This is an update on the progress of my lego case. I am now out of legos and will have to buy more before I can continue work. I’ve made the front pannel into one solid wall so that I can remove it easily to access the hard drives.
I started building a Lego computer case today. So far it has a capacity for 9 hard drives and a much higher capacity is planned. I built until I ran out of pieces, which as you can see wasn’t all that many. The next time I see Legos at a yard sale I’ll be sure to buy some, but until then I think I’m done building for a while. More pics after the jump.
What are the odds of the following: My friend and I doing major upgrades to my home network and then 30 minutes later Cox upgrading their systems to support higher speeds and killing my connection. The total downtime for my website amounts to 3 hours.
Seriously, this happened.
When I was frantically running around my house at 1am trying to get the website back online I eventually wound up disconnecting everything and connecting my laptop directly to the cable modem. I was able to connect. I thought that was odd and so I decided to run a speed test. The results: 30mbs download and 2.5 mbs upload. The download speed was almost as high as a DS3. That’s insane. After two hours of troubleshooting the internet connection once again cooperated with my LAN and business as usual resumed. (so much for getting my normal amount of sleep).
What I figured happened is that Cox rolled out updates to their infrastructure once again without so much as a warning email. This is the second time this has happened to me. The upgrades aren’t the issue, it’s the fact that they don’t tell anyone that irritates me. My connections speeds (after I burn out the ‘power boost’) is a very healthy 10mbs down and 2 mbs down (aka exactly what I am paying for).
I’m now going to call it a night and let my body rest so I can wake up sometime tomorrow (morning?).
I’ve upgraded the main switch in my server closet to the Cisco 48 port that I had laying around (I’ll finally get some use out of it now). I wanted to use VLANs so that I could have both internet facing and local networks separate if I wanted to, as well as possible VLANs for wireless network traffic. The website was down for about 3 minutes while I made the switch. This is actually one of the smoothest upgrades I’ve had in a long time. I setup all of the settings on the Cisco switch while I was at my desktop, shutdown the switch, carried it to my server closet, powered of the old one, slid it out and then slid the Cisco in. After plugging all of the cables in I was back in business. I’ll post a video of my current network if I get around to it.
A little behind the curve, I know, I have just finished watching Super Size Me. While it is an extreme an example of bad dieting I do think that there are many lessons that can be learned from it. I will hopefully never eat at another McDonalds again. If you haven’t seen it yet I highly reccomend watching it.
After my usual rumaging around Digg I somehow came accross a link to Steve Pavilina’s website. More specifically, an article about getting the proper amount of sleep in order to be the most productive. I’ve read some articles on his site about polyphasic sleep and I figured that either this guy knows what he is talking about or is really good at making stuff up. Either way, it can’t hurt to try something as simple as waking up at the same time every day, no matter how much sleep you actually get. His idea is that your body will automatically adjust to how much sleep it is getting and therefore make you tired at the appropriate times. I’m going to give that a try by waking up at 8am even though i don’t need to be awake until 9:30am. I’ll see how this goes.
The weather was nice outside this morning so I decided that I would ride my bike to campus for the first time. I left a full hour earlier than I would have if I were taking my car, just to make sure that I wasn’t late. The trip went surprisingly well: My average speed was 16.3 MPH. There was surprisingly low traffic volume on the road which made for a safer feeling ride. From the time I left my front door to get my bike to the time I sat down outside of my class room (I arrived early) it took about 45 minutes. Five minutes of that was pulling my bike out of the shed in my bike yard. Taking a car the same route results in a 37 minute commute from start to finish. It only took seven extra minutes on a 6.3 mile commute! Read more…