Bikerscum - Patrick St. Jean

Last year, at Art In The Square over at Southlake Town Square I found a watercolor artist named Preston Steed who pained a piece called "You Blinked". The little boy in it bears a striking resemblance to my son and so I had to have a copy. I recently found his business card and placed the order. It arrived today and is now out at Michael's getting framed.

Link: http://www.patriotguard.org/

I had the chance to go on a Patriot Guard mission this morning and took it. The Patriot Guard are a group of motorcyclists and non-riders who attend fallen servicemen and womens' funerals at the invitation of the family to show respect to them and to ensure that their mourning is not interrupted by protesters.

It was an extremely emotional and moving day, one that words really do fail to describe. You'll have to be there to understand. And I strongly suggest you find a mission near you and take the time to give something back to the family of someone who gave everything for us.

Link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0259324/

I cut out around lunch time to go see Ghost Rider over at the Harkins in Southlake. It seems like 2007 is the year for comic book movies and Ghost Rider certainly is that. The special effects were great, I don't think that the movie could have been made even a few years ago.

The story revolves around Johnny Blaze, who makes a deal with the devil and becomes his bounty hunter. It's really the beginning of the story as we see him becoming the Ghost Rider for the first time and learning to use his powers.

There are, obviously, a lot of motorcycles in the movie and it was refreshing to see the Sportster featured so prominently.

As some of you may have noticed, I took an outage yesterday to upgrade the OS on the main server from Fedora Core 4 to Core 6. I've been planning this one for a while and decided to go a different route with the upgrade. In the past I've bought new hardware and installed on it, copying the data over and for the most part running in parallel. I decided not to do that this time because a. I'm cheap, and b. the hardware in place handles the load just fine.

Because of that I needed to come up with a different plan, and thankfully I have 1.5 terabytes of NAS sitting here on a gig-e network. So I used rsync to back up the entire filesystem, verified that it was there and looking good, and then did a fresh install. It was a little scary, but worked out well. In fact, I think it went faster than the previous attempts.

I had the usual problem, such as getting SELinux tuned correctly, but for the most part it went off without any major issues.

Some words of advice, plan carefully. Make a list of what you've got to do to complete the migration and in what order. That list will be missing steps but they'll be minor. Update the list when you find missing steps so that you'll be better prepared next time.

Parallels just released release candidate 2 of version 2.5 of their x86 virtualization software and the last thing that was making me keep a Windows box around is finally working reliably.

I can now connect my Garmin GPSMap 60C to the virtualized Windows instance and successfully send and receive all data from it. No more USB conflicts, no more frustration.

And best of all, no more Windows box. I can finally shut it down for good. Good bye and good riddance!