Dave Easterly’s Bravo Sierra Blog

Why to buy a GOOD hard drive rather than a cheap one:

From the folks at Intel: enterprise_class_versus_desktop_class_hard_drives_.pdf.

Bottom line – If your business data isn’t important, go ahead and get that $99 terabyte drive. If it matters, be ready to spend quite a bit more.
You get what you paid for. There are good reasons why a Land Cruiser costs more than a Yaris, even though they’re both Toyotas. Why don’t people get that when it comes to hard drives?

Stephen Hartgen: Is he Idaho’s “new” Larry Craig?

It certainly looks that way… Larry Craig was a huge embarrassment to the Idaho GOP, and as a freshman legislator Hartgen has already ignited nationwide disgust and outrage, but both of these are probably outweighed by outright mockery at how clueless Hartgen (and by association, the Idaho Republican Party) really is.

People that know me know that I’ve considered myself a Republican my entire life until I got acquainted with the Twin Falls County GOP. If they are what it means to be a Republican, then I know I’m certainly NOT one. I guess non-theistic conservative libertarianism just doesn’t have a place in their little clique as far as they’re concerned, and that’s fine with me because the majority of them are people I wouldn’t want to sit down with at the same table anyway. But among ALL of them, I must admit that Hartgen was always the one who epitomized all the wretched and disgusting traits that I found morally and personally reprehensible – even worse than Grant Loebs, and that’s saying a lot.

It seems that when videos of the Twin Falls County GOP convention found their way to YouTube and some anonymous commenter made some very immature and inappropriate comments it hurt Hartgen’s little feelings. What shocked me about the whole thing was how, aside from a few choice expletives, the comment really reminded me of the kinds of things that I had always heard coming out of Hartgen’s mouth about the Ron Paul paleoconservatives that were getting involved with the local party. But I suppose that Hartgen, being the sort of fellow that he is, felt that he should be entitled to protection from having his delicate sensibilities offended. In all honesty, I think _THAT_ is where this whole thing started, but that’s only my speculation based on what I’ve seen and heard from this tax-leeching big-government neoconservative Jacobin New Englander during the time that I was attending the Twin Falls County GOP meetings.

So is he Idaho’s new national embarassment a la Larry “Wide Stance” Craig? Well, it took Craig YEARS in office to become a laughing stock and Hartgen managed to do it in much shorter order. And Craig could actually show some integrity and still come clean and admit his lifestyle, renounce all his past anti-gay rhetoric and voting records, and reclaim some credibility as a human being. I think it’s already too late for Hartgen because he can’t gain any credibility if he were to renounce his own love of big, invasive government, authoritarianism, and all the other traits that make Hartgen one of the most disappointing examples ever of what we send to our Capitol to “represent” us. It would be too little, too late and there’s pretty much no way it could ever seem genuine.

(BTW, I know this is old news [from December] but it had been sticking in my craw and I finally had to just get it off my chest.)

The Passing of a Legend and a Hero

Patrick McGoohan – the man who defied authoritarianism and stood steadfastly for the importance of the individual in the classic TV Series “The Prisoner” – is dead. McGoohan was 80 years old and leaves behind his wife of 57 years, 3 daughters, several grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

And, just like his character in “The Prisoner,” he always refused to be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered. He was a free man. And he will be sorely missed.

See this documentary for more details:

Another reason to like Ron Paul…

Apache/2.0.52 (Red Hat) Server at www.ronpaul2008.com

Linux and Apache for “teh w1n” @ RonPaul2008.com

Ron Paul Websites Blocked By So-Called “Smartfilter” Censorware

As most people who are occasional readers of this humble little blog of mine know, I work for a certain computer company who shall remain nameless. Well, their IT department uses censorware that goes by the name of “SmartFilter” to police employees’ internet use. This is something they have every right to do since it is THEIR equipment, their bandwidth, etc.. Yet “SmartFilter” is being used to censor free speech and political expression. In particular, they’re blocking certain Ron Paul websites. Among the victims of “SmartFilter” stupidity:

http://www.dailypaul.com

http://www.ronpaulnation.com

http://www.ronpaullibrary.org

Not blocked are sites like “ElectRomneyIn2008.com,” “RudyRoots.org,” “GrassRootsObama.com” and many others. If this so-called “SmartFilter” is going to block grassroots campaign sites then it needs to categorize them ALL or the same way or stop blocking ANY of them.

After a call to Secure Computing I spoke to a very nice lady named Sandra. She gave me the number to tech support. After a lot of runaround, Craig in Tech Support answered and was also very helpful and professional. He did say that some sites do get incorrectly categorized and that they have a team of folks to help with that. There is a category for politics, a category that most employers probably wouldn’t block. However these sites were all categorized as “Spam Email URLs,” a category I cannot IMAGINE an employer _not_ blocking. I have emailed the list of sites that I have thusfar found that are miscategorized to their people. I have no reason to believe this was malicious censorship yet, and we will see what happens once I get a reply back from the people at Secure Computing.

If Rudy Giuliani Were a Program in BASIC…


10 PRINT "9/11!"
20 GOTO 10


This has to be the coolest musical geek toy ever…

http://www.hauntedfrog.com/gt/movies/2007/duckon/SingingTeslaShow.html

And THIS is why _my_ ISP r0x0rz…

Two hours of _intermittent_ connectivity problems from about 3:00AM to around 5:00AM and Solution Pro sends out an email like this:

Valued SolutionPro Customer,

At approximately 3:09AM last night we started experiencing “random” connectivity issues. The root cause was the result of maintenance being performed by one of our upstream Internet providers. Our BGP session with this provider did not reset during the timeframe, but at the same time configurations by the upstream provider resulted in “black holing” our route announcements. The time taken to troubleshoot this problem was made difficult because were not aware that the upstream provider had maintenance plans. The connectivity issues lasted until approximately 5:03AM.

We have done two things to ensure this will not happen again. First, we have reviewed and confirmed the notification procedures with the upstream provider. Second, we will begin monitoring services on the upstream’s network that will alert us to this type of problem in the future.

We apologize for any inconvenience this incident caused. Please contact us if you have any questions or need further clarification.

If you have any questions or comments please email us at support@solutionpro.com

Thank You,

Customer Support
SolutionPro, Inc.
1450 S. Eagle Flight Way
Boise, ID 83709
(208) 947-5972
(800) 336-8892
email: support@solutionpro.com

And people wonder why I would sooner go swimming in a pool full of rubbing alcohol and razor blades than EVER give those douche nozzles at Cable One another dime…

Eat my nutz, Cable One.

Updated Stuff

Well, I finally updated my drum kit configuration to reflect some new gear I got and some I gave away to Lael being removed. Next time I set it all up, I’ll take a new photo or two. The updated config is at http://www.mvlinux.net/gallery/Drums/updated_drum_kit?full=1 if anyone wants to see. In other news, I added a new 250GB hard drive to my MythTV rig. Thanks to the wonderful magic of Linux’s LVM2 logical volume manager, I was able to migrate all my videos and stuff onto a volume on the new drive, then convert the old /video partition to an LVM partition, join the two physical volumes into a single logical volume, and then through the magic of /usr/sbin/xfs_growfs I now have 453GB of disk for videos, TV, music, and such.

[mythtv@localhost ~]$ df -h

[mythtv@localhost ~]$

I guess that’s all for now… Except for one excellent quote I found:

Silence can be the biggest lie of all. We have a responsibility to speak
up; and whenever the occasion calls for it, we have a responsibility to
raise bloody hell.
– Herbert Block

The Old Web Server LIVES!

Data has been recovered and the server has been fully restored.  FINALLY! 

 It’s nice to be back home with Carrie and Kash, the menagerie (2 dogs, 2 birds, and a cat), and all my friends but I REALLY, REALLY miss Canada.  I had this whole huge political rant that I was ready to write that was the product of a conversation I had with some dear friends in Ottawa about money and what it does to people but I’m just too damned tired.  Maybe later.  I’m going to bed.