Of RIT, beer, and birthdays.
Classes at RIT are going well so far. But having 6 classes keeps me on campus a little more than I'd like. Everything seems very interesting, and while I do not appear to have any Professors I really dislike this quarter, some could use a little work.
Computer Security is going well. But it is difficult to go to an 8:00am class where I know everything we've talked so far and will probably know 90% of the material we'll cover this quarter. The labs are interesting though. Each lab section has been setting up a network for the other section to hack into. My team is in charge of the Secure Linux/Monitoring Box. So of course I slapped Debian Stable on it and set up my uberparanoid encrypted services on everything :) The only real complaint I have is that the Professor does not give out much concrete information on due dates or what he actually wants. So I am not sure when I have got something right, done, or when I need to turn it in. This is highly annoying.
Psychology of Personality is interesting, but we have spent our time so far on Fraud and Dung... er I mean Freud and Jung. Which means we have learned a lot of hogwash and astrology. I think the material will get better once we get out of the historical foundations. The Professor seems to want to teach a clinical psych class, or an abnormal psych class, or an art therapy class. Anything but a psych of personality class. That is frustrating. Almost all of the personality information we have learned has come from discussions with each other and out text, not the Professor. She is an English Teacher, not in the literal sense, but that is her personality and mode of thought. She has not quite figured out how to communicate with the engineers and scientists that make up the class - but I think she'll improve on that. She is not a scientist, and it shows. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it means she'll probably leave out a lot by presenting everything as X thought this, and Y thought that. With little information about what research has shown to be helpful, useful, or true. We'll see how this goes.
Data Modeling is not quite what I thought, but looks like a great class. We have been learning a lot of management techniques and people skills having to do with Systems Analysis and Design. Good stuff. The professor is very strange and quite funny. He looks like a 60 year old Jeffrey Combs. I am in a group with two rather cute female IT majors - so I have no complaints.
Java for Programmers is well, Java for programmers. It assumes you know how to program in another language and just teaches the Java specifics, with a fair bit of good Object Oriented design in there as well. Professor Lutz is clear and concise, and I am doing very well. Class looks good and not too time consuming, so I doubt I'll have much to report.
Foods of the World is most excellent. The class is located in Henry's - a restaurant in Building 1 - the Administration Building. Each day students will give 5 or 6 presentations on foods from a region and then the professor will lecture on that region's cuisine for about an hour. We break for 10 minutes and then sample the foods that were covered in the presentations. Everything is prepared by Henry's chefs. I was expected to get a small sample of each food to try, but we get essentially a whole item of whatever it is. Most people do not finish their first plate - but I always head up for seconds. There is tons of really good food. We've covered South American, Caribbean, and African cuisine so far. There was a $30 fee, but in the last two weeks I've eaten a good $15 worth of food in that class, so I am quite pleased. I will be giving a presentation on Schnitzel at the end of October, so I'll try to make some by then and see how it goes.
CPR and First Aid looks good. We covered adult standard CPR and Rescue Breathing on the first day (which was Monday of this week). A useful thing to know. The instructor seems disorganized, but he is doing pretty well.
The first batch of beer is ready and turned out quite well. It is a dark amber English bitter. It is a very deep pure red. The prettiest beer I think I've ever seen and certainly the reddest. The flavor is quite decent, but it has a couple of slight off flavors. The next batch will be ready to bottle this weekend. There is a new Beer Section up now. With recommendations on beers and pictures, videos, recipes, notes, etc. about what Rob and I have been brewing.
A few minutes ago I realized that I will be turning 22 on October 6th, less than 2 weeks. I don't feel like I should be 22. I feel like I should be 18. I don't really have much that I want or need this year. I think that is a good thing. Perhaps I'll arrange to go out with some friends for dinner and drinks. Damn 600 mile Louisville/Rochester split...
I had a lovely time in Louisville but am now back in Rochester. School starts tomorrow morning at 8:00am. My books for this quarter will probably be over $400. And a hard drive in the server died last night. Bah!
At 4:20pm yesterday (what an appropriate time), shortly after I had gone to sleep, /dev/hdd in the server began having seek complete problems and the console filled with error messages. Since I was asleep, I did not notice. Andrew was awake. Andrew noticed. Andrew did not wake me, power down the server, or alert Steve. Some hours later Steve noticed. Steve made an attempt to call but Andrew answered the phone and accidentally hung up on him. So the errors continued... At 1:00am my bladder awoke me. I peed and on my way back to bed I heard a voice from downstairs say "Is Ryan awake yet? The server is dying." I jumped 3 feet in the air and headed downstairs where I discovered a very unhappy server and a dying hard drive. Neither Steve nor Andrew had done anything yet, and did not have much extra hard drive space to back things up. So I cleared off one of my 120GB drives and prepared to transfer the physical volume. Unfortunately the Western Digital 120GB drives are about 300MB smaller than the Maxtor 120GB drives, so I could not transfer the full physical volume. I ended up having to move data from the 600GB logical volume onto the 120GB drive. Reduce the filesystem and logical volume size. Move the extents on the dying drive to the newly cleared space in the rest of the volume group. Reduce the volume group off of the dying drive. And resize the logical volume and filesystem to fit the full volume group. This was started about 2:30am. When you have a 600GB logical volume spanning 6 drives, filesystem operations take a damn long time. So it just finished a few minutes ago. The logical volume management tools work very well, and things are as they should be now. But they are slow on large operations. The server will go down again later today or tomorrow to pull out the dead drive and hopefully RMA it back. No data was lost, just sleep.