indiboi.com

I was hoping to hold out until after my monthly budget reset, which is only a week away, but I ran out of Flourish. At least there was a $5 off coupon for Drs. Foster & Smith.

I’m going to try to update about the aquariums a little more often, but things have been sort of in a holding pattern in that regard. All I’ve been doing lately, aside from water changes, is making sure the surface of the 75g isn’t completely covered with floating plants. Just that task is a bit of a burden lately, heh. I’ll probably find some motiviation in a week or two to do some clean out. I haven’t really wanted to because of it being so warm, I’d much rather sell the plants than throw them away. I’d also really rather the plants arrive healthy and not a green/black slime in a ziplock bag.

Having earned enough Amazon Rewards points to purchase a Topeak Turbo Morph I’ve been anxiously awaiting the delivery of my fancy new portable bike pump. I got it today and a little bit ago went outside to fasten it to the bike. I removed my old pump’s holder, attached the new one, and then much to my horror discovered that the new pump is just a wee bit too long to actually fit inside the frame. I recall measuring a long time ago to make sure the pump would fit, as the top tube is dramatically sloped on my 19″ frame Hardrock, but apparently didn’t compensate for the mount.

The side mount of my old (and craptacular) pump won’t work as it has two differently sized clips. The old pump does fit very nicely in the new mount though, heh.

I suppose I could use the provided zip ties to position the new mount sideways on the seat tube, but I’m not too thrilled with that proposition. I don’t really want to return the pump either, eventually I’ll get a road-oriented bike that’ll have the space for it. In the interim, if I take my backpack I could put it in there, or in a rack bag whenever I get one of those. Perhaps I just need to order a side mount for the Turbo Morph.

After further examination, even if I wanted to, the pump is too large to mount sideways at either bottle mount position, it interferes with the cranks. Using the zip ties won’t really work for the same reason.

I really wanted this pump to fit inside the frame, instead of alongside it. The Mini Morph would fit, but it lacks the gauge. It’s just one of those bummers and I’m not sure what to do about it.

On Sunday a situation arose that prompted an operating system restoration for the web server. Thankfully the technicians were available for immediate assistance and the restore was completed within about two hours of the request. It then took several more hours to restore all the websites. Monday was almost completely spent troubleshooting random difficulties, but thankfully by Tuesday things started to settle down. There are still a couple little things that need to be worked on, but they’re all fairly low priority. Most are things that I never, apparently, felt the need to backup, oops.

To make the situation a little worse, it had been oppressively warm up until the last couple of days, the very days that I was completely burdened with work. Hopefully this weekend I’ll be able to get out, do a bike ride, and relax a little.

About a month ago I received the letter from one of my credit card issuing banks that they were going to rate jack me and that there was nothing I could do about it; even if I rejected the terms they’d take effect. They also only provided about a week to before the new rate would take effect.

Interestingly enough the interest rate didn’t change on the next statement.

Today I received a post card reminding me that I could write to find out why they’d do such a thing, but additionally now gave me the option to call to request the letter of excuses. They also extended the deadline into the middle of next month. The best news of all though is that if I would reject the terms now I’d be able to keep my current terms.

The hilarious little post script on that card said “on a completely unrelated topic” and mentioned the Credit CARD Act, providing a link to more information. It’s hilarious because everything they had been doing thus far is in violation of the new law and the relevant portions (advanced notice and opt-out) conveniently just took effect this month. The CCARDA is related to every aspect of that little post card!

I called, of course, and closed the account to reject the terms. The representative asked me if I was aware of the benefits of card membership, I simply informed her that I was aware of the benefits of not paying 25% interest.

I have ~45GB of space left on my four drive RAID5. This makes me nervous. Funny though, since my first computer had a 200MB drive, oh how things change!

My array is four 250GB drives, originally having been three, but I grew it a bit more than a year ago. When I set the array up each of those drives cost more than a one terrabyte drive costs now, but it was 2005.

Upgrading my RAID is a nerve wracking sort of thing, you see, because purchasing four drives at once is a pretty huge expense, for me anyway, and that’s really the only way to do it right. It’ll also be nerve wracking in the regard to time consumption, as each of those four drives will need to be individually failed, replaced, and the array rebuilt between each drive replacement. Then the array will need to be grown! There’s also the issue of backing up should something heinous happen, which I didn’t do when I added the fourth drive. I’m not inclined to do it this next time either, simply because it’s even more added expense.

Of course, given the current spending “freeze” thanks to the need to zero out credit card balances, this sort of expenditure is going to have to wait quite a bit more time. I think I need to sort through the array and weed out things that have become deprecated and have no future utility.

Warning, the fullsize image is ~400KB.