kiera made this as my Father’s Day card. The drawing depicts me helping her get to barbie.com on her computer. :)

Here  are some of the better shots from tonight’s eclipse. These aren’t touched up in any way, just exported to 1024 rez images from Picasa.

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So thanks to the fine work of Texas Department of Transportation, two of the wheels on the Acura were bent pretty badly, and a third wheel was bent a little bit.

Acura is a little too proud of their OEM wheels, so there was no way I could afford to buy three of them, and having the wheels straightened was more expensive than many custom wheels and could leave the wheel in a weakened state.

So, I spent a few days combing the net for deals on wheels. After much deliberation, a new set of pretty wheels has been put on the Acura. I was a little worried since it’s hard to tell what they will look like once you actually put them on the car. I’m happy to report though that they look better than I thought they would.

Check ’em out…

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These are the pics I’m considering sending in for the Scarborough Faire photo contest. Not all of them, but trying to decide which ones to send in. Most of these are from the Joust, mainly because the lighting was good and I was in a good location so they came out the best.

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As promised here’s some more shots of the snow storm from later in the day. Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to go out looking for actual “good” shots, this is just what I took standing in front of the house.

I missed opportunity for some awesome photos, for sure. But this will give you an idea of how much it was snowing. It was coming down like this for pretty much the entire day! Unheard of here…

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We broke about every record in the books for snowfall in Dallas. Here’s some teaser pics from early in the storm [4″ snow]. I’ll take some more pictures this afternoon of the final snowfall…

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I think this will only work in Solaris 10, but this should give a nice output of how many Physical CPUs, Physical Cores, and Threads [Virtual CPUs] are recognized by Solaris. This will work on Solaris 10 for SPARC or x86.

Note: I’m told that the script gives strange results when run in an LDOM. I don’t have any LDOMs to test with and I’m not really familiar with them. The script was meant to be run in the global zone. It does give proper results in an un-capped local zone.

The output looks like this:

**********
user@host:~$ ~/bin/cpucount.sh

In host.example.com there are:

1        Physical CPUs/Sockets
8        Physical Cores across all CPUs
8        Cores per Physical CPU
64        Total virtual CPUs recognized by the OS
8        Threads per Core (Virtual CPUs per Core)

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Ok, I couldn’t pass this one up. This is for all you high-school teachers out there!