Well I got up early this morning to head to Vegas and got to my BNA->DFW flight with plenty of time. The flight took off on time and was uneventful - I had an aisle seat and was able to snooze a little bit. I had a 3.5 hour layover scheduled in DFW before moving on to LAS. The flight was delayed for about 30 minutes while waiting on a crew, but we got boarded and I settled in to my seat - 25C. Then the announcement came - they were looking for a volunteer to give up their seat and in return they would get a confirmed seat on the next flight, lunch and a $300 voucher on American Airlines. Since my wife isn't arriving in Vegas until 9:30 tonight, it made sense to take advantage of the offer. I got up and walked back up to the gate where I was told that I wouldn't need lunch because I was getting a first class seat on the next flight. Yay! Of course, that was in theory.
I got to the gate for the next flight - scheduled for a 3:10 departure - and they were already oversold. The gate attendant showed some frustration at what the other gate agents had done for the earlier flight, but she said to wait and she'd see what she could do. It looked like I was getting screwed on this one as 3:00 came and nobody had volunteered their seat, but then they started checking on the seats that hadn't been claimed yet - one was for a woman in first class that got stuck with a later connecting flight. So, in the end I got a $300 voucher, first class on the next flight and still made it in time to get the rental car and checked into the hotel before my wife arrives.
Hopefully I can now take this voucher and turn it into a ticket to come back out here for DEFCON.

I had to go to Philadelphia last week for work. I packed on Tuesday night, checked the forecast, and saw a high of 55 F for Friday, so basically just a long sleeved shirt and I should be fine. I get up there on Wednesday afternoon and the weather is perfect. Over 70 F and I'm driving around Lancaster County with the windows down. Wow, I love this weather. Then the forecast changes. Now a Nor'easter is on the way in and there is supposed to be 4-7 inches of snow by Friday night. Well, that's ok, the class is supposed to finish early on Friday, so I can try to catch the 4 PM or 5:35 PM flight instead of the 8:10 I was originally booked on.

Friday morning I woke up, looked out the window and saw what I figured was rain. I turned on the TV and saw that schools were closing all across the area. Wait a second, don't Northerners make fun of us Southerners for closing schools? Crap, this must be pretty serious. I got checked out and started walking out to the car - eh, not too terribly cold for just having to walk 100' or so, and then I got out from under the canopy to discover a sheet of ice on the parking lot. Ugh. Well the next earliest direct flight home was at 7:35AM, so it won't do much good to head to the airport now. I make it in to class and the schedule is adjusted to allow most of us to leave at the lunch break around 11 AM, which I do. There are three wrecks on I-476 on the way to the airport - people apparently drove too fast on the ice, got into a spin and collided with a tree, or a wall, or another car. I dropped the car off and took the shuttle to the terminal. By the way, make sure you know if you're on US Air or US Air Express when you go to Philadelphia. They fly out of two separate terminals and oh, hey, they're not connected. You have to walk outside to get between them. Not so bad if the weather cooperates, but we've already established that it isn't doing so.

The line for ticketing is about 120 people deep when I get in it. I knew that since I needed to reschedule that I couldn't use the kiosks, half of which said "Out of Order" on them, anyway. It takes 2 hours to get up to the counter and I ask if there's any way I can get moved to the 4 PM flight and the agent happily prints out a boarding pass for me. Happy because I was clueless about the fact that nothing had taken off from PHL since 10 AM that morning. By the time I make it to the very end of the terminal where my gate is, they turn off the monitors. Ok, that's odd. Then I notice that all of the crews are coming out of their planes and walking towards the front of the airport. Uh oh. 10 minutes later they announce that all flights to and from PHL were cancelled for the rest of the day. I knew that it would be pointless to try to get in line to reschedule now, so I called the travel agent and had them secure a seat for me on the 7:35 AM flight for Saturday, then try to find me a hotel room. Oops, everything near the airport is sold out. There's a Hampton Inn 5 miles away that wants $300 for their last 4 rooms. I don't think so. Finally I get a room at the Hyatt downtown for $169 - if I can manage to get there. After 2.5 hours waiting in the taxi line, I manage to get a shared taxi that's going through South Philadelphia. There are two bright spots to this - first, I have a cab; second, we drove by Geno's. Even though I couldn't get out and grab a cheesesteak, it's always fun to drive by there.

I got up at 4:30 AM to check the weather and decide whether or not to go back in to the airport. The sleet stopped around midnight, so the interstate has been cleared off, at least. All other roads, though, are covered in icy slush. I got dressed and headed downstairs only to find that no taxis were coming by. Fortunately for me a private town car had been called for someone else at 5 AM, but then they called and canceled on the driver at 5:05, so he was sitting around fuming because of no fare for this hour. He cut me a break ($60 instead of the normal $100) on the fare and took me to the airport. At 5:30 I got in line for ticketing, about 60 people back. At 7:10 I got my ticket for the 7:35 flight and ran down the terminal to the gate. Once we got on the plane we couldn't get backed out, though! They tried the tractor, then the tractor with chains on the tires, and finally they had to chisel the ice away from the wheels to get us going. Never a good sign. Then we had to very slowly make our way across the ice covered tarmac to the deicing station. 3 hours later we were finally in the air and on the way back home.

PHL could have handled things a lot better than they did. US Airways could have handled things a lot better than they did. I left out a lot of crap that could have been avoided with better customer service - such as having one agent standing out by the lines to make sure that the kiosk users didn't jump in front of those that had waited for 2 hours - and there was a lot of that happening. The taxi line issue was just ridiculous. Anyway, I'm home and I'm leaving for Vegas on Thursday. I'm pretty sure I won't get iced in there, but even if I do, I'll be a lot happier about it.

Whew! Well it has been about 5 months so far, but as of this week I will be done with the IDCP Facilities Management course at Marist University. What the heck is that, you say? Well, it's pretty much the only certification offered in the industry of data center management. I already have a slew of other certifications that don't really relate to what I actually do. For instance, I've had my Novell CNE, my Microsoft MCSE, and have a still current Red Hat Certified Engineer certification. I'm also ITIL Service Management Foundations certified, which is a lifetime certification. Along the way I've had dozens of other product specific certifications that no longer mean anything to anybody. The IDCP Facilities Management certification has been an exercise in learning that a lot of what I have had to pick up "the hard way" doesn't really have a clean and simple solution lots of times. Only when you have the luxury of designing a brand new data center before the first check has been written can you make it somewhat easy, but that's just a relative statement. There's a lot involved with keeping all the facilities running that allow the computers to stay up all the time.

One of the luxuries that this will provide me is that I will no longer have to try to fit in quizzes, exams and discussion times during my small amount of down time. I've made it a goal for me to be ready to test for red belt in Tang Soo Do by the next testing period, which I believe is in April. That's pretty ambitious, but if I get back to going 3 times per week for the next 6 weeks I should be able to do it.

I ordered a Bo Staff and some protective gear for Tang Soo Do last week and every day since then I've been tracking the package. For days and days it continued to say, "On time for scheduled delivery on 01/25/2007," which was yesterday. Alas, it did not arrive. Now it says that it has been rescheduled for 01/29/2007. I guess it's being delayed due to all of the storms across the plains states (it's coming from AZ) but still, I want my toys!

Last night I went to class and my sparring pads had come in, which is good, because the instructor decided to do an entire class on sparring. I did learn some good new techniques that I'll be looking forward to using. I also managed to hurt myself, or at least help someone else to hurt me. I went to deliver a roundhouse kick at the same time as my opponent. I can still feel it in my left shin this morning. Ow!

When I lived in Atlanta (1995-1999) I had formed a lot of friendships through the internet - namely IRC. We hung out in EFNET on #atlanta or #atlantaga, depending on which channel had fallen to the latest skrypt kiddie exploits, as EFNET is so prone to doing. Anyway, I had a good friend who went by the name of Spastica, who ended up dating another friend of ours from the group, named CyberChrist. This week I received news that CyberChrist had died after a toxic reaction to wheat (Celiac Disease). I managed to find enough mutual acquaintances to get Spastica's phone number and gave her a call. It was good to talk to her, but I wish it was under better circumstances. To make the situation even harder, today would have been CyberChrist's birthday, so rather than cancelling the birthday party, they are continuing on but as a wake. A good old fashioned "Irish Style" wake (even though he wasn't Irish), where friend gather together and talk about the great times they had with the departed, have a few drinks, and celebrate the person that was. I wish that I could be there. The theme for the party is pirates, because CyberChrist always wanted to be a pirate. Though I only got to talk to him occasionally since I moved back to Nashville, I still have fond memories of the parties at his apartment, or his upstairs neighbors, out in Dunwoody. He was always hospitable and fun to be around.

Right before I got married I made one of my last big "bachelor purchases" of a 42" plasma television. It was pretty. Very pretty. For some reason I went against my regular routine and actually bought the extended warranty. Good thing, because 1 year and 10 months later, I started getting vertical lines in the display of various colors. I called up the warranty company and they told me that there wasn't a repair center for Middle TN, so I was entitled to a "comparable unit" or a full refund of the purchase price. Not being the child of a mother who raises fools, I took the full refund. Big screen tv's have come down in price significantly in the past 2 years, so with my refund I was able to get a 57" HDTV rear projection screen, an extended warranty, and even had enough left over to get a new lens for my wife's camera.

The warranty company had said that they would send someone out to get the TV. Six weeks went by and still no word from them, so I called them up. They then tell me that I can dispose of the TV however I see fit. Hrmmm. I wonder how hard it is to fix this thing? I called around to a couple of the authorized repair shops (closest one is 90 minutes away) and explain he problem. I'm told that the average cost for repair is $600-$800. Yikes, there goes my free "bonus tv". You can get a new no-name brand (just like this one was) 42" plasma for under $800.

A little Googling tells me that this is either a control board (blown transistor) or a faulty ribbon cable. I think I'll take the back off of it and see what I can come up with - I definitely can't screw it up any worse.

You know the best thing about cheap, yet wonderfully utilitarian parts? They're cheap and you get a lot of use out of them.

You know the worst thing about cheap, yet wonderfully utilitarian parts? They're cheap and you tend to forget the importance of remembering where you put them.

The MythTV box that I used to have downstairs in the living room used an RS232 IR blaster for the remote control interface. This was great, because I could use one remote control to handle the TV, DVD Player, and the MythTV box. I was using an old Comcast digital cable box remote, because it could control multiple devices and with the help of lirc and irw I was able to capture the codes for controlling a cable box and simply using those to control MythTV. Pretty much the same features as a DVR - up, down, right, left, chan+, chan-, vol+, vol-, menu and select.

Then it was time to upgrade. I upgraded my best MythTV box in the house with a shiny new AMD Athlon64 x2 dual core processor and moved the still-quite-nice Athlon 2800+ system down to the living room. The old living room machine was scavenged for parts and became my wife's new desktop - she finally let me upgrade her from that Dell PIII-750 that she'd been using. Anyway, as is the case with many manufacturers, MSI had assumed that nobody really used RS232 ports anymore, so they didn't put one in the MSI MEGA 180. Ouch. I moved my Firefly USB remote downstairs and figured that would be good enough.

Boy was I wrong. The Firefly is RF only, so there's no way to tell it how to turn off the television. WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor) of the MythTV box went steadily downhill. So then I started researching remote control interfaces so that I could try to get a replacement. USB IR receivers cost in the neighborhood of $35-$40, which I thought was just outrageous. Not only that, it wasn't so easy to find them. Then I found the DVICO Fusion MCE Remote for $19 with the USB IR Receiver - I thought I was golden at that point.

Oops.

Even though the DVICO Fusion MCE Remote has a "power" button, it's not programmable. Even though the remote uses IR, the receiver apparently doesn't talk to regular IR remotes. I fear that it may be using IRDA, which a regular remote simply won't do. *sigh*

Then I found a guy in Hong Kong selling USB->RS232 converters on eBay for $.99 each with $3.99 shipping. Ok, fine, I'll buy 4, especially since the retail outlets want $20-$30 each for the things. Finally the converter arrived yesterday and I got it recognized under Linux. All I have to do now is plug in the RS232 IR receiver and load the configuration file!

Now where did I put that cable...? Yep, in this quest to find a usable IR setup for the downstairs MythTV box I managed to lose the receiver. At this point I guess I'll go ahead and order two so that I can also have one for the upstairs PC, but yet again I'm having to wait for a new part. Ugh.

Everybody seems to be focusing on the Logitech Harmony remotes since they'll talk to pretty much everything, but I don't have $250 to spend on a remote (the top of the line) these days. Even the low end models still bring in $60 each on eBay. Just out of my price range.

Machine information
This machine's load average:

* 1 Minute: 0.4
* 5 Minutes: 0.33
* 15 Minutes: 0.52

Disk Usage:

* Directory: mediaroom:/myth/tv
o MythTV Drive #0
o Total Space: 439,418 MB
o Space Used: 88,749 MB
o Space Free: 350,669 MB
* Directory: rohan:/media2/myth/tv
o MythTV Drive #1
o Total Space: 190,743 MB
o Space Used: 99,523 MB
o Space Free: 91,220 MB
* Directory: rohan:/myth/tv
o MythTV Drive #2
o Total Space: 50,560 MB
o Space Used: 2,249 MB
o Space Free: 48,310 MB
* Directory: livingroom:/myth/tv
o MythTV Drive #3
o Total Space: 50,543 MB
o Space Used: 34,530 MB
o Space Free: 16,012 MB
* Total Disk Space:
o Total Space: 731,266 MB
o Space Used: 225,053 MB
o Space Free: 506,212 MB


-----

Saturday night I cursed up a storm as the 250GB drive I had in my mediaroom MythTV box went belly up. Then on Sunday I looked at the sale ads in the paper and saw that Best Buy had a 500 GB SATA-II drive for $149. Now once I get my 250GB drive replaced (it's still under warranty) I'll have 1 TB available for recordings!

One may ask why I would need that much space unless I was pirating movies. One look at the 500+ real DVDs in my office and the 'pirate' part of that question goes away. Anyway, simply put, my son loves Sesame Street, and therefore, we love Sesame Street. Soon that will grow to another show, and another, but for now it's a good thing to have. Right now I've got about 20 of his favorite episodes saved, but still, that's not that much space. However, take the number of hours in a weeknight that we're home - roughly 4. Now subtract out the time spent feeding him, cooking dinner, and feeding ourselves - we'll call that 1.5 hours. That gives us 2.5 hours left to watch tv - but wait, he's in the room with us and even if he's playing, as responsible parents (yeah, right) we can't put on that episode of CSI that was recorded the other night... So we watch Sesame Street until he's ready to go to bed.

Right now we're back in the thick of shows starting back up after the winter break, so I'm recording a lot more than I have time to watch. The shows that I really like (Heroes, Jericho, Las Vegas, etc) get recorded in HDTV, which is up to 8 GB per hour. SDTV is about 2 GB per hour. Yes, I know, I could have it automatically transcode to a more compact file, but that takes so much time to do.

So it all comes down to this - Sesame Street.

I made some corrections to some problems that I found while giving my presentation on Friday and have posted the file online here.

I have decided that we need more technical content during the Nashville 2600 Organization meetings - rather than just the social gathering and the logistical meetings for PhreakNIC. So, in putting my money where my mouth is, I'm starting off with the first one. This Friday I'll be giving a presentation on using digital certificates (PKI) in a practical manner. I'll show getting a CACert client certificate added into Thunderbird for email; generating a certificate signing request and getting it signed by CACert for apache; and finally setting up OpenVPN using a pfSense firewall. A lot of what I do should be pretty easily translated to other similar systems - for instance, Outlook can easily use the same certificate that Thunderbird does. Anyway, I look forward to giving the presentation on Friday.

In case you're not a regular, Nashville 2600 meets the first Friday of each month at JJ's Market, 1912 Broadway, Nashville, TN, beginning at 6 PM and usually last about an hour. The meetings are open to anyone that isn't disruptive.