Secret Caverns

Mo, Curly, and I went over to see the cavern today.


 We had a good time walking down the steps and the ramp and a better time coming back up. Its not a bad deal, the sign on the door said $16 for adults, we used our advanced bargaining skills and paid $5 for all three of us.
My pictures are fuzzy and it looks like my shake ruined most of them but a few came out acceptable.

What if?

1. What if in 2012 I bought small truck and put a diesel engine in it and ran it on biodiesel and used veggie oil and maintained it myself for the 40 years (cost @.20 a mile X12, 000yr transportation total $2,400.00 year. But only have to drive 500 mile a month=$100.00)
2. What if in 2012 I bought an acre for $2,000.00 and put $7,500.00 in to materials to build a small passive solar eco friendly home and maintained it myself. (total cost to sewer, water, electric, cable, garbage, phone, taxes, Insurance and internet $200.00}
3. What if I took the $78.00 I was going to save and put it into a green house and garden and recycled everything and bartered extra veggies for meat and staples? (food 78.00 month)
4. What if I worked only enough to maintain that lifestyle (transportation $100.00. Housing $200.00, Food $78.00 month = $378.00 divided by min. wage $7.00 =54 hours a month or about 14 hrs a week and with a life partner additional $78.00 a month= $450.00 or 8 hours each week.)
5. What if I spent all this time living the American Dream, and realized it?
In life, no matter how rich you are, the only thing you cannot buy is more time!!!!                            

Windows 7 Starter Network Image backup

I’ve got a new HP mini 210-2145dx here that I’m trying to get a backup of for Windows restore should I need it down the road. This version of Windows 7 will not allow backup to a NAS and I don’t have a USB stick large enough or a USB hard drive that I can use.
Macrium Reflect Free to the rescue. I had several problems getting this to work as Reflect did not recognize the NAS immediately, this was mostly caused by me not booting up the NAS ahead of time. After closing and restarting Reflect a couple of times it saw the NAS. It still didn’t recognize the mapped drive that I had created but the NAS is good enough to get this done.
I created a rescue disk in Linux flavor and pushed that to the mapped drive no problems. The other option was BartPE, that should work just as well but Linux was the first option in the list so I went with that.
Now I’m making the image of the disk which it shows running at around 52 Mb/s not to shabby for a wireless connection. The timer shows a one hour time to completion. One hour forty six minutes later and the process has completed.

Once its done should I dare try running the recovery?

Windows 7 Starter Network Image backup

I’ve got a new HP mini 210-2145dx here that I’m trying to get a backup of for Windows restore should I need it down the road. This version of Windows 7 will not allow backup to a NAS and I don’t have a USB stick large enough or a USB hard drive that I can use.
Macrium Reflect Free to the rescue. I had several problems getting this to work as Reflect did not recognize the NAS immediately, this was mostly caused by me not booting up the NAS ahead of time. After closing and restarting Reflect a couple of times it saw the NAS. It still didn’t recognize the mapped drive that I had created but the NAS is good enough to get this done.
I created a rescue disk in Linux flavor and pushed that to the mapped drive no problems. The other option was BartPE, that should work just as well but Linux was the first option in the list so I went with that.
Now I’m making the image of the disk which it shows running at around 52 Mb/s not to shabby for a wireless connection. The timer shows a one hour time to completion. One hour forty six minutes later and the process has completed.

Once its done should I dare try running the recovery?

LVM grub not booting after upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04

I updated a Dell server that I use for work and ran into a few problems on the reboot. I ended up with a grub> prompt and it wouldn’t go any further after some research I figured out the system was unable to find my root file system.
I used an alternate install CD with the rescue option to sort out where root belonged. To do this I used vgdisplay and pv. The drive turned out to be /dev/octane/root instead of the default name and I think this was causing the problems. I passed grub the information:
linux /vmlinuz-version.number-generic.pae root=/dev/octane/root
initrd /initrd-matching.version-generic.pae
boot
The version numbers showed by using the tab key to auto complete and worked fine using the same version number on initrd and vmlinuz.
Everything is working correctly now but I have yet to try a reboot and see if it picks things up after running update-grub.

LVM grub not booting after upgrade to Ubuntu 11.04

I updated a Dell server that I use for work and ran into a few problems on the reboot. I ended up with a grub> prompt and it wouldn’t go any further after some research I figured out the system was unable to find my root file system.
I used an alternate install CD with the rescue option to sort out where root belonged. To do this I used vgdisplay and pv. The drive turned out to be /dev/octane/root instead of the default name and I think this was causing the problems. I passed grub the information:
linux /vmlinuz-version.number-generic.pae root=/dev/octane/root
initrd /initrd-matching.version-generic.pae
boot
The version numbers showed by using the tab key to auto complete and worked fine using the same version number on initrd and vmlinuz.
Everything is working correctly now but I have yet to try a reboot and see if it picks things up after running update-grub.

Fathers Day

Hey Dad wish you were here. I remember a few things mostly good, I know I seem to dwell on the not so good but most things were good. A few weeks ago the bathroom plumbing sprung a leak and I fixed it with some things called gator bites. Cost less than twenty dollars, you would have loved this. I didn’t have to try and sweat pipes with water running down my arm or shove any bread up in there. Just cut the pipe take out the leaking parts and slide these things on.
Continue reading “Fathers Day”

Fathers Day

Hey Dad wish you were here. I remember a few things mostly good, I know I seem to dwell on the not so good but most things were good. A few weeks ago the bathroom plumbing sprung a leak and I fixed it with some things called gator bites. Cost less than twenty dollars, you would have loved this. I didn’t have to try and sweat pipes with water running down my arm or shove any bread up in there. Just cut the pipe take out the leaking parts and slide these things on.

Remember when we went on vacation to Florida the one year. That was some trip, we made it to Pennsylvania before the money ran out. We visited Gettysburg, and on the way back home we stopped in Durham to ride the water slide. We had lunch in the car all six of us no A/C windows rolled up and rain outside in ninety degree weather. There were some pretty good times in there.
Remember when we lived down outside of Valatie on Silvernail Road in that big old house. It had a coal furnace that was converted to oil with a single four foot by four foot grate in the entranceway. You converted that to wood and we cut down half the trees in the front yard for firewood. We also burned the old addition that had been torn off the back of the house, one piece at a time in that old furnace. I never think it got really warm there. You worked like a dog cutting that wood and I helped. Later on when I got to be about the same age your were then I wondered how you ever did it.
Remember the drives on Saturday or Sunday afternoons? We’d all pile in the car and you would drive us up on Greenbush or some other back roads. We’d just wander through there, I wondered if you knew where we were going. Chris was afraid we were lost and in Vietnam or some other equally scary place. There are a lot of houses up there now and most of the roads are paved over. Not much gravel road any more but some days you can still get sort of lost.
Some days we would go over by the fire tower and have a picnic. Us kids would wander around up there and enjoy ourselves. Those were pretty good times and I’ll bet they cost almost nothing.
You’ve only been gone a few years but it does seem like a long time now.

Ubuntu 11.04 X fails on boot

I get a flicker of a screen on boot and then no graphics.
Error in dmesg | grep fb
fb: conflicting fb hw usage inteldrmfb vs EFI VGA – removing generic driver

To get graphics ctrl+alt+F1 and login. Then run “sudo service gdm restart” and I have a full X session. Login as my user and things work well until I reboot again.
I’m having a tough time understanding the fix for this, but I have found some references that state setting the resolution in /etc/default/grub might fix things.
I found a GUI to fix this, “apt-get install startupmanager” and changed the resolution from 640×480 to 800×600 under both the boot options and the advanced tab.
Reboot and I get a GUI that works.