Fall has OFFICIALLY arrived...

Every year, my mother and I can vegetable soup starter, with tomatoes from either my parents' garden, or my grandpa Pat's garden. Last summer, my grandpa died from cancer, and it was the first fall in a long time that I did not have time to help my mother can soup. She ended up not making any at all.

Two weeks ago, I went back to Manson to help her can soup, and incidentally, to celebrate my dad's 30th anniversary on the Manson Volunteer Fire Department. Actually, canning was just an excuse to explain why I was in Manson. The fire department was giving my dad a surprise party.

That afternoon, my dad showed me his garden. I had heard him talk about how big the tomato plants were getting, but the reality was unlike anything I had ever seen before.

In order to understand this story, I need to tell you a bit of family history.

For decades, my grandpa Pat, my dad's father, had the most amazing garden. Beautiful cabbages, onions, turnips, cantaloupe, strawberries, sweet corn, and above all, tomatoes. Just amazing. Not a weed dared poke up between the neat rows of fruits and vegetables. Every year, he shared this bounty with his children's families, and their extended circle of friends. We froze sweet corn and rhubarb, canned tomato juice, soup starter, salsa, and rhubarb jam to bring a taste of summer to our family throughout the harsh Iowa winters.

February of 2004, my grandpa started his seedlings for his garden, setting up grow-lights in his basement, tending them carefully until he planted them once the danger of frost had passed. We could not believe that he had done it himself.

All through that spring, the cancer and the chemo were weakening him. One lovely evening in early May, my birthday actually, I sat on my deck transplanting petunias of the most beautiful shade of pink I had ever seen. I remember the night like it was yesterday. The air was warm with just a hint of summer, and it was so peaceful to sit there with my hands in the warm dirt, pulling apart the roots, and pushing them into their new home. The only sounds were of the birds, and the traffic that occasionally passed. I was sad, because I knew that my grandpa was not doing very well. But, at the same, I felt so much at peace that I hoped the evening could go on forever.

The next day, my mom called to tell me that my grandpa had decided not to continue with his cancer treatments.

He grew weaker and weaker, finally unable to walk very far. During the last weeks, my dad and the rest of his siblings, worked on building a ramp in order to be able to take my grandpa out to see his garden. Finally, they were able to take him out to see it. A few days later, he lapsed into his final coma. By early Friday morning, he was gone.

The rest of the summer, my dad and his brother and sisters, worked to keep the garden going. Every time we ate something from that garden, it was like having a part of my grandpa with us, another memory would come rushing back. When the end of the summer came, I think it was like losing a final part of him.

This year, my uncle took over my grandpa's garden, but it wasn't the same.

My dad's garden, however...

I was stunned as I looked up at a cherry tomato plant the size of a tree. Eight feet tall. My dad had to stand two, three and a half foot high wire fence sections around it to help support it. The other cherry tomato plants were only six to seven feet tall... In the center of the garden stood four tomato plants that were also near eight feet tall. Dad had doubled up fencing around them, and placed metal rods between the plants, which branched out over them. The cucumber plants were vertical, also supported by fencing, the cucumbers hanging from the vines perfectly shaped. The green pepper plants were bushes, and had reproduced crazy amounts of peppers. The onions had not done very well, because of animals, but the rest of the tomato plants were also much bigger than normal, and bore gorgeous tomatoes, some massive, and others the size of large apples.

My jaw gaped the more I looked at how wonderfully everything had grown. My dad was so proud of his garden this year...

Sunday, my mom and I worked like crazy to cut up veggies, blanch the tomatoes, and finally cook the soup starter until all of the vegetables were done. We put a tablespoon of canning salt into each quart jar, and filled 18 jars with the soup. 45 minutes in a hot water bath to seal the jars, and after eight hours, we were done. If it didn't taste so good, we both agreed, we'd never even consider going to that much effort.

Before I left to go home, she gave me eight quarts of the old soup to take home (it's good for 3 years). This is the soup that we made two summers ago, when grandpa had recovered from his surgery, when my sister Kim and her husband had just gotten married, after my uncle Doug had just died from his cancer. These were made with tomatoes from my grandpa's and my dad's gardens. It was the best soup starter we had ever made (until this year, of course :).

Today, I made vegetable beef soup using one of those jars.

BTW...

As a follow up on last week's post about the severe weather:

We had a tornado touch down on campus! A small one, yes, but an actual tornado (and I thought I was just being paranoid about the fact that the radar showed a hook echo right over us, and that debris was hitting our fourth floor lab windows...).

(hmm... can't find the link to the news story that explained it all...)

Severe weather causes some damage on ISU campus

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Dreamweaver MX 2004 = Slow

I am typing this as I am waiting for typing that I did in Dreamweaver to show up. Now I am waiting for something to delete.

Tedious.

Another Mysterious Disappearance

My morning has been rather interesting. I will update later, but this mystery, rather than involving ATMs or Radmind, involves G4s, the Armory, and cut security cables.

More fun than a barrel of monkeys...

Mystery Solved

Well, there were actually two mysteries that developed this week.

One had to do with the Great ATM Heist of 2005. Yes, our ATM machine was stolen from the Atrium. Yes, they finally found the ditched machine. No, the thieves could not break into it. But enough about that, even though it's pretty interesting, and has been the subject of many CSI-like discussions among the staff.

The real mystery, the one that was critical to the labs, was why Tiger seemed to be a lot fussier than Panther when forced to shutdown via the power switch.

Basically, what happened was this. If a machine had to be shutdown by pressing the power button for 8 seconds, on boot, it would hang. I would have to boot into single-user mode, run fsck, and reboot. Which is not practical, as I am not here every hour that we are open. So, I started digging around as to what would cause this problem.

It ended up being traced to Journaling, or specifically, the lack thereof on these systems. For some reason, I did not turn on Journaling when I created the new lab image.

Luckily, it ended up being an easy fix (open Disk Utility, select the volume, turn on Journaling). Even luckier, this setting is evidentally stored in an area that Radmind ignores, so I was able to touch each machine, turn it on, and have it stick. If it HAD been in an area refreshed by Radmind, I STILL would have had to touch each machine, and it would have taken longer.

So, one mystery solved by Journaling.

The Great ATM Heist, however, is still under investigation...

And the Towers (Dorms) came down...

ISU Towers Implode Tuesday
Knapp and Storms to be imploded signaling the End of an Era

Woo hoo! We had a great view of the implosions from the roof of the Design College. I forgot the camera, so no action images (it was really over too quickly anyway), but you should be able to see a video from the first link I posted, and better photos on Thursday from the second site.

Thank you, kind maintenance people, for opening up the roof!!!

The Image is Done! For REAL this time!

Well, as I suspected, the keyserver problem decided to pop up again. So, I made a simple applescript that launches KeyAccess, logs in, and quits the program. I made it a startup item for labuser, and everything seems to be working properly now.

The image is TOTALLY DONE!!!! Woo hoo! I ended up having to repartition the smaller firewire drive (the image is 14GB), and am now cloning the 10.3.x boot drive of the larger firewire drive to the other drive. After lunch, I can finally start imaging the new machines.

It's been a long process this time around, and I have learned a lot more about radmind and Tiger as a result of attempting to find shortcuts (some of which worked, and some of which failed spectacularly). It's all about the Journey rather than the destination in IT.

But it feels great to finally get there.

Arg!

And it's worse when you hit the Enter key on accident!!!

Plea to software manufacturers

Entering 8 sets of 27 numbers and letters may make your product serial numbers secure, but it drives poor IT people insane.

WT?

I just checked the image, and it appears that the keyserver problem I was having has

VANISHED!!!!!!!

Keyed apps launch normally now! Don't ask why, because I have no idea. I literally did nothing to this to even attempt to fix the problem. Which means, I will now be paranoid that the problem will appear sometime later down the road, like say... when fall classes start...

Boy, are my arms tired...

(not just the punchline to a bad joke, or, uh, not just our patrol yell from Outdoor leader training)

Moved:
• 20 G4s and flat-panel displays (etc.) out of position in teaching lab
• 20 G5s, flat-panels, keyboards, mice, power cords, out of open lab to teaching lab

Cleaned:
• all of teaching lab, even swept under the cabinet-thingys, and cleaned off the windowsills (which can only properly be done when there are no machines to block access, so GROSSSSSS).

Done: Image. At last. At least the part I needed for the netrestore image. Everything else will be done Monday morning, before I start unpacking and setting up the new G5s.

Result: I can hardly move my arms, but WOW! The teaching lab looks great!!!

tedium continues...

keyserver is not logging in on login like it is supposed to (did that make sense?). So, the choice is, ditch it (which is not possible), or go ahead and key everything, keeping backups of unkeyed software, and trust that I can write a script which will work around this problem.

Right now, I am going with the second choice, but it is annoying to have it not work right. If I can't get this to work, I can replace the keyed programs with the unkeyed backups.

In any case, this is taking a very long time to get this image built. As in, I am normally done in a day, and this is now day three of intense work on this...

Whoa.

I have been meaning to actually watch Battlestar Gallactica for quite awhile now, instead of just intending to watch it, and missing it. I missed the initial new movie, for some reason, and have just not gotten around to watching any of season one.

Until tonight.

Whoa.

Okay, that's not the word I used, but "Holy f-ing sh-t" was said enough by me earlier...

Sci-fi channel is having a marathon of all of the season one episodes, and while I am not sure where I jumped in, I spent from 8:30 to 10 pm, glued to the tv. I know how I'll be spending my Friday nights from now on. (Except, perversely, the 15th, which is the season premiere, as I'll be with my son at the local bookstore for the midnight premiere of the new Harry Potter book...)

In any case, I can't believe that I wasted so many Friday nights...

saved

by this handy dandy vi reference...

vi Reference.

Photoshop was the culprit...

...

okay, STILLLLLLL trying to even get to the line in my systemtranscript... tedious. dull. oh god my hand hurts from keeping my fingers on the control and f keys... why did Tiger axe the real man page for vi and put in its place a page that has fewer command references than the panther one did? And going to the end of the file did not help, as now I can't remember the command to go back by page, and am stuck using the arrow key....

So help me if the offending line is not in this transcript (a copy WAS in the indesign one, but removing it did not help), you will hear a scream echo throughout the atrium of the design building...

I guess I should add to that last post...

Erg. I noticed on the last couple of transcripts that three lines were added about /User/xxx/.Trash. Turns out, something added something to the trash that persisted even when I emptied the trash... Which means I now have the distinct delight of going into the command line to examine each of the five transcripts (with over 10K lines each, some many, many more), to find out which has the offending lines...

Still uploading...

After determining that I really needed to audit my radmind server, I sat down yesterday and spent a couple of hours figuring out what transcripts are being used, which will be retired after I update to Tiger or move machines, and which can be deleted altogether. I ended up being able to reclaim about 5 GB of space, which is good, as I will need it for the rest of the Tiger image.

Now, the "hurry up and wait" part starts. I will install each software package, run it one time, check for updates, and then create a new transcript to upload the software to the radmind server (takes anywhere from 10 minutes, to 20). Once it is at the server, I update it and check it in, then verify it, before adding it to the correct command file. Back on the client, I run radmind update, which checks that the new transcript applies okay, and then reboots the machine.

And then I start over with the next software package.

In the down times, I am planning how exactly to shift 60 machines with the least amount of disruption possible. I am also trying to figure out just where those 20 machines from the teaching lab are going to be stored while waiting to be installed elsewhere.

Hmmm... maybe I had better go and clean out the back storage room a bit more...

To clarify...

I spent the entire extended weekend away from the computer (barring checking email and reading blogs). In fact, I spent a good part of it chasing after my 8-month-old nephew, who suddenly learned how to crawl, and is hell-bent on staying OUT of his diaper the moment it comes off.

Let's just say his nickname isn't "Bamm-Bamm" for nothing...

Duh...

Once again, a couple of days away from the problem helps make things clear.

I was making this whole kerberized-login thing harder than it is. Tiger eliminated the need for editing /etc/authorization. Just install the MacOS X Kerberos Extras, install the ISU kerberos config file, and pop in your LDAP configuration changes, and do the rest of the voodoo magic, reboot, and it works.

Of course, I tried this after emailing the macosx admin group for info on when 10.4.2 is due.

Now I can plan on installing those new G5s later this week!!!!