I got a very nice present from my Grandfather this christmas, an old freezer compressor which I am going to use as my compressor at the apartment, as posted previously, the $100 campbell hausfeld is a bit noisy to use in the later hours or when you want peace and quiet. The current stage is a testing rig, which needs to be manually started and stopped using the plug, safety is maintained by a spring-loaded blow valve that the campbell hausfeld compressor came with, and the one issue with this compressor is that it needs to start at 0 psi, otherwise it won't turn over. For now I am using the spare port on the large set of gauges strapped to the side to allow me to vent the lines and start the compressor even with a partially filled air tank. Ideally I would need a one way valve to feed the tank, and some sort of bleed valve to vent the lines to the compressor whenever the compressor stops. Not sure how easy it is to come by such a device, would guess some sort of 110v solenoid valve which closes when power is applied and opens when it is shut off would work.



Current Music: My failing UPS's battery alarm.
Current Project: HVAC Technology

With work taking up most of my days now, the server upgrades have been going a little slower than they would have otherwise but I am now to the point of having shut down or disconnected serval and ocelot and moved everything over to bengal officially. Some things are still broken, including:
-my php in the main homepage doesn't work anymore
-dropbox and the rest of the fileserver stuff is still all over the place and not migrated fully
-not all the important stuff is on the RAID

Upgrades

However FC3 was very nice in that it recognized serval's old array right upon booting and synced up without any work on my part, just had to mount /dev/md1-4 in the fstab and I was back up and running, much faster and eaiser than expected. Also the new versions of spamassassin are very nice, only a couple days training and its already almost up to par with the old system and can get rid of spam as well as the best enterprise level stuff, and its free.

Thanks to getting the server case and power supply for xmas, the total cost of this server, including the boot drive (not the RAID drives, had those already) is only about $250, and would have been about $450 had I needed to buy the case myself. Add the cost of all the fancy softare, a total of $0 and you get a server for $450 that can handle anything myself, friends and family can throw at it.

I'm starting to really like working downtown when they send me there, thornes market beats the pants off any food court that I've ever seen, now I just need to get sprint to give me a decent deal on a treo 650 so I can get online from the T on the ride in.

Current Music: Magnatune Ambient
Current Project: Server

Well I managed to get a job already, and in a couple weeks it will hopefully turn from a contract to a full time job, so far the actual work that I've done is very similar to the tech support stuff I did with TechCavalry, however its all corporate (so no more showing up at trailer parks to fix a problem and get bitched out over our phone people not telling him about a $5/hour rate increase, or having to drive into the bowels of springfield and pray the customer isn't there so I can hop back in my car and flee for my life.

First day went well though I have to fix my sleep schedule, had a 10:00 appointment today which I was awake enough for but made the mistake of not taking a lunch break and heading back to the office...was very hungry and tired by the time I got home and dozed for almost 2 hours...have to be in downtown boston at 9am sharp tomorrow so I get to test out public transit at rush hour...probably park at riverside and take the D line in rather than catch the commuter rail way early to way too tight (you'd think the timings would be better considering most people start work at 9am) hopefully won't have too many downtown appointments, though it should make getting real food for lunch easier once I start getting paychecks that is.


Current Music: Magnatune Ambient
Current Project: Gainfully employed

Spent the entire daylight hours in the woods with my father and brothers helping out with some surveying, my Dad's current project is to verify the locations of the land boundary pins bordering our little swath of Massachusetts forest, which is rather rocky and covered in dense mountain laurel, rocks and other less than easy terrain to traverse. Took some GPS readings (more to be taken when I feel like walking the 2 mile or so boarder around the whole thing) so that we can plot where the land falls on a real topo map which should be fun. Searching for non-existant metal pins however was less than fun...searched for several hours and finally got the brush cleared enough to do a laser transit sighting and pinpoint where a pin should fall within a few inches and set a new pin. Next step for me is to take a good clean GPS reading of one of the pins and then take the survey map (just points and degrees off of compass headings) and translate locations of pins into Latitude and Longitude so that we can find the still missing pins without the survey equipment.

Also, the aforementioned compressor project is moving along, my grandfather who worked in the refrigeration business is sending me a working compressor and some various other parts so I can hopefully retrofit my little noisy compressor to be a slightly uglier but much quieter and higher performance one.


Current Music: The sounds of nature. And chainsaws.
Current Project: Ametueur Surveying Club

Finals are starting to wind down, just gave the second of two presentations, my 4k word paper is done and now I just have an exam. Hopefully can find a job soon, have one lead for a contract mac support position and another with a company that may or may not have openings for a programmer *crosses fingers* The prospect of a morning outbound commute for the mac support job is appealing though, nothing beats being able to not only dodge 95/128 traffic but to be on 90 in the morning going _out_ of the city.

Current Project: The crunchy goodness of finals.