random updates...
today as i was leaving my house i noticed that my neighbor's flower bed is SPRINGing to life! i wanted to take a pic, but i was running a little late, so i didn't. :/

been a while since i posted. i had this pile of pictures to post from two weekends ago when i was back in the laurel highlands, but the script-fu in the new version of gimp has different syntax and won't run my old thumbnailing script. so of course i'm faced yet again with the old dilemma: "should i write code to do this somewhat tedious task of thumbnailing 2 dozen pics at once, or should i do them all by hand?". almost always, i'd rather write code. this means that nothing has been accomplished yet. DOH

i'm heading back to the laurel highlands again this saturday to see the parents and my friend cortney and her family. cort's family throws a big easter party which involves lots of food, beer, wine, and playing a game called "buzz" in the corner of a cornfield with a keg at 2pm. i'll be practicing my "7" times tables. heh. i might forgo the drinking game and just drink and ride my bike around in the woods.

i'm rebuilding our main storage array at work now. we've been in fault tolerant mode for about 3 weeks now. we do have a complete hot mirror of the array, so i wasn't super worried, but because the array's warranty expired and the gateway/MPC transition, it took a little longer to get a replacement drive, and when it arrived it failed immediately during the rebuild attempt. i verified yesterday that it was likely a drive geometry mismatch and we now have the correct part number for a replacement drive. what i did today was take the original failed drive out of this windows machine that i used to re-initialize it and then plugged it back into the array. i was worried that the failed drive list would prevent it from being used, but once i marked the drive as a global spare, the rebuild started and has been going since. about 76% done now. i figure it will either work or fail right at the end, but if it works, i can worry a little less when i'm out of town.

i ran into a buddy of my boss's at the bar last night when i met some friends to celebrate a birthday and it looks like he might be able to get a winery started in lawrenceville by the end of the year if things go smoothly. he shared some cinnamon apple wine with us that was pretty awesome. as i got to talking with him, i discovered that he was the landlord of my friend jody who just moved back to town. i graduated from high school in central pa in 1995 with jody. small freakin world, i tell ya.

i finally asked my boss about getting a promotion. i kind of figured it would be a non-event. the response: "sounds about right." now i just have to write up a justification since nobody but me actually knows what i do around there. ;]

i worked a little more on the opensprints ncurses interface. nowhere near ready to start implementing the tcp sockets stuff to integrate it into the guts of the original GUI project, but i did add 'x', 'c', and 'r' buttons and got race reset functionality working. i also started soldering the wires to the keyboard controller instead of using temporary connections. the x, c, and r buttons are wired up and working. still have to get to home depot to get lumber to build a sturdier frame with a fork mount, but 200+ worth of checks i had to write for non-budgeted reasons this month mean i gotta wait til payday. booo!

the other day i went to the "the pornography of the bicycle" showing at shadow lounge. probably 2 dozen other people i knew were there too. the show was awesome even though i missed the first part. after the show, the producer of the video and his friends went to freeride to fix some bikes up that they had brought. i helped reverend phil figure out some stuff with his cassette spacers and pointed a few other people to tools and spare parts. i also brought some homebrew to share. hope to see revphil back in pittsburgh again, he seemed like a fun down to earth dude. he also was riding a 2 speed singlespeed, which is wonderfully contradictory. (a rear cassette with only two gears and spacers between them and a gear ratio selected that allows the same length chain to be used in both gear ratios without derailleurs, you just have to loosen the back wheel and move the chain when you want to "shift"). erok's all chrome bottechhia got some chrome fenders. it's officially blingin'.

looks like the weather next week is going to be sweet for the most part. can't wait to ride in it!

PS: SCREW YOU, WINTER!