Memorial Day Weekend

p>We decided to visit the grave of my Grandma and Grandpa Murdock this Memorial Day weekend. The weather was supposed to be really rainy on Monday, so we took advantage of the relatively clear skies on Saturday and headed down to the Orem cemetary. We found their plot, set down our flowers, and I told the boys some stories about Grandma and Grandpa until they got tired of listening to me. Then we left and went up Provo Canyon a ways to Bridal Veil Falls. It was a short walk to the falls and the kids had a good time playing in the water and seeing all the water. Click on the link below the picture to see all the photos we took with Ily’s phone.

Virtual Desktops on Windows

I love multiple virtual desktops. I have to work on windoze sometimes at work, which doesn’t have virtual desktops, but I found Virtual Dimension, and it rocks!

Posted by Bryan on March 13, 2006

Knee-Deep at Alta

Part way through the day on Friday, I realized I was skiing down
the hill and the only sound I could hear was the squeaking of my
boots. I couldn’t hear other people, I couldn’t hear my edges
scraping across ice—basically all I could hear was the silence of
fine, dry, knee-deep Utah powder. It was turning out to be one
awesome day of skiing at Alta. I
have the difficult assignment of interviewing internship candidates at
BYU for my company, so once or twice a year they fly me down to Utah
to meet with the hopefulls. As I’ve done before, I decided to take an
extra day for myself after the interviews and go skiing. My sister,
Julie, skied with me and we had a blast.

My interviews were Thursday and it snowed most of the day. Friday
was the ski day. There was about 6 inches of powder, and a relatively
small crowd at the hill. The soft snow was very forgiving on the
steeps, and I felt like I was skiing better than I ever had in my
life. If I hadn’t bought some sunscreen at lunch I might have had the
worst sunburn of my life too. It was that nice out. I forgot about
the terrible traffic that we’d had on the way up pretty quickly (two
accidents!). The way home was slow going too, but that was OK,
memories of ripping down the hill were very comforting.

(Sorry, neither of us remembered a camera, so no pictures)

Posted by Bryan on March 12, 2006

Root Partition Full

If you’ve tried to access the website in the past few days you haven’t been able to. I’m sorry. This will be way too much information for many of you, but so I don’t forget I’ll write down just what happened and how I fixed it. For the less interested, just know that I’m on top of it, and that the system is back up. Yay!

Here is the sequence of events that lead to this, as far as I can re-create them. First, I don’t remember how long ago, but I installed Mandriva Linux on this machine. I probably had it automatically partition the hard drive, probably for a desktop setup. This created a root partition and a /home partition. It made the root partition about 6 GB, and all the rest of the hard drive went for /home. I put a second network card in the machine and set it up as a router for my home network. I configured samba to serve files on the network card that the home network was on, eth0. Since then I have installed the postgresql database, which by default keeps all its data in /var/lib. Also, a goodly amount of log files have accumulated. I don’t know how much space this was all using before, but I made a change that started using a whole lot more recently, and not on purpose. I bought a linksys router, so I disabled eth0 on this machine. This caused samba, actually nmbd, to write lots of error messages to about 4 or 5 different log files: /var/log/messages, /var/log/syslog, /var/log/daemons/warnings, /var/log/daemons/errors, and I think /var/log/mail/warnings too, all saying it couldn’t find eth0. All of these log files had grown into the hundreds of megabytes range in size. Finally, Ily saw the whole machine crash when she tried to open a rather large attachment in gmail. Firefox probably saved it to /tmp, which became the straw that broke the camel’s back. Of course this happened shortly after I left town for a few days, hence it didn’t get fixed until today. Ahh computers, you gotta love 'em. At least with Linux it’s easy to figure exactly what when wrong like this.

Needless to say, I reconfigured samba, deleted some log files, and for good measure I removed a whole bunch of cached rpms. My root partition has 2 GB free now. I hope that lasts until I can figure out how to non-destructively resize ext3 partitions!

Posted by Bryan on March 11, 2006

Winter Weekend Continued

Sorry I’m late in posting this. After gushing to Ily about how much fun Isaac and I had on that beautiful day of skiing, I decided to take her and Micah up there two days later on Presidents day. The sky wasn’t as clear but it was much warmer and still very fun. We stopped at frozen Multnomah Falls for a bit, and then continued up to Cooper Spur. There wasn’t anything Micah could do there, so we continued on Highway 35 to Little John Sno Park for some sledding. The boys loved sitting on the sled between our legs, and Ily surprised me by being so willing to hike up the sledding hill over and over. So that was Saturday and Monday of last weekend that Isaac and I spent out in the snow. It was so much better than watching it rain from indoors!

Pictures and movies, of course

Posted by Bryan on February 23, 2006

Isaac's First Ski Trip

Isaac and I went skiing yesterday at href=“http://www.cooperspur.com/”>Cooper Spur. It was fabulous.
The conditions were the most perfect that I think I have ever seen. A
bitter arctic wind has swept the sky completely clear of clouds and
haze the past few days, and dropped the temperature down into the
teens. The wind was still blowing hard in The Gorge as we drove east
on I-84, which made me nervous about the day ahead, but with Mt. Hood
looming large in front of us our van climbed highway 35 from Hood
River and the wind quickly became calm. At the resort the blazing sun
made 18 degrees feel like 40, and the snow was a fine dry powder. It
was a shades day for sure.

Cooper Spur is the perfect resort for a kid to learn how to ski.
Kids under 7 ski free (or was it 6?), so I only had to pay for my lift
ticket and Isaac’s rentals, which were incredibly cheap. There is a
single double chairlift and a rope tow that cover a whopping 50 acres
of terrain (the big resorts in Utah cover thousands of acres). Kids
music played from the speakers on the tiny little patio at the
miniature lodge, and the rental shop dude told Isaac how “awesome” his
little skis were, cementing Isaac’s early enthusiasm for this
tremendous sport.

I struggled teaching Isaac at first. He proved to be a more
difficult student than Ily and other friends my age I’ve taught.
After a bit of, um, harsh words between us, Isaac wisely called for a
snack break at 10:30. He sat in the sun on the patio while I went to
retrieve the grub from the van. On the way back I stopped at the
ticket/rental office and paid for a group lesson for him. After
apologetically telling Isaac what a horrible teacher I was he became
pretty excited for ski school.

The class was a success, after an hour he was riding the rope tow
and snow plowing down the short bunny hill all by himself. We rode
the inner tubes a bit, broke for lunch, and he was ready for the
chairlift. At least, that’s what he told me. Isaac fearlessly rode
to the top, and even though it took about an hour, and some serious
effort on my part to keep him from giving up and sliding down the hill
on his bum, he made it all the way down. I knew it was a success when
at the bottom he didn’t head straight for the car like he’d
threatened, but for the rope tow to reassure himself that even though
the big hill gave him trouble, he was still master of the bunny hill.
A little more tubing and it was time to head home, with Isaac asking
when we could do it again. Cooper Spur hasn’t seen the last of the
Murdocks.

Be sure and check out the href=”/gallery/isaacs-first-ski-trip”>pictures and video!

Posted by Bryan on February 19, 2006

Category Specific Feed

The RSS link (that puts the orange icon in the url bar of Firefox) is now category specific. It used to just link to the feed for all categories, no matter where on the site you were. Now, for example, if you are on the Geek topic it links to the Geek feed, or if you are on the About This Site topic, it links to the About This Site feed. Django makes this stuff so easy, I love it!

Posted by Bryan on February 12, 2006