Class had been going OK - we took our second test, the first hard one, and I did fairly poorly. However, we've started scheduling additional speaking hours which should help me with my speaking, listening, and vocabulary retention - all things I need help with. I'm also spending more time in the computer lab, which should make it easier to use things like rapidrote and read bbc arabic.

Dating hasn't been going very much - I went out a few times with a girl from my class, but decided the age difference really wasn't going to fly right now. I've been keeping fairly current on movies, in fact I saw Ironman again last night, along with The Hulk. Last weekend I saw The Fall, and it was full of win.

Gas prices out here are retarded, and it'll soon be breaking $80 for me to fill a tank, if it isn't already.

Class break should be from October 13-17, so I might be going back to TX for it :)

From there I'll have until about Sunday to get back to California, so shoot me comments if you're going to be around H-town/BCS/wherever and want me to come by and say hi :)

Friday morning, our hardy group of 25 or so did landscaping duty. Not a big deal, the weather was close to perfect and the work needed to be done. I also managed to snag the lawn mower with a working self-propel drive.

We broke for lunch, and were told to come back in woodland trousers and our sweatshirts. Kinda odd, but several of us figured it was probably for painting. And then, when we got back, we were told to hydrate. And then told to go grab flak vests and rubber rifles.

Well crap, it looked like we were going on a run. And then an officer came out. And then a sergeant explained that we were doing fireman team carries a quarter mile up a hill to where the running track is here. Well, that sucked (I insisted on not being carried, being heavier than the other guys in my team. So myself and the 150lb guy traded off carrying the 140lb guy). After we got to the track, we ran around and did pull-ups, flutter kicks, bicycles, and jumping jacks. Then we did prone buddy drags across the soccer field. And then we did this godforsaken excersise known as a barracks crawl (I can't find a description online - basically, 25 people form an arch on their hands and feet, side by side. The person at one end crawls through and continues the line) back across the field. Then we did squad fireman carry races up an even steeper hill, then squad pull-ups (100 pull-ups done by a 12 man squad, in this case).

Yeah. So never come to the attention of those in power, it's just painful.

I do have regular interweb access again, but until I suck it up and buy a laptop, probably no gaming.

Tuesday I should be heading up to Monterey for 581 days. I'll write more later :) Leave comments with laptop suggestions...

Regarding pictures of my high speed low drag hairdo: that'll probably have to wait until I get to Monterey. Yes, I could take pictures right now, but honestly I can't be bothered. Too much other stuff to do on my precious liberty time.

EDIT: Here, I put a pic up

I found out that I did get Arabic as my language, and I'll get my orders March 10. I don't know when the next Arabic cycle starts at DLI, so I don't know if it'll be possible for me to take any leave to bring my truck up to Monterey. I really hope I'll get some time, as I have dick for civilian clothes handy. I do plan on linking up with Baby Phil, so he can introduce me to hot Air Force womens.

My new cell number is 979-595-8462 (oh shit phone number on the interwebs - PS, I'm a hot girl too). Stop calling my old number, it's pissing off the guy who replaced me.

Boot camp was interesting (sometimes), fun (sometimes), and a huge challenge (very often. Occasionally the challenge was to keep from laughing).

I'm not sure if I'll ever write down all of the stories I have from boot camp, but I do have fun telling them. I go to MCT (combat training) on February 22nd, for 17 days. Then I head to Monterey, CA for language training. I should have occasional cell access at MCT, and full intertron access at MOS school.

Ooh Rah

Jeff

I'll be back in a little over three months.

I finally got Caller ID working completely with our Asterisk setup here at work. The key seems to be that TAMU is sending the CID spill for off-campus numbers (numbers not inside the TAMU exchanges) late, possibly after the second ring. I hacked the Asterisk Zaptel driver to retry processing if it wasn't able to get useful data from the CID spill, on the assumption that good data is around the corner. I didn't put in any limitations on the goto I used, so the patch definitely isn't something that should be in production (alas, it is in our case). I sent an email to Digium, to see if they will be willing to patch in support for late spills.

I also just got off the phone with USAA, changing my insurance to storage after I leave, and changing the location to my dad's lake house in Livingston. This past weekend I got a 5'×10' storage unit and loaded a few boxes worth of books, I'll probably try to bring another load by this weekend.

I also just finished the His Dark Materials trilogy, and I absolutely loved it. I think Pullman actually accomplishes more with his series than C.S. Lewis managed in the Narnia Chronicles. The characters are more three dimensional, the writing is more clever, and the ending is actually sadder. The books are wicked-fast reads, and I don't think I'd hesitate to recommend them to anyone who's a fan of fantasy adventure.

I'm doing really well. I mean, I never thought of myself as unfit previously, but I did notice that I didn't have an easy time doing physical activities. While I enjoyed hiking, I was also often miserable during it. My breathing rate was high while diving (too high to be a good cave diver). And then, of course, I got weighed at 197lb while getting a flight physical.

The past few months have made a huge difference. I can do 15 pull-ups (I should hit 20 by the time I leave). I can run 1.5 miles in 12:30, in the Texas heat and humidity. I can do 110 crunches in 2 minutes. And my weight is down below 175 (below 170 without clothes, probably).

The biggest single thing that's made this possible is quitting WoW. It's made finding an hour during the day to hit the gym pretty easy to do, generally.

I think I'm mostly posting this as a reminder to myself, about how much better I feel when I'm exercising regularly, and how much fitter I am than I have ever been (even as a kid). I'm sure boot camp will be an even more intense physical conditioning, but I've put in enough prep work that I'm not afraid of it :)

My biggest problem with my particular recruiter is that he simply does not keep in communication very well. He's actually the recruiter for Brenham, Texas, as well as working here in College Station. This means that he's frequently out of the local office. He tends to not return phone calls, and doesn't remember to notify me about local recruit functions.

I mention that because he called me Tuesday, and when I was a bit wishy washy about shipping on the 24th, he told me to sleep on it and he'd talk to me Wednesday. I went by the local office Wednesday morning, and found out he wasn't expected in, and his boss was not around either. I left a message with another recruiter, but also SMSed my recruiter asking him to call me when he got a chance. Which he never did. So I dropped by today after lunch and talked to his boss, who explained that the bonus wouldn't hold until the 24th, and hence to the point of this blag entry: it is extremely unlikely I'll be shipping early at all, at this point. Which is not a bad thing, really.

The OTHER thing my recruiter's boss mentioned is that there is a recruit event on Saturday at 8am. Of course, my recruiter had utterly failed to mention it to me. Just for the record, I don't think my recruiter is bad. He just has real communication issues.

I also don't watch music videos much, not having TV and all. So I just happened across http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Az6bVkGQJc, which is the video for Title and Registration, a song that amusingly mixes a gripe about how "glove compartments" aren't for gloves, with the story of losing a girl. Yeah, I know, pretty typically emo crap. Anyway, the video exceeded all expectations of oddness. I can only assume the director was looking to outweird Soundgarden's Blackhole Sun video.

Teague machine room tops 140F.

Clariion drive array fails, comes back up after a manual power cycle.

ACNC drive arrays do not visibly fail, but running scrub jobs on our ZFS pools reveals corruption and disk problems.

Then we discover we do not actually have enough spare drives on the shelf to replace all of those eaten by the heat.

And ZFS decides to hang on the command to add new hot spares to various pools.

It's been, seriously, ridiculous and a tad frightening. That's a lot of data to have to restore from backups, so the pressure is on to get these pools out of degraded states.

Around 5:45 this morning we lost power to the machine room and any systems that didn't have a backup UPS went down.

* As of 2007/08/29 09:36: The power and air-conditioning failure in the CIS Data Center on Sunday 8/23 was the result of multiple campus power outages and a failure in the software that monitors environmental conditions in the computer room.

At around 10 pm Saturday a feeder supplying electrical power to the building blew out and caused a dirty power failure. The UPS picked it up and switched to the backup generator. After about 12 minutes the power was restored and the UPS switched back to utility power.
This was only one of three major feeder failures that occurred Saturday night

The power surge generated by the feeder problem caused a fault in the chillers that supply utility chilled water to the Computing Services Center building. When that happened CIS was automatically switched over to backup chillers. Unfortunately, due to a malfunctioning valve, they shut down sometime early Sunday morning.

The building management system is monitored by the Operations Center staff 24 hours a day via the internet using a software product called APOGEE. This software is administered by the Physical Plant.s energy management group and the OC has access to it via the internet.
Network hubs were down in many locations all over campus as a result of the multiple power outages and the alarms that would normally have been generated by the APOGEE system were not available.

The software that is used to monitor the power and air-conditioning equipment in the Data Center is a product purchased from Liebert called SiteScan. It failed as well and as a result the OC staff did not receive any notification that the Data Center was overheating until nearly 5AM when one of the vendors automated call home features sent out a notification that it had reached a temperature in excess of 100 degrees.

Soon after that the mechanical room where the UPS is located overheated to the point that the UPS shut down and went into by-pass mode. An attempt to put the UPS back online resulted in a total black out of the whole facility.

There are some obvious improvements that need to be made to assure that the OC is not depending on the Internet to monitor the machine room environment and we have already taken steps to correct that.

Anyone needing more information about this outage may contact John Rauser at 979-845-8461. This is also the number to call to register a complaint or offer helpful suggestions.