Ugh. I’m sick again. A nasty flu is going around at work. Unfortunately I picked it up. Bummer!

I’m alive. I’m convalescing from a nasty flu that has had wiped me out for a little more than a week.

Sadly, my Linux box died around 8:30 AM this morning. It was my DHCP, DNS, LDAP, mail and file server. I had several Gb worth of music, photos, documents, email and source code stored on it. I was planning on replacing the box sometime this year. It looks like the timetable for the server replacement has been moved up. Hmph.

I’ve switched to an alternate network configuration here at home. I have to read my email without the benefit of my beloved Postfix+IMAP+Spamassassin configuration. So bear with me while I adjust.

Merry Christmas, y’all. I hope your 2007 is great.

I don’t often talk about work in this blog. Well, that’s because I like my job. I’d like to share a story about Engineering Day. Some time ago Lockheed Martin invented three teams from local junior high schools to tour our facilities and compete in an engineering contest. The contest was this: build something that will suspend ball bearing two inches off the table. Each team was given a budget with various items costing differing amounts. For example, paper clips might cost 10 points, a cup of sugar cost 2 points, string costs 5 points, etc. They were also given a limited time period for construction. I think it was an hour. They allowed to work with an engineer in advance on their design.

One of the teams built a box tower out of toothpicks and paper. This structure is the first thing that pops in my head when I think about suspending anything above a table. Ultimately, it didn’t hold up to the weight of the ball bearings. It tilted to the side and collapsed.

The second team was made up almost entirely of girls. We marveled at their plan. Since we did not specify that the ball bearings were to be two inches above the table, they decided to construct a sling made of string, tape and paper to suspend them two inches BELOW the tabletop. It is a shame that women tend to get steered away from engineering careers. The girls seemed to enjoy the competition and took pride in their solution. Unfortunately, gravity won out and the sling snapped under the weight of the ball bearings.

The winning team had the simplest solution. Since sugar was cheap, it was central to their design. They made a cylinder of paper and tape. Then they filled it with four inches of sugar. They completed their project in about ten minutes. The cylinder held the ball bearings easily. The cheapest and quickest design won in the end.

I would like to think the children learned that engineering involves the challenge of balancing time and budget while meeting project goals. It can be an exciting and rewarding career choice. Also, while creative solutions are often needed, managing complexity is important. I have seen professional engineers struggle with their solutions. After a review of their software, I often tell them to eliminate unnecessary complexity and redundancy.

My father passed away earlier this year. This summer my mother dropped off a PC that he used as part of his business. She asked me to take to a look on it for anything important. I’ve been avoiding taking a look at it. I wasn’t sure what kind of feelings looking at it would bring. Also, I’ve been dreading the holidays without him. But it is time to summon courage and deal with my emotions. Lately I’ve suffered with bouts of not sleeping well. But I’m going to be okay.

I bought an enclosure. This is a device to which you can connect an IDE hard drive. This one supports USB 2.0 so I can attach it to my computer by USB. I don’t need to open my case to install the drive. Well, I took a look at the drive. So far I haven’t found anything interesting. I did find evidence of a sneaky spyware program that had installed itself. Also, I saw that the drive was badly fragmented and could perform better after running a defragger on it. The Windows directory has about 1.1 Gb of data. That seems a little unusual for Windows NT. I’ll take a closer later.

A terrible ice storm hit my area last night. About 11 PM just after chatting with a friend I lost power to my house. This morning I’m still without power and consequently without heat. The power company predicts an extended outage with four to five days to get power fully restored to all customers. I’m writing this entry from work right now. I plan to stay with a friend tonight. Temperatures are expected to drop to 10 degrees overnight. I pray my water pipes don’t freeze and burst.

UPDATE (7:00 PM): Power is back on. My Linux box is now acting strangely. It failed to power up and then failed to initialize the network card. I finally coaxed it back to life. Yeah, Internet and email access is restored! Also, my pipes are fine.

It started last week. As I settling in for a fine night’s slumber I hear a sound. It was a chirp. Not a bird’s chirp but the unfriendly chirping that can only mean that the battery on a smoke detector needs to be replaced. I played a game of hopping from room to room to find the offenders. I needed a 9V battery! Sadly, I found none. I even checked the alarm clocks in my bedroom and the guest rooms. Their batteries, it appeared, had been salvaged long ago. Cranky and exhausted I settled for an unhappy night of restless sleep.

The next day I stopped by the Walmart and picked up eight 9V batteries. When I got home I replaced the battery. Then I heard it again. How can a chirp annoy me so much? I replaced another battery. Satisfied, I returned the ladder back to the garage. About a half-hour later my ears were once again greeted with another chirp. At that moment I decided to replace all of the batteries in all of the smoke detectors. That is when I discovered I had nine detectors and eight batteries. Fortunately, the chirping went away when I replaced eight batteries.

On Sunday the last smoke detector decided to start chirping. No problem I thought. I replaced that last battery. Peace returned. The world was sunshine and roses once again.

Last night I was watching TV after a long work day when my friend the chirp returned to greet me. What?! I had replaced every single battery in every single detector. Or, so I had thought. In frustration I raced out to buy eight more batteries (backups are good). To my surprise I found there was a smoke detector in my furnace room. I had no idea! I have no less than ten smoke detectors in my house. Their batteries went down around the same time.

I felt great this morning after a comfortable night’s sleep. What a difference undisturbed sleep makes.