The eye:hand coordination project was linked over on boingboing yesterday. I visited it, and found myself immediately sucked in. I was forced to immediately take a photo of myself and render it in pencil (which I then shamelessly scanned and tried to pass off as ballpoint). It's pretty neat-- try it yourself!

I've been playing around with Tiny Tiny RSS for the past couple weeks. TT-RSS is an RSS feed aggregator. I took a look at "Google Reader" right before I looked at TT-RSS, and if I hadn't seen "Google Reader" first, I'd have sworn it was a rip-off of TT-RSS in look-and-feel. Unlike "Google Reader", though, TT-RSS actually works.

I've submitted a few patches and generally had a good time with it. The author, fox, has been great about dealing with my barrages of patches, and I've been having a lot of fun tweaking the program. Oh, and fox hates MySQL, just like me! *smile*

If you're looking for an RSS feed aggregator that presents a web-based interface to a database backend and supports gathering updates from a cron job or on-the-fly when the web interface is accessed, it's is what you're looking for.

I'm getting interesting exposure to PHP and JavaScript, both of which I'm only very lightly familiar with, as well as actually using that Postgres server I've got installed for something useful. Gee--- I should probably start thinking about making backups.

TT-RSS has really made a major impact in my daily surfing habits. I find that I spend most of the day just using TT-RSS, instead of surfing a lot of different sites. It keeps me more on-task with what I'm doing, but I feel less like I'm missing things since I've got unread pointers for all my favorite sites. I actually feel like I can take a day or two off from using a PC and not miss anything.

This all points to my Internet addiction getting worse. I'm tracking about 40 feeds now, and adding more every couple days.

I started around 220lbs in late 200509. Right now I'm sitting right at around 209lbs. The pace isn't breakneck, but the diet is also becoming surprisingly tolerable.

The progress on excercising 45 minutes per day isn't so good, but then I didn't expect it to be.

I still haven't bought a bathroom scale yet. I found a $200+ model that will do what I want (I *think*) but the technical docs aren't available online. Some freight scales appear to have RS-232 outputs, but the manufacturers want to sell you some 'doze-based software to work with them, which makes me wonder if they're not going to have obfuscated output. *sigh*

...that doesn't mean you should hot-swap them.

I've said this time and time again. Hot-swap is sexy, and people want to play with it. Don't!

The worst had to be Microsoft's original Windows 2000 Server exam (70-215, I think). In the exam questions, you were throwing around groups of hot-swappable disks like a juggler. Microsoft was so proud of their new hot-swap awareness in the OS that they made a lot of green "paper MCSE's" think that it was okay to play w/ the hot-swap disks any time they wanted to.

It's not okay.

Case-in-point: A Customer of a company that I subcontract for decide that he needed some addt'l disks in a Wintel server computer. Midday on a regular business day he pulled a disk and checked out the model number, etc. Of course, the server alerted him to the disk "failure", but he took no notice.

After getting the information he needed, he placed the disk back into service, and the server dutifully "rebuilt" the array. It "rebuilt" and "rebuilt", and eventually failed to "rebuild".

Seems that one of the other disks in the array had a rather large bad spot on it, presumably in an area of free space. The "rebuild" needed to read these bits, and freaked out when it couldn't.

He's all better now. I helped to get a backup restored and get all the necessary server software again.

For the loss of a day of staff productivity, and the cost of my time, the Customer gets a lesson on hot-swappable disks, and some recommendations on how to do his backups better.