Screws In My Coffee

[caption id="attachment_1385" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Lonnie's Xmas Tree Portrait"] [/caption] Every year since I separated from my children my distain for the year end holidays has grown. I have fond memories of Christmas with my children in Portland, Oregon when they were growing up and still believed in Santa Clause.  Now that they are teen and adult ages the pretense of playing Santa is long gone. Now the only joy that look forward to during the year end holidays is that a critical computer or network system does not fail during the break so I can just chill. That all changed in 2010 however.  No I did not have the Ebenezer Scrooge experience and get visited by three ghosts.  Nor did I have a Miracle on 34th Street and meet a real Santa Clause. What happened was the Nor' Easter Blizzard of 2010 that dumped 32 inches of snow on New York and New Jersey. This snow storm may have inconvenienced the locals, but for me it was...

[gallery link="file"] What a wonderful surprise to be visiting my sister in New Jersey. Today it started snowing and the landscape is all covered in white.  I have not been in snow like this in a long time.  I am also staying in a bead and breakfast (B&B) for the first time.  My wife Sylvia has tried to get me to experience a B&B and I have always refused. Boy was I missing out. We are staying just about a mile from my sister's house at the Pillars 2 B&B . The host LaMonte and Nancy are really great.  Tonight Nancy provided us with homemade cookies, homemade marshmallows in hot chocolate. We have also enjoyed walking around the neighborhood looking at historical homes. Some of the homes are in great shape for their age.  At one time Plainfield was the full of millionaires who worked on Wall Street in New York.  The population has changed over the years but there are still some amazing homes still standing. Tonight my sister, Deborah, fixed a wonderful dinner a...

[caption id="attachment_1352" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Nubian Flower Child circa 1980"] [/caption] So where did this drawing come from? Well for this drawing I got the inspiration from a drawing for my comic book that I drew in 1980. I do not know why I have a fascination with drawing portraits with my bizarre hippie trippie style.  When I started drawing this image I thought that I was drawing a woman.  As I now look at the finished work it sort of looks like a man.  A lot of my drawings start out one way and end up another way. I am a very moody person and my drawings reflect the way I am feeling.  On one level my art conveys my emotional state during the time that I am working on the drawing. For example when I draw portraits that are smiling, I am happy and when I draw portraits with a sad look, I am sad.  So this drawing the Nubian Flower Child has a dazed look.  This is how I felt during the course of creating this drawing.  ...

[caption id="attachment_1320" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Ala Bindah 1980"] [/caption] I completed another drawing last night. I worked on this mostly over the Thanksgiving break when I was in Hilton Head Island , South Carolina. I decided to take a break from the O Magazine beauty ads and draw something from an old sketch book. The inspiration for this sketch came from a sketch that I drew in December 1980 thirty years ago. The sketchbook is filled with drawings for a cartoon or comic book that I call  The Zulu Aqua Mareens (ZAM). Zulu because they are colored purple. Aqua because they are fluid surfers. Mareens because they can do anything. The story behind the title is what I did with Sylvia when we were up relaxing at Hilton Head.  The Purple Haze reference is to remember the fact that we got sucked into a vacation time share scam.  All of my life I have avoided going to time share presentations. During my visit to Hilton Hea...

rsync -avzurl -e --exclude-from='/sys' --rsh='ssh -p 22222' root@eoldev2.eoldevsite.com:/home/eoldevadmin/ /home/eol/home/eoldevadmin/ rsync -avzurl -e --exclude-from='/sys' --rsh='ssh -p 22222' root@eoldev2.eoldevsite.com:/home/eoldevadmin/ /home/eol/home/eoldevadmin/ rsync -axvrHgp --delete ssh -p 22222 root@eoldev2.eoldevsite.com:/ /

Beyoncé  from O Magazine L'Oreal ad I finished the latest entry into my series of O magazine inspired drawings.  When I was looking through the September 2010 issue I found this picture and you may find this surprising but I selected it for inspiration before I realized who it was.  I sketched out my basic draft on my illustration board, then I read the ad and much to my surprise it turned out to be Beyoncé . As usual after I started to really draw I have not looked at the image since 10/30/2010 when I started the drawing. Now that I have taken snap shot of my completed drawing you can see how much fun I have making stuff up.  I always have fun drawing and making colors flow into shapes that are curvy and organic. I titled this drawing Snake Farm Bones Girl because I was watching a lot of Bones episodes on NetFlix and I realized that I was drawing the main character, Bones.  The Snake Farm reference comes from a Ray Wiley Hubbard ...

Agave Virtual Machine On Fedora It was the simplest thing that I have done on a Linux box.  I thought it would be real complicated and would not work, boy was I wrong.  It use to be that only macho super geeks could run Linux, now even a cave man can do it, For starters I wanted to take my existing Windows Vista box and convert it to a virtual machine and then run it  on a Linux box.  This seems simple enough but it took me almost two years to do it. Granted there were a lot of technical software changes in the last two years to make this happen on  my existing hardware.  In fact I tried this two years ago and I could not get it to work because of driver issues with the Intel BIOS RAID that was not supported by any Linux distribution at the time. The release of Fedora 14 and Red Hat 6 is what pushed me to try doing this once more. My goal all along was to preserve the landscape design software running on Vista so that my wife...

Finally got a virtual machine running on my aging Intel Core Duo with 4 GB RAM.  This is a swan song for this ASUS P5K deluxe main board.  I had to install an IDE drive to get Linux Grub to load my Intel BIOS 2.3 terabyte RAID 5.  I am debating installing an additional 4 GB RAM to help out with the virtual machines, or just upgrading to a new Intel i7 main board and take advantage of a fore core processor.  For now I am happy to get Red Hat KVM running so that I can experiment with it and compare it to VMware.

I am drawing another portrait.  I started this drawing on October 30 and I have been posting progress on my FaceBook page .  I started with another picture in Oprah's O magazine for inspiration.  I am doing a series of pictures that are inspired from advertisements in the magazine. Oh my  Little Dragon lady is starting to be the title of this drawing. The series of drawings from the O magazine is Oh my ladies.  It is my style of drawing to give the drawing the power of giving the viewer the calming effect of color as I see it.  I may start with an idea and then see how far down the rabbit hole I go. I want to also reference the Hindu influence that is in my art.  Out of respect for Hindu religious beliefs I am not going to reference it in my art titles, but I am definitely influenced by the art of Hinduism and philosophy of Hinduism. One of my favorite images is of Ganesha , the god of wisdom, prudence, and salvation.  I discovered this image when I was a teen in southern Califor...

This is an age old question. I have asked this of myself several times in my life.  I do not believe that I have ever written about this aspect of my life before.  I have discussed it with my friends and family a lot. I just finished a drawing that took a month to draw. [caption id="attachment_1231" align="alignleft" width="200"] O Magazine Lancome ad[/caption] I started it on September 10, 2010 and I finished it on October 10, 2010. My Landmark Education training confirmed my belief that life is a game.  I like creating games to motivate my life.  I have not drawn a picture in about two years so I wanted to kick start my artistic brain with some inspiration.  I said that I was going to draw on a picture for one month.  Now I need something to draw. Usually I do not have a problem coming up with ideas for a drawing.  I am one of those artist that creates art with an improvisational style.  I call my type of art Colored Acid Jazz. My brain has always run a...

I suppose that 100 years from now everything that is written in blogs will be forgotten and in some recycling dump. Is anyone writing anything worth remembering for 100 years? Is there a Thomas Jefferson or a Mark Trawin out there writing Blog entries that will stand the test of time?  I seriously doubt it. Take this Blog entry.  I am writing this just to test RSS feeds on my Facebook account.  Who else cares about this but me yet it is here for all to see if they really care. What I want to be remembered by is my pencil artwork.  I am just finishing up another wonderful portrait that I am truly proud of and will share with you all shortly.

I love it when I push a machine to it's limits. Some day I'll review the errors and figure out what caused this bomb.  I must say that I do miss the old Mac bomb icon in system 6.  the new multi language message that tells you to that your system has crashed is so boring. Interval Since Last Panic Report:  3102596 sec Panics Since Last Report:          1 Anonymous UUID:                    F2C3F164-E22C-4CED-9F75-D38C6BF746D9 Wed Sep 29 06:48:58 2010 panic(cpu 1 caller 0x2a8ab2): Kernel trap at 0x96fb3f40, type 14=page fault, registers: CR0: 0x8001003b, CR2: 0x0cefb004, CR3: 0x00100000, CR4: 0x00000660 EAX: 0x818d3e2c, EBX: 0x0cefb004, ECX: 0x0cefb004, EDX: 0x00000000 CR2: 0x0cefb004, EBP: 0x818d3dd8, ESI: 0x818d3ecc, EDI: 0x818d3ec0 EFL: 0x00010282, EIP: 0x96fb3f40, CS:  0x00000008, DS:  0x00000010 Error code: 0x00000000 Backtrace (CPU 1), Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack) 0x818d3bd8 : 0x21b455 (0x5cf328 0x818d3c0c 0x2238b1 0x0) 0x818d3c28 : 0x2a8ab2 (0x591664 ...

Sometimes I for get about the Mac OS x being a variant of BSD. I am working on getting my Soekris appliance updated from Debian 3 to FreeBSD 8.1.  In the process I was using a VMware Fusion FreeBSD virtual machine to build my image for my embedded network appliance.  When it came time to update the BIOS on the Soekris box I needed to work from the command line and not through the GUI serial terminal procram that I had been using called CoolTerm. So I proceeded to install Lrzsz, which needed the Mac Ports which needed Mac Developer environment XCode. The hardest part about this step was registering as an Apple Developer to get the free download of XCode SDK. I am registered as a Safari Developer, Yooo Hooo!. Mac Ports installed Lrzsz here: /opt/local/var/macports/distfiles/lrzsz /opt/local/var/macports/software/lrzsz /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/comms/lrzsz /opt/local/var/macports/distfiles/lrzsz/opt/local/var/macports/software/lrzsz/opt/local/var/mac...

The way that it was explained to me is that Exchange needs to authenticate you for each email session.  This should happen only once when you start Outlook.  Every time that you quit Outlook Exchange will ask for your credentials once.  Make sure that your are authenticating with asuramsyourusername and no other server.  Once you do this you will not be prompted again for authentication until you exit Outlook. This is an enhanced security feature for Exchange.  One advantage to this feature is that it allows you to access email without VPN.  The email connection is secure and encrypted between your remote Outlook client and Exchange.  To make sure that it is you when your laptop or computer starts up Exchange wants your authentication to give you access to your email. I fixed the problem with Dr. King-Jupiter because the pop-up was populated with webmailyourusername.  I am not sure why that happened, but after I changed this to asuramsyourusername the pop up only displayed once each ...

Here is my latest dump file. Interval Since Last Panic Report:  1127014 sec Panics Since Last Report:          1 Anonymous UUID:                    F2C3F164-E22C-4CED-9F75-D38C6BF746D9 Tue Aug 17 00:36:22 2010 panic(cpu 1 caller 0x2a8ab2): Kernel trap at 0x002945e6, type 14=page fault, registers: CR0: 0x8001003b, CR2: 0x0d6d1004, CR3: 0x00100000, CR4: 0x00000660 EAX: 0x102ba41c, EBX: 0x00000034, ECX: 0x0000000d, EDX: 0x00000034 CR2: 0x0d6d1004, EBP: 0x7c323528, ESI: 0x0d6d1004, EDI: 0x102ba41c EFL: 0x00010202, EIP: 0x002945e6, CS:  0x00000008, DS:  0x03f60010 Error code: 0x00000000 Backtrace (CPU 1), Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack) 0x7c323308 : 0x21b455 (0x5cf328 0x7c32333c 0x2238b1 0x0) 0x7c323358 : 0x2a8ab2 (0x591664 0x2945e6 0xe 0x59182e) 0x7c323438 : 0x29e9a8 (0x7c323450 0x874fa4 0x7c323528 0x2945e6) 0x7c323448 : 0x2945e6 (0xe 0x48 0x7c320010 0x220010) 0x7c323528 : 0x1ad47c7 (0x13801124 0x34 0x34 0x102ba41c) 0x7c323588 : 0x1ad582a (0x7c323628 0x7e10e536 0xe 0x1cc...

I like using my MacBook Pro 17 inch laptop. I love running Windows 7 on it and switching to Mac applications and the wonderful BSD terminal for work on my Linux servers. Today I fixed an annoying problem on my virtual machine running Windows 7. I needed to resize my 40GB virtual disk and make it larger. I used this tutorial to get it working. What I used in this process is a bit of software that I had heard of but never used, Gparted . Gparted is a Linux application and you can boot the ISO file and repartition your disk space.  I did it and it worked like a charm.

Today I was in Destin, Florida and I ran 10.5 miles on the beach.  I ran without my shoes for the first time since my early 30s. Running barefoot on the beach is a good idea when I regularly ran 5 miles in Vinece Beach, CA.  Today I ran on the fine white sands and I did not have nay problems.  I do not think I will run that distance again without shoes.  At mile 8 I was starting to get some sand related abrasions on my feet.

I was at a convention in Cleveland, Ohio this past week. I could have left my running gear at home, but I decided to pack it. The hotel that I stayed in was downtown so that is where my run started for duration of my stay in Cleveland.

Instead of complaining about how I use to be able to run, I decided to start running again on March 31, 2010.  After two months of walking and running almost every other day I ran 10 miles last night in 1 hour and 47 minutes.  I finished the last two miles running fast and strong. I am going to run my first race in Georgia, it is a short 5K race, Loop the Lake . I have not done a 5k race since 2005 when I started running for the second time in my life. So running when it is hot, humid and raining has been an inspiration. Breaking the barrier of one hour of running without stopping last week gave me the will power to run 10 miles. I have run this far before, so I am not breaking new ground, but it is harder than I thought to remain inspried to run when I know I am not in the best shape.  I am working towards some local short distance runs and I am inspired that after two months of steady running I can run 10 miles. Training for a marathon in March 2011 or the Rouge Orleans 100 mile run ...

The Bandera trail run is just around the corner.

The Outlook Live infrastructure is already federated with Microsoft Federation Gateway. All you need to do to enable federated sharing is create a new organizational relationship with another Outlook Live domain. Before you begin Federated sharing uses the autodiscover information in your domain to configure the federated relationship. You must make sure that both your organization and the partner organization have the CNAME autodiscover record configured in DNS. See Use a CNAME Record to Enable Outlook 2007 to Connect to Outlook Live . Use Windows PowerShell to configure federated sharing in Outlook Live. 1. Connect Windows PowerShell to Outlook Live . 2. Run the following command to enable free/busy sharing between two Outlook Live organizations: Get-FederationInformation –DomainName <the other tenant domain> | New-OrganizationRelationship -Name <the other tenant domain> -FreeBusyAccessEnabled $true -FreeBusyAccessLevel LimitedDetails Here's an example of what the c...

After proving once again that insanity is if doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, I am relieved that I finally have an operating system on the old HP DL380 G3. FreeBSD is always a good choice for difficult hardware.

Since I can not get CentOS 5.4 installed on the HP DL380 G3 I am considering using my old freind FreeBSD.  the problem with the HP server is Grub.  the old server BIOS does not let Grub work as a boot loader.  Lilo on the other hand may work.  I will attempt a FreeBSD install with Lilo as te boot loader. Quoted from http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2009/06/02/most_reliable_hosting_company_sites_in_may_2009.html : Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in May 2009 - Netcraft Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in May 2009 cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2"> Rank Company site OS Outage hh:mm:ss Failed Req% DNS Connect First byte Total 1 New York Internet FreeBSD    0.000  href="http://uptime.netcraft.com/perf/graph?tn=may_2009&collector=11,14,20,21,23,25,28&site=www.nyi.net&range=2678399&sample=9&sd=1241136024">0.266 href="http://uptime.netcraft.com/p...

I have been searching for a way to get an old HP DL 380 G3 to boot CentOS 5.4.  It has problems with Grub.  I am going to try this solution. BTW this is my first post using Adobe Contribute. Quoted from http://www.hyper-linux.org/HP-HOWTO/current/hp-hardware.html : HP hardware supported by Linux DL 360/380 G3 To install/use these machines under redHat 7.3 or 9, you have to pass the following parameter on the command line at boot time ide=nodma. You may also use the following command in the file /etc/rc.local /sbin/hdparm -d0 /dev/hda If the fans of DL360 G3 machines do not have an acceptable noise level after the boot either you install the hpasm driver for your distribution, or you update the BIOS of your machine (2003-04-08 or upper) P31  

I work near the last natural sand dunes in Georgia.  I have driven by the dunes for  about four months and today I decided to run on them. I have not run on any trails since early 2009.  I have been running one to three miles on the  concrete trail along the Flint River with my road shoes. Today I worked until almost sunset so I decided that it was a good day to run in the sand dunes. What I first noticed about these dunes when I arrived in Albany is that on weekends they are full of all terrain vehicles (ATV) and dirt bikes.  During the week they are used as a sand quarry.  There are no trespassing signs on all of the gates to the dunes.  It looks like the local thrill seekers and Albany State University (ASU) athletes ignor these signs.  I have observed some ASU track athletes training on the sand dunes.  I use to run in the deep unpacked sand on the beach when I lived in Southern California.  I know the training benefits of running in deep sand.  I want to build up strength in my ri...

My wife asked me how I felt after one more year on the planet.  I responded to her question with the fact that I do not measure my life, goals and accomplishements by the birthday calendar.  I measure my goals by the calendar year.  Every goal that I have set for myself is based on the calendar year, not by my birthday. So in my usual fashion, once I make a statement of this is how things are, I ask why?  So I decided to make a birthday based goal.  I already have a goal to run in the Snickers Marathon in Albany Georgia in March 2011.  So on my 60th birthday I will run my second 100k race which is a hare over 62 miles. So this is a long two year goal. I have done this before so I know it is not impossible.  There is a different twist with this goal in that I do not know where I will run the 100k.  that is the part that I will have fun planning while I am training.

Today I created the possibility for running in the Snickers Mardi Gras Festival Marathon in 2011.   This marathon is held each year in Albany, Georgia on March 5, 2011. I have completed my hiatus from running.   My long break from running came when I completed a 62 mile trail run in January 2009. I had to stop running because I could not afford to buy running shoes due to my immense credit card debt.   I have since paid off all of my credit cards, started a new job in a new city, so I started running again this month. Starting to run again allowed me to break a barrier that I have been through before.   Even though I am nowhere near to the physical condition I was in when I ran 100k in 16 hours, my mental state is unstoppable.   I know that I can train myself back to the level so that I can run 26 miles on the road. I had great coaching when I was taking running classes in Austin Texas.   I am starting off slow and I will gradually build up my running distance and speed through patien...

Ever since my kids were small they played with Legos.  Now my oldest daughter is in college and my son is in high school living with their mother in another state.  I loved Legos because they allowed young mindes to create things quickly with out any hand tools. I decided to buy two sets of Lego Mindstorms for my son and I.  My son has always expressed to me that he wanted to program a game.  I wanted him to get the experience at an early age in programming. So after getting my order of Mindstorms and two books from Amazon I opened the box and started building the first robot in the tutorial that came from Lego. Building the robot was pretty straight foward as the Lego instructions were so easy to follow that even a cave man like myself could do it. From my background in manufacturing and mechanical design I can really appreciate the engineering and tolerances that go into the Lego product.  Here you hav all of these plastic parts and you can build almost any structure without using gl...