The Time Sink

Well, the rains just never came, at least to this area. The hill country may have had something significant, but all we've had here so far was "enough to wet, but not wash off". They're still calling for as much as a quarter inch before things clear sometime late Tuesday, so we do have some hope. ...and messy muddy sidewalks and cars.

Speaking of teasing, here's a concept for you: Network Attached Storage is moving past the 'appliance' stage and to the component level. In the past I've mentioned Snap Servers and a couple of other forms of NAS. ...and I've even bandied about the concept of using one of those old pen-based computers as a plain vanilla server and hanging a couple of USB HDDs off it. Hmmm... It seems Linksys has gone one better and tossed a very plain vanilla NAS device onto the market for the 'roll your own' crowd...

This little thing is small (read: just a few inches high) and runs a nice little embedded Linux. So, yeah, the nuts and bolts community has already dissected it and come up with all sorts of cool hacks, including the ability to interrupt the boot process and allow you to load in your own kernel off one of the attached USB HDDs.

I'm not taking things to that level just yet, but I am taking a look at exactly how I may want to reconfigure things here... I mean, hang a couple of HDD's off of one (hey, didn't I just mention that <g>? ) and maybe your file server just became a space heater. Hmmm... Oh, and the bit about Windows only? Shine it: the Mac OSX crowd and the Linux crowd are just using the built in web interface for admin...

Hey! We received some decent rain early Monday morning! ...and there is more scheduled in for this morning. Cool! The streets still aren't washed off from all the street work, so maybe today's will handle that (as much as an inch? Nah... Maybe?).

Lotsa' rain! ...and remember how I said the air has been all sorts of dirty? Well, here's a shot of the shallow end of the pool after the rain and after the pool sweep made a couple of passes through:

Good flippin' grief! Last Thursday we were in the nineties... One rain storm later and we're down to the sixties and the first fog of the season has hit:

It's been short shrift here all week here. The homework has been pretty heavy for the guys (which means more crosscheck and review work for Shelley and me) and work itself has been a bit full. That's left me looking to get to bed early and maybe read rather than work all that much here...

Rain is a maybe today, but it will totally depend on the weather pattern; they aren't calling this one at all (especially since the last one fooled them). Oh, and since it's likely fallen off the front page everywhere but here: all the hikers and all of the climbers were located and are off the mountains (the two climbers who died on day one were also recovered).

...and regardless of the weather, today is an 'inside day'; Brad has a book report due (read: some 3-D thing we'll have to contend with) and I'm overdue for tearing apart the workstation here and rerouting a bunch of wiring into more sensible hanks. I'll work on that in between assisting Shelley with Brad's stuff and likely be off line for portions of the day.

Hmmm... I think today is going to be "Saturday, Part II"... Shelley got tied up in preparing a meal for a family from church; and while I was able to get Brad started on his book report, most of my day was spent asleep...

Yeah, every so often I need a 'catchup day' and yesterday was it. Figuring a midnight bedtime, I spent something like fifteen hours either in bed or asleep on the couch...

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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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