My friend (mother to my godson) asked me to play at her father's funeral today. I, of course, said that I would. I did warn her, however, that neither she nor her sister would ever be able to listen to "Amazing Grace" on a bagpipe without crying (or at least getting seriously misty) again.

Playing funerals is not an easy job to begin with. Compound that issue with the fact that you knew the person it's for. Yes, I knew her dad too. He'll be sorely missed.

RIP, EBS. I hope I honored you appropriately.

It's not like I wasn't expecting it... but when you move a SCSI AIT-2 tape drive from an older machine to a dual-core Xeon with a RAID, you expect equivalent performance.

Wrong.

Backups that were completing within a day were now taking 4 days.

The solution? the --block-size=n option to cpio, where the block size is n * 512 bytes.

By setting it to be the transfer rate (found via cat /proc/scsi/aic7xx/1 on this machine), it completed in about 2 hours.

You would think someone would've built the smarts into commands like cpio, tar, and dd to do some kind of calculation on best performance instead of using some tiny number that works if you're only looking to back up a single, small file.

Here's a news quote from some suit in some official capacity out in the California area:

"The tack they're taking is a particularly troubling one," [Tom] Wilson [of the Canal Alliance] said. "They're painting illegal day workers as criminals, making generalizations about a group of people."

The sheer idiocy and illogic in the above statement explains a lot about the current condition in this country. Come on, what does he think "illegal" means, "sick bird"?

I get to referee a hockey game at The Phone Booth, er, MCI Center. Some of my friends from a local league asked me to be a referee for an "exhibition" game they're doing Sunday evening. This means I get to watch the Craps get beat up on by Tampa Bay.

OK, the guys are with the two worst teams from this past season's beginner league at the rink I normally play at, but it will be fun anyway.

Wonder if I can get my team to do something similar so we can play one of our league games there...

... just wish we did better than 4th place.

Oh well, maybe next year.

WOO!

NJ Devils win the season opener at home. With all the hype about this year's number one draft pick, Sidney Crosby, another rookie ends up doing a whole lot better... Zach Parise.

It's fun... look at the Canadian media, and it's "Crosby nets point in season opener to Devils." I look on an NJ site, and I see "Devils rookie steals spotlight." He scored a goal and got an assist, vs Crosby only getting an assist.

OK, so this isn't techie stuff... but you gotta start with something.

Busy night ahead of me...

Bagpipe lesson at 7... referee a hockey game at 10:40. The weekend tournament in Toronto should be fun, though. :)