Buying a house

Given that we are in the process of buying house this article kind of sums up some of the craziness that is going on at the moment. I don’t have much sympathy for someone who is buying a loft in Arlington for $950,000. I mean is it really worth almost a million? I am guessing daddy is helping with the down payment as well as sorting out the mortgage.

Mmmmm that sounds a little bitchy doesn’t it, oh well.

Phoenix Bikes

I met a couple people from Phoenix Bikes last week during a special event with Whole Foods. They had a mechanic in the parking lot tunning up bikes. Whole Foods also donated a portion of the sales for the day to Phoenix bikes. There website says

“Welcome to Phoenix Bikes! We are a little community bike shop serving folks in and around S. Arlington, VA.

Located in Barcroft Park, along the 4 Mile Run and WO&D bike trails, we work with young people in the community, building bikes and becoming leaders. In addition to participating in our Earn-A-Bike Program and other Phoenix Team activities, our young mechanics join staff and volunteers in serving Arlington’s biking community. We do tune-ups and repairs at low cost to area cyclists, and sell quality used bikes fit for the whole family. Stop on by the shop to check us out, chat for a few minutes, and get into the Arlington bike community.”

So I decided to go down on saturday to see what I can do to help. I ended up being there for a couple hours. I helped fix a rear brake on bike that didn’t have brakes. I put together two wheels with new tubes and tires and I installed a new cassette on a rear wheel.

Lots of fun for me, hopefully I will have more spare time to help them out in the future.

bugger

The topic of conversation tonight the origin of the word bugger or buggery wikipedia came up as the first entry on google.

The follow on conversation was that the muppet show song phonemon was originally written and performed in a Swedish porn film. The challenge for the readers is to find a youtube clip of the Swedish porn movie.

here is a link that kind of back up the conversation

Where am i

I haven’t posted here for a while. I switching from using live journal as my rss aggregator to reader.google.com, so haven’t been on live journal as much. I also wanted a little more control over my blog, especially being able to view the logs so all my new entries are going to www.imacdonald.co.uk. I orginally thought I would do public type posts to imacdonald.co.uk and private stuff to livejournal, but that doesn’t seem to worked out that way.

So I figured I would do a post here to let people know I have moved. There is an rss feed available at https://www.imacdonald.co.uk/rss if you if you are using google reader or something similar.

Another one bites the dust

I have a number of maxtor (now seagate) 120 gig hard drives. I used to use them in my raid array till I got fed up replacing them every 3 months. I needed a hard disk for a test box and the only ting I had handy was was one of the left over 120gig hard disks. Yesterday I logged into the box and the root file system was readonly, kind of strange, maybe it was borked from distro upgrade. I rebooted and the box and ssh didn’t come back to life. I poked at the box this morning and found found it was kind of messed up. I booted the Seagate disk doctor tools and the first thing it reported was drive over heat. Not really surprising since these drive always ran hot, so I ran the disk diag tool, lots over errors

So the conclusion is official an other one bites the dust.

RIP Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 120GB ATA/133 HDD, last known successful diagnostics test 11/27/2005