Monday: Fuck you, Monday.

Since I didn't get groceries this weekend (significant groceries at least), I had to do so today.  I was wondering why the deli counter was sparse, and then I saw this sign.

It turns out I live on an island in the middle of the ocean, and if shipping fails, I could pretty much starve. Or, at least, not have turkey for my lunch.

At least fish isn't an issue here, so I was able to fulfill my dinner plan for today:

My thought is to do fish + salad things this week, with BLTs at the end of the week.  Tonight was salmon, which I pan fried in some bacon grease with some onions.  The salad base was lettuce, heirloom tomato, and avocado, with a sauce made from garlic paste, umami paste, apple cider vinegar, and the leftover hot grease from the pan.  Not bad, although I had a bit too much vinegar.  The salmon slice was also a bit big, and my last few bites were trapped with bones.  I really wish WF was better about removing those.  I picked up some pitas for side bread, and some Cotswold, because I really like Cotswold.

While eating dinner, I discovered that my DVR was having serious issues with something.  I couldn't get it to play any videos, and the preview images weren't generating, and the program that does that was freaking out and crashing myth-frontend.  A few diagnostics later, and it looks like I have a bad sector on the big hard drive that holds...well...everything.

To give you an idea of what this means, I'm Ash in this situation, and my data is Pikachu.

I have some backups, and immediately went into mad backup mode.  I've protected my photos, mp3s, and my downloaded tv shows and movies.  I'm syncing the mythtv streams over to another hard drive as well, so I'll be able to get the DVR stuff back up and running while waiting for my new hard drive to arrive from amazon.  Yes, I did order a new hard drive as soon as I saw a problem with this one.  I need to get into a regular backup scheme.  I think cron will be helping me with this very soon.  My only concern is getting rsync to do some sort of archival sync.  If backup file A has md5sum M_A, and disk file a has md5sum M_a != M_A, I want to have A moved to A.DATE_OF_BACKUP and a moved into its place.  This protects against corrupt working files corrupting the backup.

Plus, I then need to sort out an md5sum system to ensure backup integrity.  Grumble, grumble.  I see why I've been lazy about backups before now.  Clearly, I have elaborate concerns about data integrity that I find hard to craft a strategy to handle.  Yes, I realize that "ignoring backups" is pretty much the worst solution to this problem.  Ok, this weekend (or Thursday, when this new disk arrives), I'm setting up cron jobs to do basic backups.

"Why not RAID?" Given a RAID array of two disks, how am I protected any more than having a working and a backup copy of the data?  I could add more disks to the system, but that's starting to get expensive.

Finally (on this topic), I found this link that tells me how to manually force bad sectors to be dumped.  I'm curious as to whether or not this is a valid long term solution to the problem.  I plan on trying it once I've rsynced and copied everything I need to.  Luckily I don't have any major DVR shows until the weekend, and I should have the replacement by then.  Even if this works, I have a long time until the warranty runs out on the disk (04-Aug-2013), so I'll have to run the Seagate tool before then.

Now, I need a kitty being friendly with a bunny:

Excellent.

 I'll do links later, since I've spent all evening panicking about data, in between trying to translate a physics function into a decent math function.  It turns out I don't care about various constants, because I only care that the full space integral equals unity.  I'm reasonably sure that the full space integral is finite, but I kind of feel like I should prove that to myself as well.

In the meantime, here's a picture of what I think would be a super gross burger.  However, I know that some people like fried eggs, so I place it here for them:

Ok, one link:

• Cookie Monster hat for babies.