shawn.pinet.name

After the most recent power outage at home, our home server isn't turning on.  I tried turning it on, and off again, and watched as it flashed cryptic dell codes across the 1-2-3-4 pannel on the front.

So I activated the "DR plan", and figured I could have a new share up in 5 minutes... And we recovered just fine.  All of the important stuff at least, while I find a new home for the drives.

I now have all my data, and a happy wife, who was looking for something for teaching tomorrow.

Hurray for backups!

I've had my fireplace going for quite a while this winter, and have added an extra fan to help improve the amount of heat getting into the rest of the house.  Hey who knows it might even improve my fireplaces EROEI as it's blowing on a part that didn't have the best heat transfer before.

However in some ways I always look forward to the first bill of the year, when the bill comes in for our propane.  Since I track our efficency of propane use vs. degree days (coming soon?), it gives you an idea how much heat I've been putting out in our fireplace downstairs.

The biggest problem with using a GTD system is that at least for the first while I find myself entering 200-300% more entries INTO the system than I'm crossing OFF the system.  And right now I'm not even breaking my tasks down fully...

At the end of last year, I had the blower go on my wood stove.  For whatever reason it would get up to temperature, you could hear the motor kick in, but it would just sit there.

Last night I managed to take it off, remove all the dust, clean it out and get the fan spinning again.  Another quick lubrication job, cleaned off the contacts and hooked it back up.  Fired up the stove and.... IT WORKS!

I almost feel like a handyman now.

From reference, the blower consumes 42W of power when it's running according to the sticker on the blower motor.

I think it might be time to leave Facebook finally.

I can understand being a young company that they're going to make a few mistakes, and I understand that I have a bias and tend to value my "data" a little more than most people.  But this one goes beyond a little far for me. 

Every time a user was uploading pictures, they would scan not only that user's photos, but those of other members to identify potential matches.  They enabled this without notifying people, and modified the default behaviour as to how our data is going to be used.

I love this time of year.  Even though most people found that the 32C that we hit today hot, I had a nice place to work outside in the shade.  Having somewhere nice to work meant it was easy to be productive, especially with no one else home.  32C in the shade with a breeze is actually nice to work in!

I've been dreaming of this kind of nice warm day with the opportunity to work outside for a while now.  It was doubly nice since I get to do it again tomorrow, and I got to avoid at least an hour of traffic.  I have to say outside at home was nicer.

Sorry for the small hiccup.  The pinet.name and a couple other websites were temporarily down while we had some problems with payment processing at our registrar.

The important thing is that all is back to "normal" now.

Expect a lot of updates to this site during the month of June.

I haven't been regularly on facebook in a LONG time.  There hasn't been anything significant to do there, and I'm happy that most of my friends still pick up a phone and call me if they want to do something.

That said, here's what I got when I finally logged into my account today:

Since I installed google analytics on my tikiwiki installation a while ago on the wiki, I've been using this to gather information as to what people are interested in, and how they're getting to my pages.  Last month I decided that I wanted to set a goal of increasing the amount of traffic that I saw coming in from search engines.

So after identifying a couple common themes, and as part of my goal to keep generating more content last month I took a couple tries at generating content that I figured would be search-engine relevant.

I find this password reset email funny, only because I would expect the email to be there within 30 min, not within 24 hours.  24 hours for an email seems fairly 1998.

From my websense password reset page:

Your temporary password should arrive in the next 24 hours. Use the temporary password the first time you sign in to mywebsense.com.