duksta.org :: Blagh
Drobo to the Rescue
A little shy of four years ago, I picked up a second generation USB/Firewire Drobo to be the repository for all our household media. I already had a pair of 750GB drives, so I picked up a pair of the new at the time 1TB drives from Seagate. I put it all together for a net capacity of 2.2TB and it's worked flawlessly ever since.
This past weekend, I noticed that Drobo was flashing all sorts of unhappy blinkenlights at me. I could still access my data, but it was telling me that one of the 1TB drives had failed. So, I ran down to Fry's and picked up two new 2TB drives. I replaced the bad drive with one of the new ones and let it do its thing. 48 hours later, RAID redundancy was restored to the array and all was well.
I just slotted in the other 2TB drive in place of one of the 750GB drives, which will up my net storage capacity to 3.6TB. I'll also replace the one remaining 750GB drive with the 1TB drive that I'll get from Seagate because the one that failed was still under warranty. This all worked out to my advantage, as I was starting to hit 85% full on the 2.2TB I had. Now with the upgrade to 3.6TB, I've got 40% free space.
A lot of my geek friends give me crap for buying a Drobo and not building some Linux RAID box instead. I work hard at work. I don't want to have to play sysadmin when I get home. I want my home gear to "Just Work", which is exactly what Drobo does for me.
Posted by John on April 17, 2012
Top five things about living in Seattle
I moved to Seattle a little over two months ago for a new job. I'm quite happy to be living here and I figured I'd share some reasons why.
• The rain isn't that bad. — Seattle has a bad rap for being rainy all the time. Most of the time when it rains here, it's just a drizzly mist. Very rarely does it pour like it does back East. It is overcast a lot, but it was overcast a lot in Providence too. Chalk it up as part of living by the water.
• Everything takes credit/debit cards — You can seriously live a cashless existence here. Parking meters, vending machines, transit pass machines; you name it, it takes a credit card. Now when I tell the homeless people that I don't have any cash on me, more often than not, I'm telling the truth.
• Everything is online — Every business here has an online presence. Pizza shops? Check! Restaurants? Check! Hardware store? Check! Picture Framing Shop? Check! It's the way it should be.
• Best Garbage Collection — Here you get three cans: recycling, compostables and garbage. Since I can compost all my food waste, I'm down to making only one half of one kitchen bag of garbage a week. The garbage men are also very neat; there's never any garbage on the street after garbage day. We do directly pay for garbage collection, as opposed to through property taxes. I think that's what gets us that level of service.
• Awesome public transportation — For first month I was here, my car hadn't caught up to me yet. I didn't miss it. Now that it's here, it sits parked on the street all week. The only thing I use it for is the occasional grocery trip. I've used a quarter of a tank of gas in five weeks. I'll be lucky to put 1000 miles on my car this year.
• I'm walking everywhere — This is probably a corollary to the previous item and also a function of where I chose to live, but I'm walking everywhere. Home to the office. Home to the grocery store for small items. Around town to go out for dinner and or drinks. There are a bunch of good restaurants and a couple of decent bars within ten blocks of the house. It rocks to be back in a walkable city.
Ok, that's six things. I got carried away. Needless to say I'm enjoying the change of venue.
Photo by zoonabar on Flickr, because I haven't gotten around to taking my own picture of the Space Needle yet.
Posted by John on April 3, 2011
Found Objects
It's funny what you find when you're doing renovations on your house. This morning, we were cleaning up the old baseboard heat covers upstairs in preparation to give them a coat of spray paint to freshen them up. As we were cleaning them, these betting slips from Lincoln Downs slid out from behind. Looks like the previous owners had spent New Year's Eve 1982 betting on the horses or dogs. Obviously, they weren't a winner.
Posted by John on September 26, 2010
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