My first weekend in Atlantic Canada found me walking the downtown shores of Halifax… taking random pictures and scouting out places to eat that were walking distance from the hotel (and finding Tim Hortons for the short drive to work!). Lots of interesting boats docked, probably because the hotel is only about a block away from the Maritime Museum, but this guy stood out from the rest:
It’s Theodore the Tugboat! If you don’t recognize him from TV you can read more about him here and here.
You can’t walk around the corner, see his big eyes staring at you, and not smile
Looking back it has been a year since Vanguard… and about 6 months since LOTRO (which I seemed to have forgotten to post any pictures for). Before Vanguard I think it was WoW for a couple weeks. I don’t know why… but I can’t seem to escape MMORPGs. Time to get back on the treadmill…
Every 6 months or so I read about a new one… and get the urge to try it out. This time it was Aion. What usually happens is I sign up for the new game… play it every waking moment for about 2 weeks… the decide “I’m done”, and walk away. I spent so much time in my first MMORPG that I think I’ve burned my brain out of the genre… the addiction doesn’t stick (to the chagrin of the companies charging the monthly fee)… making it easy to see when the real ‘grind’ begins so you can get out while you’re ahead
Aion is still in beta in North America (it has been out in Asia since November 2008)… and this weekend they opened up “beta 6″… the last beta to shake the bugs out before launch in September. So I rolled a Sorcerer and pushed through what content I could on Friday night and Saturday. Not enough time to do a detailed review… but initial impressions are that it’s “WoW-like” in how easy it is to get started in the world (Vanguard didn’t do much hand holding) but with some nicer graphics and early access to flight. PvP can be a big part of the game in later levels, but it’s not something I made it far enough to see.
I’ll be traveling for business the next month, but should be back before Aion opens up “for real”. I’m looking forward to trying some other classes and seeing other parts of this new world… in fact I wish I could play tomorrow as well… but I have to get ready for my flight.
(Actually… maybe I can sneak in an hour or two before heading to the airport )
What do you do with an old, loud, hot fileserver that’s acting up: crashing after a couple days or weeks of use? What if it’s full of obsolete IDE drives, and the drive industry is moving to SATA? What if you’re tired of buying replacement IDE parts to limp along just a little while longer?
Well, if you have 5 free SATA ports… you buy 5 of the best bang-per-buck 1.5TB SATA drives and upgrade! Here they are fresh out of their static bags. They don’t take up too much space, do they?
And here they are in a birdsnest of wires, hanging out the side of the case while the filesystem is formatted and all the files are copied over (which took about 12 hours):
And here’s what I got to pull _out_ of the computer: over a dozen IDE drives between 200-400GB each, several feet of IDE cable, a drive tray, a stack of power cables, and the 3 PCI cards it took to hook everything up to the motherboard. Plus a 120mm fan that kept it all cool (not pictured):
What did I gain? Well, so far, no more crashing. And things are cool enough that I could remove an extra fan, making it quieter. The new drives takes up about 1/3rd of the space and use about 1/4 the power of the old setup. And capacity has more than doubled to almost 5.5TB!
Today my friend BJ organizeda trip back out to Ganaraska for the dualsport guys on the ODSC and GTAM websites. The forecast mentioned a decent chance of rain, but we were hopeful things would stay dry while we were out and about. We were wrong
Not too many pictures today, just the normal ones of the crew at the parking lot:
…the Lookout…
…and the TrailTours guys we seem to see often.
A light rain started when we were unloading the bikes… but by the time we had made it through the first few sections of single track it was coming down harder. And not long after getting to Thorpe Hill it started to really get us wet.
The damp and miserable weather cut the day short, though it was starting to look better when BJ and I headed out. Not only did the rain cut down on the trails we rode, but it played havoc with visibility. The overcast skies made the trails dark, goggles were misty and covered with water blurring the trails, and those with glasses under their goggles had them fog up almost immediately after putting them on. I was “using the force” to ride half of the time… hoping I wouldn’t hit a stray stump, root, or tree and fall off. Some were not so lucky :
It also fogged up the internals of my helmet cam… causing things to come out at a much lower quality than usual. Still, I did get some footage of the first couple trails and our runs at Thorpe Hill. I got skunked: after about 3 tries I never made it up, bah! I did make it up the sand hill later… but by that time I had abandoned my goggles and the camera to see where I was going (so no pics). My ego was only mildly bruised… since many others didn’t make all the hillclimbs either:
Here’s a few minutes of YouTube footage from the day: note I screwed up somewhere editing it… and sounds are 1-2 seconds behind when they actually occurred… oops… figure that one out later:
Thanks to BJ for the invite, organization and spot on his trailer. Met a few new people today and hope to ride with them again! (and lots of WRs in the group today, go Yamaha! )
