During one of these courses, we had to write a poem… in french.
At that time, this young (±14y-old) stubborn little fellow, still not willing to put a lot of effort into whatever cruel french-teaching tactics they would force on him.
We had to write a poem about love, in one hour, and I didn’t want to do it.
I just wrote down what came up in my head at that time.

Reading this poem again after all these years, I think it is marvelous.

Je n’ai pas envie d’ecrire un poème
Le sujet?
Ce n’est pas la mème

On doit écrire sur l’amour
Pendant un seul cours

Ce n’est pas pratique
Parce que je sais rien
De la romantique!

As I’m waiting for the piano-playing powers, I decided to be prepared for when that talent kicks in and go buy sunglasses.
Too bad Billy Stickles’ designs are’t for (affordable) sale no more.
So I went for Ray Ban, as it also has some Ray in it.
Don’t be confused here… Ray Ban has absolutely nothing to do with Ray Charles.
Ray Ban makes products that ban sun-rays from your eyes…

I used to know only one kind of sunglasses: That pair of glasses that are darkened to deflect sun.
Turns out they have quite some types.
These are the groups I manage to distinguish now:

•  Cheap sunglasses ( < 10 euros) : They make everything look dark. Are made of light non-durable plastic and don’t live to see another year.
• Expensive sunglasses (50 – 150 euros) : They make everything look dark. There come with excessive branding-powers, have a box fully printed with the finest of marketing farms.
• Ultra expensive sunglasses ( 150 – 3500 euros) : They make every product look as good as on the commercials. Come with excessive branding-powers, have a box fully printed with the finest of marketing farms. Give you the power to brag about the price-tag of your eyewear to nearly 99% of the people you’ll encounter while wearing it. Almost all of them have something about airplanes in their descripton. They come with more technical specs than you get when you go out to buy a computer. They make you panic every 2 minutes when you can’t feel/see them where you left them (tshirt, pocket, wherenot…).

I ended up with the third kind.
Yes, this is the bragging part.
I went for the Ray Ban  RB8307 aka Ray-Ban® “Aviator™” TECH” and a bunch of letters and numbers…

Ray Ban – RB8307

I did actually buy them because, they were the only sunglasses that fitted my face… (It’s became too fat).
Only by googling it, I found out that a part of it is made of Carbon Fiber…
Why would someone care about Carbon Fiber in his sunglasses? Because regular plastic or rubber is too heavy? What’s next? Silk? Or is that not expensive enough?

One of the options is a polarized lens with anti-reflective technology and a hydro-oleophobic coating…
I have to say, this is the first time I have bought polarized sunglasses… and it’s awesome.
All LCD displays you look at, look like an LSD party on their own.
All the other things look just beautiful, not just darkened.

I learned that the Hydro-oleophobic coat is actually something that my Samsung Galaxy SII and iPhone have as well… they are scared of fat.
To be honest… Never noticed it on any of these products. They all have greasy  fingerprints all over them.

Conclusion: They are over-expensive for just a set of sunglasses. But they do whatever I expected them to do… Give my eyes a break whenever the sun gets out.
I think the cheaper polarized models will do the job just as fine. But they didn’t fit me as well as this one.

It’s not my goal to get the cheapest, but the most expandable solution, both in storage as in ways of functions.

This is what I came up with:

• Casing – Lian Li PC-Q25
• Motherboard – ASUS P8H77-I
• CPU – Intel® Core™; i3-2125
• Mem – 8GB Kingston Value RAM KVR1333D3N9K2/8G
• Powersuply – Antec EA-450 Platinum 450W
• HDD – 3x Seagate ST3000DM001 (3TB)

At first, I was thinking of setting up a softraid 5 configuration.
But then I found out about ZFS for linux.  So I might try this first.

I’m going to think this over a few times. Will check out other disks, other raid-solutions, an SSD as ZFS Cache etc…
The cool thing is, later, whenever I have a good TV, I can just cram some tv card in there, so I won’t even need to stream all content over the network

Sounds good? Leave your comments below

De weg kwijt…

Een man vliegt in een heteluchtballon boven het land en beseft dat hij verdwaald is.
Hij ziet beneden een man lopen en daalt tot hij binnen gehoorafstand is…
“Neem me niet kwalijk,” roept hij, “Kunt u mij misschien helpen? Ik heb mijn vriend beloofd hem een half uur geleden ergens te ontmoeten, maar ik weet niet waar ik ben!”

De man beneden antwoordt: “Ja. U bent in een heteluchtballon en zweeft ongeveer 10 meter boven de grond. U bevindt zich tussen de 40 en 42 graden noorderbreedte en tussen de 58 en 60 graden westerlengte.”
“U bent zeker een Systeem Beheerder” zegt de man in de heteluchtballon. “Inderdaad” zegt de ander, “maar hoe weet u dat?”
“Nou”, zegt de man in de ballon: “alles wat u zegt is technisch gesproken juist, maar ik heb helemaal niets aan die informatie. En al met al ben ik nog steeds verdwaald.”

De man op de grond kijkt peinzend omhoog en zegt: “U bent zeker manager?” “Dat klopt”, zegt de man in de ballon: “maar hoe weet u dat?” “Eenvoudig. U heeft geen idee waar u bent. U weet al helemaal niet waar u naartoe gaat. U heeft iets beloofd terwijl u geen idee heeft hoe u die belofte moet waarmaken en u verwacht van mij dat ik uw probleem oplos. U verkeert nog steeds in dezelfde positie als voor wij elkaar ontmoetten, maar op een of andere manier is het nu ineens mijn schuld.”

A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: “Excuse me, can you help me?” I promised my friend I would meet him somewhere, half an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The man below says: “Yes, you’re in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above this field. You are located between the 40°N and 42°N and between the 58°W and 60°W.”

You must be a SysAdmin” says the balloonist.
“I am” replies the man. “How did you know.”
“Well,” says the balloonist, “everything you have told me is technically correct, but it’s no use to me. I’m still lost.”

The man below says “you must be in management.”
“I am” replies the balloonist, “but how did you know?”
“Well,” says the man, “you don’t know where you are, or where you’re going. You made a promise you din’t know how to meet, but you expect me to fix it. You’re in the same position you were before we met, but now it’s my fault.”

But it’s too late.
The connection is lost and the machine has no wake on lan…
Now you have to get out of your chair, find those damned pants and go all the way up to the attic to switch it back on.

No one likes this horrible situation. So Molly-guard is here to save the day.
Molly-guard is is a bunch of scripts that capture the halt, reboot, shutdown and poweroff  commands and give you a second chance.
By checking if the tty has been created by sshd, it checks whether you’re logged on from a remote machine.
If that’s the case, molly asks you the hostname of the machine you want to shut down.
If the hostname you entered does not match the hostname where Molly is running on, you’re saved

You might think this is a silly tool, but after a long time of silence, I’m back to using my home server and just saw this screen:

A little cool thing to know:

A shield to prevent tripping of some Big Red Switch by clumsy or ignorant hands. Originally used of the plexiglass covers improvised for the BRS on an IBM 4341 after a programmer’s toddler daughter (named Molly) frobbed it twice in one day. Later generalized to covers over stop/reset switches on disk drives and networking equipment. In hardware catalogues, you’ll see the much less interesting description “guarded button”.

– http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/molly-guard.html

Molly-guard man page from ubuntu: here