Here we go.

Words, as always, are insufficient to express the full richness of each and every living moment. But, once again, I find myself typing them anyway. (Or thinking about typing something, at any rate.)

This weekend witnessed an attempt at getting the new buildmeasite server running. Friday evening after work, I journied to Second Buildmeasite Boulder Branch Office, and found scottgalvin.com, along with his brother Peter, hard at work putting together the elements that would become Hydrogen.

Dagobah had also been relocated to the second branch office.

My contribution to the gathering was a generic cola drink, bearing the brand name of a grocery store chain which shall remain nameless.

After scottgalvin.com glued the chip fan on, we went through a couple of Peter's old cdrom drives before finding one that would boot with a bootable cd. Using this drive, we proceeded to use Jaeger's Debian disks (Jaeger himself was not present at this particular gathering due to religious reasons, although scottgalvin.com assured me that he would have loved to be there) to attempt to install debian.

The installation kernel refused to recognize the RAID array, despite a couple of attempts, so we resorted to turning off raid and plugging one of the hard drives into the primary ide port, with the intention of duplicating it and moving it back to raid later.

With the drive acting as a "normal" ide drive, the installation went smoothly, and we proceeded to apt-get a bunch of the packages requested by scottgalvin.com. With the clock approaching 0200, this concluded the activities for that evening.

Saturday night. Once again, after finishing up at work at 2000, I journied to the second branch office. Once again, my contribution to the gathering was a generic cola drink, bearing the brand name of a grocery store chain which shall remain nameless.

Jaeger, scottgalvin.com, and Peter were all present. When I arrived, they were in the middle of duplicating the drive, which had been put back into RAID mode. While we waited for the drive to duplicate, we discussed the possibility of helping Peter install Linux on his household firewall, which was on a Windows 2000 server.

After the drive duplicated, we attempted to boot it into debian, with partial success. The kernel loaded, but failed to mount the root filesystem. A little research revealed a twofold problem: 1) with the moving of the hard drive, device names had changed, so the fstab needed to be updated. Had this been the only problem, it wouldn't have been to terribly difficult to fix. Unfortunately, there was another. 2) The kernel's ide driver still wouldn't recognize the raid array.

Jaeger used Dagobah to ssh into Ziyal and discovered that we would indeed need to recompile the kernel with special support for the raid chipset enabled. (I noted that the very fact that it needs a special driver calls into question whether this is a "genuine" hardware raid array. Jaeger speculated that it is, in fact, a software raid system, except the software to drive it happens to live in the BIOS. (At least mostly.) Very odd. Up until this point, my practical experience with RAID systems had been virtually nil.)

After we began to investigate options for compiling a kernel which could be used to boot off a floppy or cdrom and fix things, Jaeger's parental units called and requested his presence back at the Boulder Compound. Apparently, their migration to the Oklahoma wasteland^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H state is entering the furniture moving stage. (Since I myself happen to have a few relatives in that area, I have been there a few times myself. I'll just say that based on those experiences, Oklahoma would NOT be among my top 10 most desirable locations to live.)

Peter and I tagged along to the Boulder Compound, where after being given a meal, we assisted in loading some articles of furniture and boxes into the truck. Not a full-scale move, mind you. According to Jaeger, the migration will not be complete for another year and a half. I observed that this could make his family's dwelling situation almost as interesting as mine. (Maybe even moreso.)

In discussing the plans for Hydrogen, I requested that Jaeger call me the next day when he was ready to begin installing the custom buildmeasite software (which would include code I had written), since my presence during the kernel install would likely be extraenuous.

Well, latest word is that it will not be ready to go to inflow tomorrow. The installation of the buildmeasite stuff has not yet begun, and the kernel has apparently not yet booted successfully of the RAID array. Doh.

On the plus side, I did manage to spend much of the afternoon in countless iterations of the epic, prophesy-fulfilling battle between the mighty Samus Aran, last of the Chozo, and the evil phazon-producing entity known as the Metroid Prime. (Curious. How many other video game franchises have titles named after the primary villian in the game? I can't think of many.)

SPOILER BELOW. DON'T READ IF YOU DON'T WANT TO KNOW.

At once point, I managed to convince myself that I had been victorious, and won the entire game. My delusion was soon shattered, however. After the Metroid Prime had been reduced to an exploded pile of radioactive goop, its health level having been finally taken to 0, I walked to the center of the disaster. I was shatterd to find another even more evil thing, which emerged and began to attack me. It was the "Metroid Prime's Essence" according to the scanner.

Since my health had been reduced to 3 energy tanks from the previous battle (and I thought I had been doing well), I didn't last long. I guess that gives me a challenge for later.

Alrighty. I think I'll head to bed soon. Peace.