Last week, I was in DC for work. It was mostly uneventful, but I did manage to make my way to the American Art Museum one afternoon. I think the most interesting part was the Alexis Rockman exhibit, but I found most of the modern art section to be rather fascinating.

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When I got back, I found that my primary linux desktop (mystique) seemed to be acting up. After some investigation, I found that one of the drives had been kicked out of the raid array (causing excessive slowness) and there was a bad bit on one of the RAM chips (causing random crashes). I initially assumed that the RAM was the cause of the raid issue. Unfortunately, after spending much of Sunday swapping out ram chips and running memtest86 repeatedly, I was no closer to actually confirming which chip was bad. Instead, I decided to replace the motherboard, process, ram, and disks since, at this point, I can't really pin down which of them is the true culprit. Multi-devices failures are very troublesome, so I'm just jettisonning the whole thing and starting over.

Luckily, I have a currently disused rackmount case (formerly freasha, now replaced with a new 1U version), so I've just pulled all the old hardware out of it and will use it to build the replacement. Also, I happened to have a portable eSATA HDD with data that could be to erased, so I've used it to rebuild the array until new hardware arrives.

The interesting thing is that the dying machine was built with 5x500 GiB drives in a raid5 array (~2 TiB total). Since I am not terribly interested in making a bigger array, what I've done is to buy 4x1TiB drives and I'm going to put them in raid6 so that I won't have to run around looking for a replacement drive should one fail. I've had to do so in the past and was lucky enough to not have to do it this time due to spare equipment.

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In unrelated news, I somehow ended up reading the entire back archive of El Goonish Shive over the last 4 or 5 days. I don't quite remember how I found myself there, and I'd never really read the comic before. I found it to be strangely compelling, so I guess I'll keep following it for now. I must say that carrying out an archive binge is really quite exhausting. It is also rather disappointing to reach the end and find there is nothing more.

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In even more unrelated news, Blogger seems to be broken in some strange way, recently. My main account for posting to it now returns an error message when it attempts to pull the list of blogs that I can post to via xpost. Initially, I thought that perhaps something had changed in the protocol api, but apparently nothing has. Instead, some change has been pushed that causes some accounts to have problems. The account still authenticates correctly, but can't pull blog lists to populate the UI. This seems to be a known issue that has been going on for over a month without complete resolution. I ended up adding my guyblade.com google apps account as an author, just so that I could post. Highly annoying.

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