RIP CentOS Long Live ALMA!

F*** (and I cannot stress this enough) YOU RED HAT! Years ago when RH so graciously offered to take CentOS under its wing and make it an official downstream, we all knew what would happen. What none of us knew at the time was how soon that would be. RH Promised to keep Cent7 and Cent8 (LTS) alive and well, and only make changes to future products, but there we sat a mere one release later, and RH announced Cent was moving upstream, and not only that, they were killing all mirrors, all history, and all upgrades immediately. This left many of us struggling to hang on with 3rd party repos and work arounds, but here it is. The day. EOL of all remaining Cent products and I have to figure out what the hell to do. Luckilly one of my hosting partners has already decided. ALMA Linux (the spiritual and genetic successor to CentOS) will be the replacement. Thanks to the excellent work of many of the original CentOS devs, there is a sysyem in place to upgrade from older versions of CENT to ALMA, almost hands off. After a few hitches, and a few reinstalls, here we are, a brand new distro with all the original content. RIP CentOs, Long Live Alma, and **** You RedHat

Major Change: Cloudflare

Big changes coming under the hood of PCM HQ, due to a stupid, and I mean STUPID, short sighted, boneheaded move on the part of google, our DNS business was sold off to square space. Squarespace was in no way prepared to offer any acceptible level of service, they don't have dynamic DNS, they don't have programatic DNS, their management portal is TRASH tier. So, we are transfering our DNS service to CloudFlare. This may result in intermittent downtime over the next few days. Apologies if that happens.

A quick seasonal check-in

Another blog post, another season in the books... From the spring to now it has been a whirlwind. The trip to DC was wet, but outstanding, even with a terrifying bus ride through the heart of Virginia on winding backroads, and a crazt but loveable tour guide who would love to talk about the air force memorial on the right. The weather world was insane, with two big wind storms, but has settled into a good-ole-hot-summer. Eliza has grown tremendously this summer, and is becoming a wonderful young human. Several vacations, one to the beach, one or two camping trips, and a few trips to Cincinnati rounded out the year. Professionally I've written a few nifty bits of code at work and saved the file-store from a corrupt vmdk file. Beyond that, life is moving on, at an ever accelerating rate. Sometimes I wish it would slow down so I could live in the moment, but with yet another school year starting that is likely not the case. Onward, and upward. Claydar out.

BIG WINDY, SPRING? Follow up from fall...

Big Windy! It was big windy today with temperatures in the 70's. Yes that's right... on February 9th! It reminds me of spring, and has me excited for spring. I will hopefully get some good camping and kayaking in this spring, but we will see. Quite a lot of time between now and then and we have to get through the basketball tournaments yet. The royals have a team on fire this season with only a few losses. Can't wait to see how far they will go! Speaking of "how far they will go"... I realize I didn't do a wrap on the last post. Marching Band... WOW. The Royals placed well in Semi's but didn't make it to state finals. Still a record finish. The next weekend we booted two bands that beat us that were state finalists, finishing Top 5 in MSBA! Some fishy stuff going on in judge land in KMEA and it cost us perhaps the highest placement the school would ever see. It will be hard to follow up last year. What a show. Then the football team went all the way to the Semi-final game, with the band travelling to Bardstown! Next up in band world is of course basketball and then the trip to the National Memorial Day parade in DC. THE SHOW MUST GO ON. Not much to add beyond "hey I'm hyped for spring" and "Go Band" so I will leave it at a short post today.

Marching Season...errr life, or something

My word, marching season is upon us yet again, as always a whirlwind. I'm reminded why I both love and hate KMEA as opposed to MSBA. At least in MSBA you know the smaller bands are judged more harshly, in KMEA there is some glimmer of hope but you constantly get dunked on anyway. Just eliminate open competition and call it a day. The late nights are HARD anyway. Would that fix it? Nah, but at least you know what you are getting in to. In the same train of thought, I'm gassed after the second week of competition. A long running ear infection with accompanying fever leading into the season, and then the late nights on Saturdays along with lawn work, and real work, oof. I'm TIRED Y'all only 6 more weeks of band! Wait... Marching band, because the football team is absolutely rolling, so maybe we get some post-marching football band in, then we roll into Basketball band, constant background of concert band, and the big parade coming up in Washington DC this spring. Band is life. As always... for 9 months of the year... breathe man, breathe.

Monsoon Season

Noting that there is a 99.9% or greater probability that nobody but myself reads this or cares... Remember this is sort of a "public" facing journal. You the reader (probably just me in a year), will be happy to know I'm feeling better today than in my last post. Frustrations are just that... frustrations, and this is a somewhat therapeutic way for me to vent without it being on "Social Media".

It has absolutely poured the rain on and off for several weeks and been repugnantly hot outside of the rain, which means that yes fans we are in the doldrums of summer. Thankfully I have an excellent coworker who can find the BEST musical tracks. I was reminded today of that second tier of alternative artists from the 2000's that are severely underrated. Guys like Rise Against, Muse, Red Jumpsuit, and Breaking Benjamin... Headliners on their own, but often overshaddowed by bigger or mainstream artists. Heck, I hear Linkin Park tracks from the LATE 90's on the radio today before I hear MUSE which is wild considering just how big Black holes and revelations truly was.

I'm rambling, but you know if you've read these posts, that this is the time of year "music keeps me sane" I'm glad to have music in my life. Especially good music, and people who know what good music is.

...and just like that you've got 3 posts in just over a month. It is like some sort of record!

Seriously?

Rant incoming.

You ever put maximum effort into something, produce a solid, and I mean seriously GOOD product for your effort, and then get ONLY complaints, ungrateful, or disrescpectful responses to it? It rubs me the wrong way man. People are all too quick to complain about toxic situations, or poor morale only to introduce more of it themselves. Why can’t we celebrate successes no matter how small? Why can’t we constructively criticize and agree to improve it when time for improvements are upon us? Why can’t we say, “Good Crack at it, can we please include this on the next update?” Why can’t we be just be glad that we are moving forward? Why, is it EVERY SINGLE TIME I write a piece of software? Be happy or do it better yourself.

End rant.

New Radio Who Dis?!

Well.... Covid 19 was a thing. Along with some other traumtic friendship drama. That was a long two years, but I finally feel like my life is halfway back on track.

I bought myself a new ham radio and am trying to get back in the hobby and actually establish myelf on HF. So if you feel the need hit the KJ4HVL - Ham radio link in the upper right to see what that is all about.

Maybe, I will post again before two years passes. Have a great summer!

Why did I wait so long?!

Fall of 2018... That's the last blog post when I said we might be running on better internet. A year and half ago.

I played with idea over and over, but set a rule for myself that whatever I did, I wasn't going to pay limestone cable any more of my hard earned money... That meant I would have to sacrifice our TV service in some way to upgrade our WAN speed. Well... They finally made the choice for me. Instead of negotiating prices with their video suppliers Limestone's idea of 'pass the cost on' finally got to me. They added like 3 channels that the broadcast stations are sending out as .2's that literally NOBODY will watch, and jacked their prices up $14 bucks to pay for them. Enough is enough. I cut the cord with their video service, got hulu live TV, and am paying the exact same price I would have been paying, except now all of my 83+ channels are in HD AND my downlink is 10x faster, and my uplink is 2x faster. Glory be, real bandwidth, I'm in the future.

Enjoy the faster performance of our site.

Point of Order

Oh wow, another blog post! I know nobody reads these, but hey, if the server is working this well, I might as well post them right? RIGHT?

Today's update is a little shorter. A couple of points of order for our lovely little site, if you will. There will be some brief downtime (possibly as early as this weekend) to upgrade / silence the cooling on this box, because TBH pizza box servers are loud AF. This will involve some ghetto rigging, basically merging two server enclosures (one fans / psu, the other a custom motherboard / tray and cpu coolers).

A second upgrade should come once our ISP gets their act together and moves us out of the stone age to faster connections. Rumor has it that PCM will be operating on no less than a 100mbit pipe by Haloween. Obviously I'm not holding my breath.

And another thing

Two posts in a year? Now we are cooking. Not really sure why I felt the need for a blog post, but I do. I suppose it is the proverbial changing of the seasons? Maybe I feel like a new year is begginning even though I'm not really beholden to the school-year anymore? Regardless. I'm very much looking forward to a new marching band season, the hustle and bustle of the holidays following, and to continue raising our little bundle of joy. You heard that right. I had a spawn and she turns 1 pretty soon.

As far as the tech world goes, my job marches on. For posterity's sake I want to make not of a few cool youtube channels I'm following, and maybe get the folks a few views. I'm really digging AVE and his Jeff Kruth-esque style in the shop with both manual work and electronics. I'm also following bigClive and his esoteric teardowns and ever-present roasting of dumb-ass electrical designers making shit products. I'm also now following linus tech tips, and techLinked for modern IT / Computer / Gaming news. A notable mention is electroboom, but he is a little slapstick and maybe too mainstream for my needs possibly because he reminds me of soooooo many crap teachers I had in the IET dept at MSU.

In the world of ham radio, I realise that I have been licensed for a decade, and simply don't have enough money to do what I want in the hobby. I really need to get a rotor and some good antennas. Maybe I need to try harder with my existing gear. Also there are things I want but can't justify because of my lack of use of my gear. I really need to use it more.

For a brief update on the server: We've been up since the day we put the server in. Almost 6 months of uptime. Linux truly is the server king. Long live RedHat! A better ISP should be coming soon, and who knows, once I get it, I may look into hosting some dedicated servers, and gaming some more? I'm sure my @pcmojo bretheren would be hyped.

A New Server

Well, it finally happend. Our faithful friend with us since the great server crash of '07 finally went dormant. During a brief shutdown for equipment maintenance something corrupted a crucial OS file on our server and she never woke up. The good news is it prompted the installation of our already waiting backup server which is a huge improvement. We are now running apache on a true linux box. Modern core series CPUs, abundant ram, excellent NICs and easilly managable disk means that PCM is back better than before. Including cleaning up a lot of the junk. While it is a work in progress, we will eventually restore all services, and this will eventually be a good thing. Enjoy your time here. -PCM Actual

That is a really low post average

October twenty freaking sixth. My average is literally one blog post per year. I'm not sure why or how this happens, or what it is about this time of year that lets me do this... But Hey, at least it is something.

Some big changes are in the works for the website. Including migration to a linux server, upgrades to the rendering engine of the weather site (possibly being made into a standalone server), and additional things on the back-end that most of you won't see (including getting my home data-stores sorted). Upwars of 4TB of data need to be hosted efficiently, protected, and replicated to backup disks. All in theory will be accomplished using an ESXi Server. Trick being, figuring out how to pay for the data-store and UPS system to protect all of it. Additionally, a bandwidth upgrade may be in the cards if Limestone Cable can get their damn act together...

Another Year... REALLY?!

Short update today... The weather side of the site sees a good deal of use, but the rest of the site has fallen into disarray with several broken links, dis-used features, and out of date information.

I have planned some back-end updates to make management easier, and some features will be repaired or upgraded.Hell, I might even figure out a way to get this blog rolling. LOL See every post where I say that. Outties.

Blog Fundies

Work is slow today, so why not update ye old blog hauss. I continually think about my blog and wonder why I don't write to it frequently. To be honest, I'm not really sure why I don't. I read something today that made me really want to share it in a place not so alligned with facebook somewhere it would just get glanced over.
My hobbies mean a lot to me and take a lot out of me. Band is a huge part of my life, and I love making music, and firends doing so. I also enjoy seeing the band program at the high school grow students into upstanding youth. Another hobby that instills those same ideas is ham radio, in fact there is an Amateur Radio Operator code of conduct:
Dating from 1928, originally written by Paul M. Segal (W9EEA)

The Radio Amateur Is:
CONSIDERATE...He/[She] never knowingly operates in such a way as to lessen the pleasure of others
LOYAL...He/[She] offers loyalty, encouragement and support to other amateurs, local clubs, the IARU Radio Society in his/[her] country, through which Amateur Radio in his/[her] country is represented nationally and internationally.
PROGRESSIVE...He/[She] keeps his/[her] station up to date. It is well-built and efficient. His/[Her] operating practice is above reproach.
FRIENDLY...He/[She] operates slowly and patiently when requested; offers friendly advice and counsel to beginner; kind assistance, cooperation and consideration for the interests of others. These are the marks of the amateur spirit.
BALANCED...Radio is a hobby, never interfering with duties owed to family, job, school or community.
PATRIOTIC...His/[Her] station and skills are always ready for service to country and community.

Why can't everyone be that way? In all aspects of life? I think I like my hobbies a little more after sitting and pondering them today. Who knows, maybe I will write more about them in the future.

IT IS HERE!

THE LAN PARTY IS HERE!!! BE SURE YOU HAVE STEAM UP TO DATE AND ARE READY TO THROW DOWN!

PCM LAN PARTY

The rarest of rare events unfolds in:

details here

Mt. Dew Kickstart

If you know me, then you know I've loved caffeine for a long time. One of the reasons we still have BAWLS logo's around the site is not because they sponsor us anymore but because I personally like the product, it tastes wonderful and provides hours of energy (even if it does ruin my stomach the next day). I've had everything from the insane 1.5 liter cans of monster, to the terrifying venom concentrate (which literally left me drooling), to Bawls, and even some exotic stuff from Germany. I feel a bit like an energy drink connoisseur to be honest, so when I came across Mt. Dew Kickstart (more like when the ads finally got so tiresome I figured I had to try it) I knew i could write a short post about it.

In the past few weeks Mt. Dew has introduced a new product called Kickstart, and I have to say... I love it. There are currently 2 flavors, only one of which I have tried (Orange) and I have to say it is about the most well rounded soft / energy drink around right now. On top of the fact that it is made with real orange juice, it is sweet, and tastes sort of like Mt. Dew without the that strange metallic aftertaste that Mt. Dew has. Of course as an energy drink it does have some caffeine, but it doesn't leave me tossing and turning days later. It has a dose of B-Vitamins and other additives we normally see in energy drinks, but not the mega 12000% ENERGY BLAST KENYAN levels that most do. Additionally it does not hurt my stomach, and comes in at a measly 80 calories per can.

TL;DR Mt Dew Kickstart DOES EXACTLY WHAT IT CLAIMS TO, and is therefore a great product. A little energy, a cool drink, with some sparkle. PERFECT.

Legit

Today marks the first day of legitimacy for the site. We have transitioned away from our free domain name, used so often for the internet's underbelly, and purchased a fully qualified privately registered domain. Freidns and family, welcom to PCMOJO.ORG. The mission of this site, is to provide an outlet for information relating to myself and family, and to be a test bed for technologies related to my field of work and study.

In honor of the new-found legitamacy of the site, I am re-dedicating this particular blog, expect to see information on upcoming movies, life events, photos of the house and so much other stuff. As I move into the summer I will hopefully be able to have a little more time to write, and with the regularly scheduled movies at our home theater, I will have something to write about, along with longer posts about the weather than just simple tweets found over on weather.pcmojo.org