The Samurai has been tore down since Thanksgiving. I have the front Toyota axle under it now, but I’m missing a sprint top plate. I’m going to steel one off the old Chevy. I also have the 6.5:1 transfer case with twin-stick installed.

Things I have left to do on it are:
1) Steering drag link.
2) Rear axle.
3) Break lines.
4) Drive shafts.
5) Repair busted Birfield.
6) Remount tires on new rims.

After that, I’ll be back on the trails. It’s probably only a days worth of work to get it going again, but I just haven’t been motivated to work on it. I go out there, mess around for awhile, then bail.

Next weekend I’ll be helping Dr. Smash move to his new shop, so maybe the weekend after that I’ll have it finished.

It’s really, really raining! This is awesome…. We are going to have new trails this year!

Why is it that Unix has such difficulty with network mounted filesystems? You mount a remote filesystem and if that remote system goes down then your desktop stops functioning also. Even Mac OS X has this problem. Can’t open apps, can’t close apps, can’t unmount the share, can’t list the directories, nothing but power off and reboot. Even if the share comes back online, it still blows up your desktop.

Windows doesn’t do that. Ahh, MS Windows. The slightest breeze will blow it up, but loosing a filesystem does nothing to it. It just happily unmounts it and goes one with it’s day.

I’ve tried CIFS/SMB, AFP, and NFS. They all do the same thing. I guess I should get a different gigabit card for my NAS. One that doesn’t timeout constantly when set to Jumbo Frames.

My friend Dave is building a new desktop system. So I offer to sell him my dual 500GB drives so I could buy a 1TB USB drive and a Airport Extreme. So that’s all good and he brings over his computer parts and I order up my stuff.

Well, Monday night Jane brings home our new Airport Extreme and I start setting everything up. I format my USB drives that I received a few days before and started copying over all my data.

Things didn’t go so well. Over the network it was going very slow, but I was OK with that. The next day I find that the copy was still going. All day the copy was going. The next day I gave up on that. So I pulled the NAS out of the rack and brought it into the office. I plug the USB into the NAS and try to mount the drive.

Nope, the NAS software can’t read Apple partitions. So I boot Ubuntu on the drive. After a few hours of hacking around and figuring out how to mount the HFS drive and another bit of time figuring out how to mount the FreeBSD UFS2 drives I get the thing copying. Then it stops. Restart…. crash… The thing just kept losing the connection on the USB.

The next day I finally get everything copied over and notice that the fan isn’t working in the USB drive. The USB drive was getting very hot. The fan in the back was not working. I’m thinking to myself, “it’s probably something simple like it’s not plugged in.” I could just open it up and fix it myself, but there is a do-not-open sticker on it. Lame.

I shoot a email off to the support asking about fixing the drive. The next day, I still haven’t heard anything back. So, I open it. The fsck’n power wires for the drives are pushed into the fan blades. Lame. So I fix it up and notice some jumpers. I get the user manual for the drive and found out it for setting striping or spanning modes. It’s set for spanning. I figure that striping would be faster access to the drive. So off I go changing things. I set it for striping and
finally get it repartitioned.

So I built up Dave’s system because it has the USB 2.0 ports on it and my old NAS didn’t. I pull the drives from my NAS and put them into the new system and plug in my USB drive. The copy went much faster this time… except it’s still dropping the USB connection. Peeved I continue restarting and copying.

Finally I get the dam thing done, Thursday night. I connect it to the Airport and everything seems fine. I kick on my Time Machine backup and let it go for the night.

The next day, Time Machine was locked up. ARG! It also locked up my Finder and my Airport. Reboot everything, and it’s working again. Start Time Machine… a few hours go by and it locks up again.

All day I messed with this dam thing trying to get it to work. I reformatted it 50 times. I did everything I could think of and still it’s locking up left and right.

Finally I copy everything back onto the Linux system. The copy went perfect. I setup an RMA to send it back, but I start reading the return policy for EagleTech. It says that if they don’t find anything wrong with it they will charge me $45. Well, I know exactly what’s going to happen. They are going to fool with it for 10 minutes and say everything is fine.

Well, I have set it back to spanning and formatted it using Linux. Now I have it blank and bare connected to my Mac doing my Time Machine backup over USB. It’s going very fast and so far so good.

I’m going to finish the backup then plug it into Dave’s Linux box and copy all my files back onto it. If it locks up one more time I’m done with it.

I think I’ll try to order a new controller card for it and replace it myself. That way I won’t have to mess with EagleTech support.

Oh, and they tested the drive before they shipped it. The checked off everything, but they didn’t check the cooling fan. Lamers.

I should just build my own stuff for now on.

Our power is off again. It’s only our street, again. It’s the same power pole, AGAIN!

As I sit here in the dark, again, and look around at my neighbors down the street enjoying their lights and TV, I wonder what it is about our street that loses power for what seems like every month. Is there a bad transformer that needs to be replaced? A bad circuit breaker? Why can’t it be fixed? Are we overloaded and need another transformer?

It wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for my Internet business. Actually, it’s not that bad because I have learned that the power is not the most reliable here. I have eight hours of backup power for my web servers.

Today has been especially trying. ATT internet was down during business hours today and my company lost $30k in revenue because of it. Not even five hours after getting my internet connection restored the power goes out.

It’s been a nice day.

Coming back from wheeling doing like 40 on a dirt road and my front end locks up. That was fun. After stopping really fast we checked things out. Unlocked the front hubs and continued home.

Tomorrow I’m going to put it up on the stands and pull the front end apart. Sucks.

I hope it’s not the R&P, but it’s probably going to be that. All well, I have three more. I guess I’ll find out tomorrow.

Things have been going full force lately with work. I have two major projects that I’m currently trying to wrap up. One of them is just about done. I’m doing the last bits and tweaks to it on Sundays and I have a shipping date at the end of the month. So that pretty much takes 10 hours out of my Sundays.

The other is my full time day job. I’m doing sort of a re-write to Rails 2.0 and that’s going very well. I’ve learned a ton about Rails and getting the code to be The Rails Way has been quite interesting. I’m finally seeing how Rails can make a project quicker to develop with Rails.

Anyway, I should get back to work before I run out of time.

The guys came up for Randy’s birthday and we went out to Prison Hill to do a bit of wheeling. Tim was riding with me because his truck is in the shop getting painted.

So we were out at prison hill messing around and they guys wanted me to go up into this one spot to see my rig flex out. As I was getting to the spot there was a few lose rocks that I had to drive over. I was on two rock, passenger side, front and back. There was also a rock wall on the passenger side. While I was on the rocks the front rock rolled out from under me. That made the rear slide out and into the wall. While up against the wall I ended up blowing out my rear passenger window. It just exploded when it hit the rock. Oops.

So after that we went over to Dr. Smash’s shop to check out his rig. While I was there Smash said that he was ready for my buggy. So I’ll have my buggy started next week! That’s cool. I’ll have to load everything up into my dad’s truck and haul it down there.

After that Tim and I went wheeling some more on the way home. We went back into some tails by the river and ended up on some new gnarly trail going up a wash. That was really fun. It came out right into the Bunny Ranch.

It was a long day of wheeling and we had a blast. We will be already to do it again next weekend when everyone has their trucks.