I've spent the better part of the last few weeks rebuilding my file server's raid volumes. I finelly get to the point of being complete and the box starts locking up solidly. I track it down some sort of race condition/conflict or something that occurs at a particular place on the volume. So I pull the 4 disks out and run the manufacturers diagnostic tool on them all, and of course there's nothing wrong, so I check the smart info logged on the disks themselves, and of the 4, one of them has relocated data twice, and it had locked the box solidly twice. Coincidence, I think not. Though zero filling the disk didn't trigger the fault on that disk so maybe it's not that disk. Rebuilding the array from the ground up at first seemed to be ok, so I proceeded to fill the volume to make sure, and low and behold it locks up 440GB used on it. I will not blame XFS for this because the other identical 4 disk volume in the machine, which was built first was and still is completely fine. Next up I'll rebuild the array with 3 disks present and see if the problem is gone, and if so I'll again be forced to replace a disk I can't claim under warranty (because their application says it's fine).

I went back over my old draft post file and thought I'd dredge up some gems. Like How to dress Emo, or the ongoing Hacks at MIT and the competition from Caltech. If you're bored at work there's always Uncyclopedia (or if that's too much fun, Wikipedia) which is my new Everything2.

In one of my depressive states lately I found myself reading wikipedia's article about Third Culture Kid's. Even if the classic description doesn't quite fit me, I think I am a third culture kid. I find I don't really fit in where ever I go, I'm different.

Also, in the latter part of last year I proved domestic air travel in Australia doesn't require ID. As long as you have a frequent flyer card that is. Though there is some luck involved, sometimes you still get asked for ID, but not as often as you would think !

We've been going to Sizzler way too much lately, but on the plus side, the staff haven't recognised us yet, or so we think.

I finally finished Untold Legends on my PSP, granted I wasn't playing it really regularly but it did take months. I had quests to complete in it after the epilogue which caught me by surprise. I've borrowed Grand Theft Auto for it currently.

Now Zoidbergs the popular one!

Again I'm having second thoughts about life itself. 2005 was a tough year for me mentally and with any luck 2006 will be better. I still haven't moved house, despite disliking where I live, I still work where I was a year ago, despite not enjoying the work I do. I feel like I need a change, but I don't want to leave anyone out in the cold. I didn't go offshore at all in 2005, even though I enjoyed it so much on the 2 short occasions I had in 2004. Not that there wasn't an opportunity to do so, but I would have missed the December Reload AND a Floorball match. 2005 was the year of Floorball for me, I went from just trying out this new indoor sport, to buying my own stick and playing solidly every week. If you're ever bored in Perth on a Monday night, come on down to Revolution Sports and watch some of the action.

As I write this there's less than a week until yet another lan, and again, this time despite having a PC that can play games, I still won't be able to partake in gaming action. Yes the shuttle is still having hot flushes and I'm royally pissed off about it. I'm on the verge of buying a new motherboard and selling the sn25p because it's not suitable for my environment (non air conditioned home comfort and non air conditioned lans). Though I'm also considering some case modding to make up for the inconvenience of the whole fiasco.

I renewed Reload Gaming's domain for 2 years just recently. We've been holding lans for 4 years under that name. I wonder how much longer I'll be a part of it.

A while ago I got a cool gaming headset ! It rocks. USB audio is good.

I'm also questioning my choice of friends these days too. I have a few small groups of friends and seem to rotate through them in sequence, with various groups going in and out of favour. Just lately I've been finding myself more and more annoyed with one of my current groups and I'm seriously thinking of just dropping the majority and starting afresh, which won't happen because I'm lazy and socially inept. But it doesn't alleviate the problem that's there.

I had my hair cut today... which is probably good since it was only trimmed once in 2005 and that was in November.

Have you noticed how none of our relatives are related to us?

I fineally bought the SN25P I'd been dreaming about for ages, and it's mostly good, bar the poor ventilation in the ram area. Which before the summer heat hit shouldn't have been a problem but it was. Until now I'd never had BSOD's from overheating ram but now I have. Maybe OCZ ram is shit too, who knows, but at least it's running at it's advertised timings (with AUTO set in the BIOS), unlike my corsair 1gb sticks. To alleviate this I've had to add another fan to the case, now it has 8, which is quite amazing considering it's size. I must admit the CPU cooling is awesome on this model, even under full load the cpu stays nice and cool because it's cooled with a separate intake and exhaust. This is doubly amazing because I've got a dual core AMD 64 in there, the X2 3800+ (2x 2.0ghz cores, same speed and cache as the 3200+ but 2 of em). If it wasn't for the ram, nforce4 and graphics card all using the same cooling air and that being poorly circulated (psu fan runs too slow) then I'd highly recommend this box, but because of this I think it will be the last shuttle I buy. I might even have to hock it and build up something thats stable. I can't use pc's that aren't stable in all conditions.

I've seriously discovered Ikea, they serve breakfast till 11am !

I bought a floorball stick and the first game I played with it we won! I even scored 2 assists. Perhaps at least this is looking up.

My new years resolution is 1920x1200...

I'm so frustrated right now.

I'm not a nerd, I'm socially challenged.