Another 15 minutes

I’ve been watching the new Knight Rider series for the first few episodes now, and I’m abit sad to say that I think they screwed it up abit. The original series from the 1980′s with David Hasselhoff is in many aspects better than the new one, even though the new series ofcourse comes with better special effects, better acting skills and better stories. But one thing that keeps bugging me is the fact that the new K.I.T.T. (the car) can tranform between many different vehicles (it’s supposed to be made out of nano-technology materials that can change shapes to objects of the same mass). Remember the show “Viper”? It was a simular show with a car that could change between the two models of Viper, it stunk. This is simular, but this car can change into several models of the Mustang, a truck, a van and police cars etc, it’s just too much. I think they’d been better off just having the cool intelligent Mustang with its gadgets and maybe only some things changing on it, not the entire car. This is more like Transformers and not Knight Rider, but I’ll probably still be watching it. What do you think? I hate the hood scoop it has in “attack mode”.

Saw “Righteous kill” today with Robert De Niro and Al Pacino today. It’s a good movie, but nothing special really. I’m pretty tired of movies starring both of these actors believing it will be even better than just having one of them, I don’t really care for neither one of them actually they both bug me somehow with how they act, always with the same personality. Atleast the movie has a kind of twist that I like so it turned out as a well spent couple of hours after all.

Today we pulled the boat out of the water on a trailer and to the shipyard. I borrowed my fathers car, a 4-wheel drive, so it was no problem at all to pull it up. It was a beautiful day, abit windy but after a while we managed to get the boat somewhat straight. We had to wait for a while before we were let in to get the trailer, and the wait even longer to pull the boat inside, since they didn’t want any cars in the way of the tractors pulling the bigger boats (and some small ones that could’ve been pulled by hand). When it was in its place on the shipyard we noticed that it’s abit back heavy, so we have to get some better struts to put under it. Finally, after a long day, we tied down the waterproof canvas over the boat and decided to call it a day and leave the cleaning to another day. I forgot to take pictures…

I just got my Synology DS207+ diskstation from Dustin Home to use as backup for my fileserver and also faster access when streaming video content and recording with my Dreambox digital TV receiver. I did some basic setup with a 2Tb RAID0 volume (2 disks) and ran a quick backup of the most important files from one of the servers in case the UPS fails on me again before I get the new battery.

The Synology diskstations are pretty clever devices with a nice AJAX web interface, Linux based. You can use it as a media server, you can install 3rd party components, download files directly to the device with BitTorrent, use it as a webserver, backup server, integration to Active Directory and much more. I will explore more what the possibilities are when everything else is OK in my systems.

UPS update: I have now disconnected the batteries again, since two of them overheat pretty quickly. I will have to check ETA of my new batteries tomorrow, I hope it doesn’t decide to shut down again.

When I got home from work I was expecting the network to be down, like described in my previous post today. But to my horror the entire rack was dead. The UPS had shutdown completely, I had to reconnect my bad batteries for it to start again. I contacted APC to check if this is normal behaviour when no batteries are connected for a longer period of time. The servers are now checking data integrity on the disks but I expect everything to be running again soon. I don’t like this situation with the UPS though, I sure hope APC will come through for me on this one.

Argh!

As I previously posted my UPS at home failed this past weekend so I had to disconnect the batteries and wait for the new ones to arrive. Guess what, today my systems stopped responding in the middle of the day. I feared there was a power failure, the first unplanned one for two years, and it comes now? I can’t believe my luck with these kind of things, one thing after another the last few weeks, both at work and at home, this got to stop! If it had been a power failure I’d very worried that the RAID on my server would be fucked up and all data lost. Since the external backup station I just bought to backup some of the most important files from the server has just arrived today at the post office there would be a good chance that fate yet again would play a dirty trick on me.

I called around abit to the power and phone company from my work, hoping to get a clear picture of what I could expect when I got home, and it seemed like it was not a power failure, but only a network issue. That’s better news atleast. My ISP said they had no connection to my equipment when I called but there were no big incidents reported in my area, atleast not yet, but they will continue to search for any errors. I also discovered that my phone was not working, so clearly there are some things going on. I hope they will take care of it soon, right now I’m just so glad it wasn’t the power, phew!

We’ll see when my network is up and running again…

I tried the PC game “Hell’s Kitchen” today, just because. It’s like a small restaurant simulation game where you have to place ingridients in the right order to complete all dishes at the same time or else Gorgon Ramsay will shout “donkey” at you. It was pretty fun the first hour, but quickly becomes pretty boring since the only thing that changes is the amount of ingridients available, they could have made it more advanced and more focused on actually cooking the food right in detail, and less of just a speed point-and-click game.

Anyway, this game can keep you busy if you need to kill a few minutes or so. “Fuck me…”