Starting Over...

Somehow I decided to stop dieting and exercising back when. And I haven't completed the ripping robot or the RAID-5 box. Oh, and I added 18+ pounds to end up at 240.5 lb. How did all the that happen?!? Oh yes... I got obscenely busy with work and everything else went to crap.

So... The RAID box is now slated to be a RAID-6 box using LINUX's RAID drivers. All the hardware is purchased and assembled and is currently running Vista with collection of six 500GB SATA II drives (3TB in total). Vista is actually great for running a media center machine but lack of good native RAID is concerning. Since we've now filled 1.5TB of the space an issue is about to occur with lack of backups. Need to find time to solve these issues. Hmmm...

I've been making time to exercise (bike a measly 15 miles a week and visit the gym for anaerobic upper body workout 3 times a week) and generally eat better (more like a South Beach diet but still plenty of carbs / calories) and shockingly it has been a real difference. I've gone from 240.5 to 223 in about 3 months. Realistically I need to exercise more and do it more regularly as well and sleep better and eat more consistently. Goals are the same as way back when, get below 200lb. Following that reevaluate and likely go for my youth weight of ~175 - 180. The big difference will be quite a bit more upper body strength. In fact, the last several months of gym have been making a nice difference - of course not as much or a quick a change as I would like, but still a nice change.

1 More Down

221 lb. last night. Rate slowing down tooo much. Must have something to do with not enough sleep, no exercise in 2 days and eating sushi (with rice) with company last night... should have had the sashimi. Perhaps both biking this afternoon w/ DD and gym this evening... time to start recreating some muscles of my imagined youth.

Shedding pounds

Last night's weight - 222 lb. Nice. Still need to hit the gym and start exercises targeting my flabby / oversized areas.

Irresponsibility at All Levels Kills

From the NY Times, "Global Sludge Ends in Tragedy for Ivory Coast"

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/02/world/africa/02ivory.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

"... a highly toxic cocktail of petrochemical waste and caustic soda, ended up in Mr. Oudrawogol’s backyard in a suburb north of Abidjan is a dark tale of globalization. It came from a Greek-owned tanker flying a Panamanian flag and leased by the London branch of a Swiss trading corporation whose fiscal headquarters are in the Netherlands. Safe disposal in Europe would have cost about $300,000, or even twice that, counting the cost of delays. But because of decisions and actions made not only here but also in Europe, it was dumped on the doorstep of some of the world’s poorest people... So far 8 have died..."

Sure, this could be blamed directly on the renting corporation, but that would be inappropriate. The problem is multi-level and extends all the way up to the corporate officer who chose order this release, (or if not ordered then chose to not immediately render aid). It extends down to the individuals who worked the machinery to make the release. And it extends out the companies board of directors and even its share holders for not raising such an alarm as to make the owning corporation to immediately make into changes and aid in the clean up.

It is truly amazing how irresponsible people can be and I am once again offended.

Detainee Bill Shifts Power to President

From the NY Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/30/us/30detain.html?_r=1&th&emc=th&oref=slogin

"Rather than reining in the formidable presidential powers Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick
Cheney have asserted since Sept. 11, 2001, the law gives some of those powers a solid statutory foundation. In effect it allows the president to identify enemies, imprison them indefinitely and interrogate them — albeit with a ban on the harshest treatment — beyond the reach of the full court reviews traditionally afforded criminal defendants and ordinary prisoners."

This is so incredibly frustrating! So, I for one, need to review how my local representatives voted on this and make sure that they know that no longer receive my vote if they were for this insanity. And... I need to make sure that new candidates are against this stupidity.

Isn't it nice to know that GW can now declare ANYONE a terrorist, including you or me, and put us in a prison indefinitely with no means of defense??? How stupid or gullible has this country become?

Diet and Exercise...

Is continuing to show progress. Now 224 lbs. Looks like about 1 lb. a day so far which means I really need to increase the regular exercise of expect the pace to drop off. I think the gym membership will finally come back into use again.

From the NY Times, "U.S. to relax ban of liquids on planes"

At Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Aubrey Hux wasn't as happy to hear the news [that very small quantities of liquids would once again be allowed in airline carry on luggage]. Just back from a vacation in Thailand, he said, "You can't have enough security as far as I'm concerned."

Uh huh, yeah, right... People really do say the stupidest things. Ultimate security would require mandatory house arrest for all persons except for critical necessities. Of course all products delivered to or expelled from your house would require review by authority figures. And air travel would be virtually eradicated, but if you had to travel then you'd be strip searched, CAT scanned, required to submit to digestive track purging, and then travel in your own personal lock box. And by the way you'd have to prove the necessity of moving each piece of luggage and if it passed some extreme criteria it would be sent by a randomly selected, different carrier.

So, yeah, perhaps you Aubrey Hux, and others who think security is paramount would enjoy such a world. But I, and I suspect most other sensible people would prefer to fight for our freedoms and fight general insanity and stupidity of the paranoid.

BTW - President Bush thanks you for accepting his campaign of fear.

Don't Need No Stink'n Laws!

From the NY Times, Quote of the Day:

"I just follow my own common sense. And the hell with the law."THOMAS R. BUCKLEY, a longtime justice in Dannemora, N.Y.

Just plain frightening...

Down Another Few

Last night weight - 227.

I stayed up all night and worked... then biked first thing this morning in Wissahickon. Now it is 1 AM again and definitely time to crash...

RAID-5 Storage Box

OK, I'm committing to building the ripping robot and that means I need a good place to put all the ripped data. Additionally, I would really like a centralized, reliable back up location for all the machines in the house. In short - I really need a RAID-5 array.

I have a 1TB TeraStation for business purposes, and it works fine for backups, but it is generally slow. So, while it is tempting, for convenience reasons, to get one for my own needs I've decided to go a different direction. I plan to build a RAID-5 storage box with a fairly high speed processor and good amount of memory.

After too much research I've come to the following conclusions:

• Either LINUX software RAID-5 or a plug in RAID card (I want to be sure that if ANY of the hardware fails I can easily get back to a working state)
• Either go cheap and use an existing PC with cheap 250GB IDE ATA/100 drives or build a new medium high-end machine with 500GB SATA 3gbs drives

The current price estimates:

• $450: Reuse 1Ghz Athlon w/ four 250GB IDE drives with a FastTrak SX4060 RAID card
• $700: New Athlon 64 box w/ 2GB RAM and four 250GB SATA drives
• $1100: New Athlon 64 box w/ 2GB RAM and four 500GB SATA drives

Of course, if I go with the higher end machine then it would be easier to push more tasks at it, like turning it into a PVR (Personal Video Recorder). This would require at least a TV frame grabber card and running LINUX with MythTV. Or, I could go the the Windows XP Media Center route. Of course, the machine will be less taxed if I used a higher end PVR card like either the Hauppauge PVR-350 or PVR-500.

Added cost? Between $50 and $300.

Ripping Robot

We own a ridiculous number of CDs, (likely more than a thousand). The problem is we never seem to know where 1/2 of them are or even if we necessary own the desired disk of the moment. So - the solution rip them all. But honestly, who wants to rip 1,000 CDs? And yes, I could send them all to a service, but that seems like a silly idea...

My solution? Build a robot that will rip all my CDs for me!

Being highly lazy / efficient I have the plan:

• Build the mass of the actual robot with Lego's new Mindstorms NXT system
• Augment it with metal hardware for stability and allow for a longer operating span
• Create a plug power supply for the robot - I'm not going to deal with batteries
• Use a fairly powerful PC with a high quality CD/DVD recorder running:


• Windows XP Pro
• EAC (Exact Audio Copy)
• LAME encoder
• some (YTD) GraceNote look up tool
• my own custom code to integrate the parts and direct the robot

The issues:

• Lego continues to be a pain to deal with - they are now creating nice motors and sensors but still creating a mostly closed environment. I'm actually shocked there there isn't a good alternate "brain" to drive lego components.
• GraceNote is the preferred info source... but is a pain to deal with - so I'll force some other app to be my middle man
• FreeDB doesn't match CDs well enough for mass, unattended ripping
• Some CDs will not be confidently matched or have ripping errors and the robot will need to separate them out
• When the robot is powered up it will need to determine if it is holding a CD or not and where is the trolley
• The robot will need to manage precise motion in order to consistently pick up a CD and to accurately drop it

So... the Lego's are purchased and ...

1. The first Lego "brain" was misbehaved and needed to be replaced
2. Lego "brains" only talk interactively to PC via Bluetooth... the problem... they only like some Bluetooth stacks and it doesn't include my Dell laptop's Bluetooth. Grrrrrr...

What Diet?

Still on a diet, biked, but no change in weight in the prior 24 hours, still at 228.5. Grumble...

Losing the pounds...

I started the South Beach diet two days ago. I weighed 232.5 immediately prior to starting, (the most I've ever weighed). I weighed 228.5 one day into it. My goal? Lose 33 pounds in 37 days. So, I started biking daily again. I plan to get up to twice daily bike rides in the next day or two.

I really HATE being overweight... especially as I was in such good shape for most of my life. Well, no time like the present to effect a change.

Unix on Windows

Aside from the GnuWin and Cygwin Microsoft also has a Unix on Windows solution. It requires a free, 218mb download and you'll likely have to have the source to your favorite app to recompile it with the included Gnu compilers.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/interopmigration/unix/sfu/default.mspx