Roofing

The roofers just left after doing a complete tear off and re-shingle.

They did a very good job and it looks great. … I do have a few take-away’s from this particular home project …

  • Make sure the roofer looks at the INSIDE Of the house as well as the outside before giving a firm quote. In our case the roofer didn’t know that the area above the living room didn’t have an attic.  As such, they were unsure about the vents above the living room.
  • Make sure you know what everything on the quote is for … the quote called for 6 extra vents … 3 of which were going to be installed in the garage.  Since we don’t spend a lot of time in the garage, only one vent is really needed.  We also needed an additional vent for the kitchen exhaust vent that wasn’t included.
  • Before deciding on a shingle color / style … make sure you see a full size example.  The shingle ‘chips’ that the manufacturer provides show the colors, but not the layout.  In our case it worked out well.  The shingle’s have black, brown and a little green, which works well with our brown gutters & trim.
  • For all home improvement projects, keep all the paperwork … turns out, when we had the gutters replaced, the guy didn’t install gutter flashing.  This COULD have caused ice damning.  Not exactly sure what I could have done about it even with the paperwork at this point … but, if I had paid for the gutter flashing before, I sure as heck would have gone back to the gutter contractor about it.

Now I have to get the vent in the bathroom replaced (Monday) and the bathroom ceiling fixed (later).

Cinnamon & Diabetes

For those of us with Type 2 Diabetes (of which I was recently diagnosed), this article on the NIH’s web site might prove interesting.  The conclusion was …

The results of this study demonstrate that intake of 1, 3, or 6 g of cinnamon per day reduces serum glucose, triglyceride, LDL cholesterol, and total cholesterol in people with type 2 diabetes and suggest that the inclusion of cinnamon in the diet of people with type 2 diabetes will reduce risk factors associated with diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.

Bonus: Cinnamon tastes good in coffee.

Legal Disclaimers

I’ve always suspected this about the legal disclaimers that are becoming ubiquitous at the bottom (and sometimes top) of email messages from companies that employ attorneys …

… they are mostly, legally speaking, pointless. Lawyers and experts on internet policy say no court case has ever turned on the presence or absence of such an automatic e-mail footer in America, the most litigious of rich countries.

http://www.economist.com/node/18529895

I kind of find it amusing when there is a disclaimer that reads …

This message contains confidential information and is intended only for the individual named.

… and it’s sent to a public mailing list.

CentOS Upgrade

Well, I’m pretty pleased with CentOS so far.

I just completed a minor version upgrade (5.5 to 5.6) via yum and it went very smoothly.  This involved 3 virtual guest and one host (the guests run inside the host).

I had one small glitch with the RPM database on middle-earth.  Some dependencies were screwed up, but that was corrected by running yum clean all.

In order to speed things up, I’m going to be mirroring the most current CentOS package repository on middle-earth … that way I can get the updates done much quicker (installs too).

Of course I still have to move a bunch of the applications to the virtual machine’s.  I think I’m close to being able to retire gondor.  Moving rivendell is going to a major effort.

Epsilon

By now everyone’s probably heard about the data breach at Epsilon … which resulted in a lot of major eCommerce vendors customers mailing list getting stolen.

Personally, I’ve gotten notifications from Chase, Walgreen, Tivo, Best Buy, 1-800-Flowers, and a few others … informing me of the breach and assuring me that no critical information was stolen … just my email address.

What do you do now?

Nothing, really.

Continue reading

Virtualization Advice

I need some virtualization advice.

I’m currently running this blog, among others, on XEN 3.1.2 based virtualization on CentOS 5.5.

At the present time, I have three physical machines running … rivendell, gondor, and middle-earth.

Middle-earth”is the XEN host.

Rivendell and gondor are stand alone servers running Fedodra 10.

Currently gondor is primarily a web server and backup mail delivery server.

Rivendell is the main system and acts as a NIS server, MySQL server, samba file server, chat server, mail server, etc.

My goal is to migrate all the functions from rivendell & gondor to XEN instances on middle-earth.

My questions relate to where to run services, file systems, and processor allocation.

Specifically …

Continue reading