Here's a great article on couch surfing. I gave Phil some advice when he embarked on his bicycle trip across America last year. (The article got his trip stats wrong--he did 90 miles a day!) I wish couch surfing had been around when Eric and I did our bike trip. We probably would have met a lot more people that way. I guess we'll have to do it again one of these days...

I just released version 1.53 of Presto's Hard Drive Monitor. Check it out if you're into such things!

It's been a tumultuous week for our aquarium. I added a six-line wrasse, a Clarkii clown, 20 turbo snails, 10 crabs, a sand-sifting cucumber, a lettuce nudibranch, and two clams. Everybody seems to be doing well except for one of the clams which died after one day and the cucumber which died after four days.

I also arranged all the cabling and tubes to better integrate a Red Sea Wavemaster. And removed a ton of algae from the tank.

All of which is making the tank look better than it's looked in a long time. Unfortunately, all of the commotion caused some stress on one of the longest tank residents, a yellow tang named Scotty. I found him dead in the tank after work. R.I.P., Scotty.

If you are in the market for a new Windows laptop, it's hard to beat the Best Buy Blue Label Toshiba. I've bought over a dozen laptops for work in the past two months, and the Toshiba is my favorite overall. And at $799, it's a steal...

Sunshine *** : Makes me nostalgic for 2001: A Space Odyssey. Well filmed, but impossible physics and some ridiculous plot gyrations cost this movie a star.

If you're doing tax loss harvesting, this guide may come in handy: Approximating Total Stock Market.

I upgraded my Linksys router from DD-WRT to Tomato today. I like Tomato's clean interface and superior QoS capabilities. If Tomato runs on your hardware, check it out!

Das Leben der Anderen ***** : Must-see movie about East Germany's secret police. I was originally turned on to this movie by an article in Wired, Piecing Together the Dark Legacy of East Germany's Secret Police.

Hot Cartoon Makes Understanding Credit Crisis Simple And Fun: Educational and entertaining. Well worth 11 minutes to go and watch it!

Rocky Mountain News prints final edition: This makes me very sad. Newspapers are on life support right now and this is something we all should be worried about!

It's interesting that the government has decided to bail out the financial and automotive industries but not the newspaper industry. I would argue that newspapers are just as essential to the functioning of our society as either of those industries!

1.4 gigapixel picture of Obama's inaugural address. I wasted a lot of time today zooming in on the faces in the audience. The user snapshots are pretty interesting (and funny at times).

Mort *** : Personification of Death in Discworld.

I've been using the Windows 7 beta for a few weeks now. It's a winner! The Bumper List of Windows 7 Secrets from MSDN Blogs has a great walk-through of some of the new features. It's awesome to see Microsoft adding so many tweaks for power users.

King of Kong ***** : Donkey Kong documentary. Watch out for those barrels!

Cod ***** : The cod is responsible for everything! I'm a sucker for fish and economics books like this.

As somebody who regularly uses the word "monkey", I took particular interest in this article: Your Boss is a Monkey. Good tips on the use of the least-reinforcing scenario.

Gmail just keeps getting better and better. Some time back, I noticed that Google added the ability to view PDF attachments right in your browser (they are converted into HTML pages). Since launching Acrobat is always a pain, I love that feature.

Today I noticed that if somebody sends you an mp3 attachment, you can play it straight from Gmail without downloading and launching an external media player... very cool!

Study looks to link male names with criminality: "Poor Ernest and Preston, they were doomed from birth." One of the comments below the story from a fellow Preston sums it up perfectly: Aw, nuts! (Thanks for the link Eric!)

Equal Rites **** : Making my way through the Discworld novels. You gotta love Granny Weatherwax!

I'm trying out my friend Greg's new service, GeoBadger:

<img alt="GeoBadger" src="http://www.geobadger.com/gb/smallbadge?l=AaztAAV3CAAAAR8vYWcdQ379sn7LDucyTpv%2F5%2BBfWxBxg%2BruC5Jr%2FDtHxLy%2ByCM%3D" / >

Lookin' good, Greg!

Buying Myself a Birthday Present: I wonder what it must be like to be able to spend $20,000 on a watch!

I set up my first Linux KVM (kernel-based virtual machine) this week. It was a lot easier than I was expecting (using Ubuntu 8.04).

Using KVM for virtualization is nice because it uses a lot fewer system resources (RAM in particular) than hosted hypervisors such as VirtualBox or VMWare. Plus installation is quicker and easier. And performance is probably superior.

The official Ubuntu documentation on installing KVM was very useful. I followed it almost exactly. There is also a decent HowtoForge KVM tutorial. One tip is that you don't need to specify the "qemu:///system" in the virsh commands (e.g., "virsh list" or "virsh start ubuntu" work just fine on my system).

If you are running Linux, I highly recommend checking it out! It's very cool.

Here's a nice Python class for implementing daemons under Linux. It has start, stop, and restart methods and creates a PID file.

I'm moving Samsung onto my list of companies with great customer service. I returned a failed hard drive to them last week, and I've already received the brand new replacement drive!

A tale of data loss, narrowly averted

Last week, my file server started behaving very erratically. I checked the logs, and found lots of seek errors for one of the hard drives. Uh oh!

I fired up smartmontools to check the drive's SMART stats. Sure enough, the drive was reporting a lot of nasty errors. To prevent further errors, I immediately unmounted the filesystem. I intended to remount it read-only, but it refused!

I ran xfs_repair (this is an XFS file system) and partially through the test, heard that most dreaded of sounds for a hard drive owner: clicking.

Some Googling led me to consider trying the freezer trick. People say this works if your head is stuck. Going down this path seems like a one-way street though. So I decided to run the badblocks command first. This reported only about 50 bad blocks total on the entire HD.

Unlike some other file systems, XFS does not have the ability to repair bad blocks. At first I thought this was a deficiency, but now I think that's the best approach. By isolating the defective drive and doing as few destructive write operations as possible, you will stand the highest chance of recovering data from the drive.

I decided to simply buy another drive of the exact same size and make an exact image of the defective drive onto the new one. dd_rescue is a great tool for doing this. After about 6 hours, I had an exact replica of the old drive, sans the defective blocks. (The data onthe defective blocks is lost forever, of course.)

I pulled the old drive, inserted the new drive in its place, rebooted, and everything is great! I used xfs_repair to repair the missing data.

(Lest you worry, all my truly important data is backed up in at least two separate places, so I was never in danger of losing anything precious. But data loss of any kind is always a pain, if only because of the time wasted trying to figure out what you've lost.)

In summary:

• Don't panic!
• Immediately stop writing to the damaged drive. If possible, put it in hardware read-only mode (i.e., smartctl).
• Run badblocks on the unmounted drive to see how bad the damage is.
• If the drive works, but just has a lot of bad blocks, then get another drive of the same size (or larger) and use dd_rescue to create a copy.
• Re-mount the copied drive in your system and run whatever filesystem repair tools you have to.
• If the damaged drive has no life at all, then try the freezer trick... what else do you have to lose?!
• Have a good backup strategy for all of your data!

Light Fantastic **** : More Discworld goodness (second book in the series). Long live The Luggage!

I learned the other day that one of my favorite restaurants in Portland, Genoa, closed last November after 38 years, a victim of the bad economy. I remember my first (and, unfortunately, only) meal there about 10 years ago. It was my indoctrination into truly excellent service and food. The hefty bill kept me from going back, but I thoroughly enjoyed it nonetheless and always vowed to go back and treat myself to a meal there every so often. I guess I won't get the chance now. A good lesson to take advantage of things you like before they're gone forever.

The Slate Buyout Guide: $5.6 trillion in 2008. Whoah!!! I thought it was $700 billion. Big difference.

To whomever sent me an invite to the Mugasha private beta - thanks! It's pretty cool. I've been looking for a good way to listen to electronica at work. Especially now that I've exhausted the entropy in Pandora and am listening to the same tracks over and over.

Public data sets on Amazon Web Services are very cool.

Interesting article from the New York Times on Printing Money - and Its Price. And I found this interesting site, zFacts, that had a nice national debt graph. I'll have to look into this zFacts site more, it looks interesting.

I finally got around to posting our 2008 holiday letter. I still need to sort through the photos for most of the year and post those, but I figured it's getting pretty late so I needed to get that letter out!

We picked up an Evolve RoadRunner showerhead at Costco last weekend ($28). I love this product! You turn it on and it allows the cold water to run until the hot water starts to flow. Then it automatically shuts off the water flow until you pull the cord. Obviously this saves on energy costs by not running the hot water unnecessarily. But I also love that I can tell exactly when the shower is ready by listening for the water to stop.

I was a little skeptical about how well it would work. But after a week of use, I'm extremely satisfied with it. The ShowerStart feature works flawlessly. And it has a very strong pressure even though it's a low-flow showerhead. Highly recommended.

My 2008 in cities (in approximate chronological order):

• Las Vegas
• San Diego
• Phoenix
• Shanghai
• Sedona, AZ
• Grand Canyon
• San Jose/Bay Area (*)
• Dallas
• Leavenworth, WA
• Seattle
• Anacortes, WA
• Eastsound, WA
• Friday Harbor, WA
• Bend, OR
• Manila (*)
• Puerto Princessa, Philippines
• El Nido, Philippines
• Coron, Philippines

One or more nights spent in each place. Cities marked with * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days. A lot less travel than last year!

With the rising temperatures, the heavy rains are quickly melting the once-in-a-generation snowpack that has coated Portland for the past two weeks. As the snow melts, I find myself a little sad to see it go. Here are a few highlights, most of these are first-timers!

• Skiing down my street and around my neighborhood (pictures)
• Cross country skiing with Aimee across town to Ben and Annie's house (pictures)
• Sledding down the big hill by Chapman Elementary School, including a 7-person "sled train" with the Big House gang (pictures)
• Hiking through a blizzard for dinner at Macaroni Grill downtown
• Meeting neighbors and other fun-seeking indivudals while doing everything listed above
• The universal camaraderie all around town in dealing with nature's adversity
• Having an actual white Christmas (complete with fresh snow fall)

I love the use of "localvore" and "global positioning system" in this Willamette Week review of Lucier:

One group of Portland diners that'll be tsk-tsking at Lucier: locavores, who are sure to wonder about Chureau's heavy use of air-freight ingredients, from East Coast seafood to Japanese Wagyu beef (offered at $25 an ounce) and calendar-defying dishes. In June, for example, Lucier featured a special menu based on heirloom tomatoes and, later in the month, one spotlighting black mission figs (both menus were $100)--both barely in season in California then, let alone Oregon. As for me, I like a restaurant menu to serve as a kind of global positioning system, telling me where I'm at and what month I'm in. Lucier fails that test.

We enjoyed a nice snowy walk to East India Co. yesterday for lunch. My Indian friends at work say it's currently the best Indian food in Portland. I had the $6 lunch special--it was good! Nice ambiance, good service. I'll be adding it to our regular restaurant rotation.

We've been challenging ourselves this year by seeing how long we could go before turning on the heat at the condo. We amazed ourselves by making it well into December. But the brutally cold temperatures this week finally forced us (on Monday) to power up the furnace. It's nice to have the heat back, but it was also empowering to be able to go without it!

I'm really mad at American Airlines right now. They suck! I just learned that they deducted 40,000 miles from my frequent flier account due to inactivity. No warning letter. Just a big deduction. Thanks for nothing American Airlines.

With customer retention policies like this, it's no wonder American Airlines is ailing. I'll certainly make every effort to avoid flying with them ever again.

The Onion sums it up well, as they often do: American Airlines Now Charging Fees To Non-Passengers

A Wildlife Mystery in Vietnam: I always get very sad when I read about a species's being driven to extinction due to habitat loss.

Just got a letter from Comcast saying that, starting in January, I'm going to be getting 12 Mbps down and 2 Mbps up ($43/month package). Sweet! I've got to hand it to Comcast. They don't just rest on their laurels and pocket the money but actually seem to reinvest and bring new capabilities to customers. And given that FiOS isn't available in my area, I'm especially grateful that they're keeping up in the Internet access arms race!

Good article on what drives housing prices: Why You Can't Afford a House in San Francisco.

I've always liked reverse polish notation.

I learned about it in high school and became addicted in college. My trusty HP48 calculator helped me through four years of engineering classes but left me unable to use a regular calculator! Seriously.

If you think about it, "regular" calculators are very counterintuitive. Sometimes they operate infix (such as "2 + 3 =" to get 5) and other times RPN (such as "4 sqrt" to get 2) and still other times in some sort of funky prefix (such as "2 + 3 = + 4" to get 9). And don't get me started on the memory functions (MR, MC, etc.). I'm surprised anybody can use a regular calculator.

Which brings me to the point of this post: I can't use the built-in calculators that come with Windows, Ubuntu, Mac, etc. I used to emulate the HP48 using Emu48, but the performance wasn't that great. Last week, I found grpn. Simple, fast, and beautiful RPN elegance. All I need now is a Windows version...

Let's say you have some cash in the bank and want to chase higher interest rates. While your money is being transferred between banks, you won't be earning any interest.

I derived this formula that takes into account the lost interest and tells you how many days you'll have to have your money in the new bank before you start making more money versus leaving it in your old bank:

days = (transfer time in days) * (old rate)/(new rate - old rate)

So, for example, if you're currently getting 2.67% and want to know if it makes sense to move your money to a bank offering 3.5%, and the transfer takes 10 days:

10*2.67/(3.5 - 2.67) = 32 days

So that's 32 days the money has to be in your new bank (on top of the 10 days transfer time) before it'll be worth the hassle.

The literal video version of Take On Me, one of my favorite 80's songs/videos, is very creative! I think I like the lyrics to this version more than the original. I'm looking for more literal video versions, but haven't found any yet... hopefully this isn't a one-hit wonder like a-ha.

Want to understand the current economic crisis threatening to blow up the civilized world as we know it? Two very well produced This American Life episodes can help.

By now, everybody knows that the catalyst was the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. To understand that, listen to The Giant Pool of Money.

Once you've gotten your head around sub-prime, continue on to Another Frightening Show About the Economy. (This is the better of the two shows in my opinion.)

In return for a two-hour time investment, you should get a pretty good understanding of how we got here.

I saw this over on bogleheads.org: Notes from the Diehards VII Reunion. Current thoughts and advice from Jack Bogle, the guy that started the Vanguard Group.

I got a chuckle out of a quote I saw today on iGoogle: "There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." By Richard Feynman. Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

Great entry on electoral-vote.com today on the Comparative Election Turnouts Among Countries: "While Americans like to think of the U.S. as the world's best example of a democracy, if one uses voter turnout as the metric, the data show a different picture."

This saddens me greatly. When I was on jury duty earlier this year, the judge who welcomed us at juror check-in gave an impassioned speech on how serving on a jury is the only requirement our country places on women and one of only two requirements (in addition to possibly being drafted) that are placed on men.

I would add voting to the list of things "required" of a good citizens. This quote from Elie Wiesel says it all: "Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

Unfortunately, as the table shows, far too many people (like my friend J.S.) sit on the sidelines and skirt their responsibilities, both in elections and jury service!

I'm not sure my little rant here will change anything, but it felt good to get that off my chest :)

As one of the "suckers" described in the article, I found this Motley Fool article on Bailout: The Sucker Punch to be spot on.