Wandering about was interesting, I moved aside to let a cyclist through on the pavement and he thanked me which felt nice. I think I surprised him by speaking all English back at him though. There are lots of eating places, and some really randomly specific shops – I found one which sells only lacrosse equipment. I nearly went into a 7-eleven, but then I didn’t. Thrilling story that.

I got terribly confused by pedestrian crossings, I just couldn’t work out where I was meant to have priority over cars and where I wasn’t. Some places said I couldn’t cross, and I got worried because I remember jaywalking being a criminal offence over here. Eventually I tried the pelican crossing to get over the main road, big dual carriageway thing, and it just never changed to let me cross. So I wussed out, and moved to cross at a different point. That crossing was more cooperative, and it changed (they have a red hand for don’t cross, and a white running man for gogogo). I set off, reached the central reservation and it had a count down saying ‘20 seconds to go’ so I set off across the next carriageway, and suddenly 3 cars appeared and tried to run me over. Apparently when the white man shows it means you have priority, not that no cars will drive at you. Frightened the life out of me.

I collected the car and the woman accepted my VISA debit card as a Credit card, so that was alright. Apparently I had already paid on the Internet so she only wanted to check who I was. She gave me  a white Yaris (pictures of these things are all available at InfiniteView). It looks nothing like a Yaris, just a generic 4 door car with a Yaris nose on. It took me a few minutes to get used to it being an automatic, I couldn’t work out what was wrong at first, til I realised I was subconsciously using the brake as a clutch. That doesn’t end in happiness for the car. I could see the woman pulling faces at me from behind her desk, so I quickly joined the main road and adventured back to the apartment. Have to say, driving wasn’t as bad as I had expected, but I was trying to do nothing complicated. Staying in the right hand (slow) lane, and hoping I didn’t reach any traffic lights on red when I wanted to turn right.

For the rest of the day I dithered about in the house trying to get rid of my jet lag. Matt came home at 5.30 and I drove us to the Hertz place to have him added to the car as an additional driver. Took a few minutes but didn’t cost any money which surprised me. Then Matt directed me off to Palo Alto to a diner known as ‘The Creamery. Interestingly parking appears to be free here in the states, we parked in a multi storey and there were no tickets or anything. Palo Alto looked strange, from what of it I saw. Reminded me of Spain. The diner was nice though, looked like a stereotypical US 50s diner, complete with juke box. I had steak with grilled veg and it was lovely, though I avoided the steak sauce which confused me. It smelled like cough mixture. They had Heinz ketchup and ‘pourable mustard’ which just seemed to be english mustard in a ketchup bottle. We also had milkshakes, I had cookie dough, and it was served in a metal tub with a glass to decant it into. Amazingly tasty, but after a while it was just a *bit* too much.

I let Matt take over driving. We headed off to Frys, which appeared to be a computer/tech hypermarket. Was the size of maybe two ASDAs and just sold interesting tech things, a whole aisle of motherboards, computing books, computer chairs, pre-built computers. Matt said there’s an aisle full of oscilloscopes somewhere. I think I’ll be buying a third party battery for my MBP before we leave, they’re cheap and seem to work (compared to my current battery which just dies randomly with no warning after ~10 -> 30 minutes of use).

Then home! We played rockband briefly but I was suddenly so tired I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Jet lag sucks.

Second leg of flying was less fun, I had another window seat and another empty space next to me, but there was no entertainment. I watched lots of Californication on my iPhone but really by that point I didn’t have much concentration left. Saw some very pretty mountains out of the window but I have no idea where I was. Plus there was loads of turbulence. That flight seemed to go on forever even though it was only 5 hours (again an hour early !) and at the other end I got terribly confused as I had to leave the security part before I could claim my luggage! Thankfully Matt and Lea had come to find me, and guide me in my sleep deprived addled state.

From there we went to In-N-Out burger, which was quite nice actually, I just couldn’t eat all of it (why doesn’t that surprise anyone). Sort of reminded me of a Burger King Whopper. Also had refillable drinks, which apparently is the norm. After that we drove back to Mountain View and Matt explained some of the intricacies of American road signage and driving. The fact everything refers to street names rather than place names is a bit confusing when you have no idea what anything is called.  Also, all the speed limits are .5, so 35mph on normal roads, 65mph on the ‘highways’. Next up, Target to buy an air bed for me to sleep on. Sort of a cross between Matalan and ASDA, appeared to sell everything under the sun but had a really small food section. Apparently WalMart is the same and they don’t have giant food shops like our supermarkets. Seems surprising for a country that stereotypically loves its food so much.

Rest of the evening was a blur, I was well out of it. I got the wireless credentials and played around with the television a bit, then  decided I’d go for a shower. Sadly this is where it all went wrong, in my clumsy lack-of-sleep state I slipped in the bath and now my left leg has an amazing purple bruise on it. It’s typical I’d hurt myself somewhere such that there is pain when I sit down. Sigh. Anyway could have been a lot worse, if I’d landed on my head or something, would have had to test out my travel insurance. Matt inflated my air bed shortly after, and I passed out  at about 11pm and didn’t wake up till 7am CA time. I think I’d been awake 30 hours in a row.

Anyway, what have I been doing. World of Warcraft wise, big success. We finally cleared Ulduar (ignoring the horrible hard mode boss) and have moved on to Icecrown Citadel. We’re already 2 bosses through, the prospect of clearing all the raids in Wrath before Cataclysm is released is looking surprisingly likely! I’m really pleased for our little crew, from such small beginnings, etc. It’s also nice to be killing bosses who drop good loot as well, I’d forgotten what that felt like. Helps to gear up some of our more reluctant raiders. Oh, also invited some new people to the fray, a level 80 rogue and a level 13 paladin – friends of friends, both at Lancaster Uni. I like making new friends, so fingers crossed they’ll fit in well

Real life time now, I’ve got so many exciting things coming up this year I can’t quite contain myself. It starts on the 3rd of March when my brand new 27″ iMac is delivered. Then on the 12th March the F1 season starts (yes I am UNBELIEVABLY excited about that), then the 15th of March I am FLYING TO CALIFORNIA to visit Matt and Lea. Yes you read that right, I am finally making the trip to the states I have always wanted to make, with the added benefit of seeing good friends when I am out there. Then I come home, and I have booked my Motorbike training for the 3rd April, and then  I might be going to Paris (conference submission pending). Then in May we’re making plans to possibly go to Turkey for the F1 Grand Prix!!!!! And in June, Heather wants me to go on a cheap holiday with her too!! My passport will be getting a real work out.

I have a feeling this is all going to make me very poor but I just can’t bring myself to care.

Been thinking a bit about what I might do when I finish my PhD (I know, putting the cart before the horse somewhat given I’m still frantically working on PhD stuff, but humour me). I’m not sure I am cut out for a career in research, well not in the sense of sitting in Infolab working on specific projects, I try but I am learning my brain just isn’t in it. I feel a bit like I want to get out and see the world – I guess this is still some hangover from not having a future anchored to employment at the university any more, and probably why I am going traveling/experience mental in 2010. Of course my ideal employment would be something in the glamorous world of Formula 1, but I doubt I am mathematically clever enough to even dream of a technical job, and everything else is being in the right place at the right time, and knowing the right people. So I’m back to what was my original idea as a kid (other than joining the RAF, which I guess isn’t off the cards either… I just don’t think I ever could bring myself to be physically fit enough these days ), something in the Foreign and Commonwealth office, I can be diplomatic right? I’m being purposefully vague, I know more about this than I’ll bore people with, but there’s a few possible avenues in that direction I could explore, and I guess traveling, studying, and meeting new people are all useful experience for such a career.

Been feeling a bit weird recently, sort of homesick for my parents’ house. I think I just miss having someone look after me. I have lots of friends in Lancaster of course, and beyond, but there’s nothing quite like being looked after, and fed, and just being able to recline in the living room watching crap on TV. So what I’m saying is I want a servant. No, wait that’s not right… Seriously though, I went home for the weekend and it was really nice, lovely warm house, very relaxing. Of course parents are parents, they get on your nerves a bit, but I reckon with a real internet connection staying there would be really good. As long as I had my desk and everything else of mine down there. I think really its just like being in a bubble, nothing to worry about, forgetting about the real world, just letting it pass you by. And I can’t really do that, I have things to do and a PhD to finish!! Makes me wonder what I’ll do when I reach the end of my funding though, come November. I think its likely I’d just move back there for a buffer, bit of breathing room. We shall see.

Anyway, lets end on a less introspective and boring note. Television! I have regained my appetite for television. Firstly, I am becoming something of a Doctor Who nerd, of the highest order. I’m ridiculously excited about the new series starting soon, and I’ve been re-watching loads of the 2005+ stuff. I’ve downloaded some original Who, but I am struggling to work out where to start watching it all. It’s complicatedly ordered and impossible to order which upsets my digital OCD. Other than that I watched the new series of Silent Witness on the BBC and it was amazing. Literally amazing. I recommend people go watch it, I’m sad it has ended, and on such a whimper really too. I didn’t even know it had ended, got excited when I saw there was more on TV and then realised it was them re showing the previous season. Which I haven’t seen so that’s sort of good but… Lastly I’ve finally got around to watching Life on Mars (series 1 so far so no one spoil the end for me), and that is amazing too!!!!! So many TV shows, so little time.

Will end here, I have rambled enough. Removes my guilt for untimely updating for a while at least.

• British Bulldog
• May I
• Polo
• Red Letter
• Chainy
• Kiss, Cuddle or Torture
• Kissy cats
• Cat’s Got the Measles
• Stick in the Mud
• Tig
• Tiggy on High
• Hot Chocolate
• Farmer, Farmer
• Tig on Lines
• In and Out the Dusty Bluebells
• The Farmer Wants a Wife

At some point I’ll come back and flesh these out with descriptions, but for the time being its a list I can keep coming back to.

So this is detailing my experiences, the problems I’ve come up against, and the potentially rubbish ways I’ve come up with to deal with them. The end result however, is something that appears to be working, and whilst I can’t vouch for the success of my redundant storage solution till I have to use it in anger, it seems to be functioning as expected.

Step Zero: Mythbuntu

I chose to go with the pre-built Myth distribution of Ubuntu. I presume that most of these instructions would work for any debian based flavour of Linux (and with a bit of thought probably any other distro) but I didn’t have to manually install any of the myth software, and my hardware was all auto detected. I suppose in some cases you wont be so lucky.

One small issue I think I came across, I installed the OS and then found that GRUB couldn’t find the master boot record and it refused to boot. I think this was because the system disk wasn’t the first one seen by the BIOS. I just switched my SATA connectors around until it was, and reinstalled from scratch. Not the perfect answer, but it worked and that was my goal

Step One: Software Raid

I used mdadm to handle the RAID, and this wasn’t pre installed in Mythbuntu so first of all, get it installed.
$ apt-get install mdadm

In my machine I started off with two 1.5Tb hard disks, alongside the system disk, which I wanted to set up as a paired raid10 array. I searched dmesg to find the device names of the two disks first.
$ dmesg | less

Piped the output of dmesg into less, then searched that output for references to the one disk I knew I had, the system disk ’sda’.
'/sda'

This showed me sdb and sdc, which I guess you’d think was logical, but I was being paranoid. You can also see the devices listed in /dev/.

Here was my magical command :-
$ mdadm -v --create /dev/md1 --level=raid10 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc

Verbosely create a new raid 10 device called /dev/md1 (I should have used md0 if I were being correct but I didn’t, meh), using two raid devices found at /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc. You can test this is working with :-
$ mdadm --detail /dev/md1

And again, the device should appear in /dev/.
You can check the progress of the raid array being initialised with :-
$ cat /proc/mdstat

And you can see the raid array appearing as one disk, by using :-
$ cfdisk / dev/md1

Though this may not work as expected if the disks you’ve used already had some form of file system on them, unreadable by Linux.

Technically there is another step which goes here, but I’m writing this to include the problems I faced, as I faced them; skip down to ‘Problems after Reboot’ if you want to spoil the surprise.

Step Two: LVM

Initialise the disk for LVM.
$ pvcreate /dev/md1

Creates the a volume group, containing that ‘disk’.
$ vgcreate vg-server1 /dev/md1

Now, create the volumes themselves! I decided I wanted two, one partition for mythtv, the other for data.
$ lvcreate -L 500g -n lv-mythrecordings vg-server1
$ lvcreate -L 895g -n lv-data vg-server1
I had a ‘1.5Tb’ disk, which of course ends up being nowhere near 1500gb. Hence I chose 500gb for my myth partition, and what was left at this point for data.

Next I needed to put a filesystem on the partitions. I chose XFS as it is extendable while mounted, very easily, but it has the drawback of not supporting shrinking. I don’t think I’m ever going to need to make my partitions smallers, so that’s fine by me.
$ apt-get install xfsprogs
$ mkfs.xfs /dev/vg-server1/lv-data
$ mkfs.xfs /dev/vg-server1/lv-mythrecordings

In order to test this had worked I mounted the partitions, and wrote small text files to them.
First of all, create the mountpoints (I did this in /mnt for convention purposes at this point) :-
$ mkdir /mnt/data
$ mkdir /mnt/mythrecordings
$ mount /dev/vg-server1/lv_data /mnt/data
$ mount /dev/vg-server1/lv_mythrecordings /mnt/mythrecordings
When mounting you need to refer to the ‘magical’ device address, you can see how it works there.
Also, if you mount these as root (i.e. sudo) you can only write to them as root. Expect to have to sudo when creating your test files.

Step Three: fstab
We don’t want to have to mount the partitions by hand every time, it’d be ridiculous. The solution is to add them to fstab.

My editor of choice is vim, but any text editor will do :-
$ vim /etc/fstab
You may wish to make a copy before you edit this file, just in case you change something by accident.
I added :-
/dev/vg-server1/lv-data /raid/data xfs defaults 0 0
/dev/vg-server1/lv-mythrecordings /raid/mythrecordings xfs defaults 0 0

The ‘defaults’ option means certain interesting things to do with the way in which the partitions are mounted. The default was fine by me, read up on it if you think you may need something more complex.

Now create folders for the mount points to match fstab. I chose to keep my partitions mounted in /raid – something I just chose myself, no convention.
$ mkdir /raid/data
$ mkdir /raid/mythrecordings

I then tested fstab by mounting them as they should be when the system boots :-
$ mount /raid/data
$ mount /raid/mythrecordings

When mounted, you will need to check the permissions on the folders are correct for everything to have permission to read/write to them, and that they are owned by the right user / in the right group. This involves the commands ‘chmod’ and ‘chown’.

Step four: Samba

Now samba for remote access to the partitions as shares, from Mac OS and Windows (and Linux).

$ apt-get install samba smbfs

Then you just add things to the config file. Again, make a copy if you’re worried you might mess it up.
$ vim /etc/samba/smb.conf

Under global settings I put :-
security = user

And then I added my shares :-
[media]
comment = Media Share
path = /raid/data/media
browseable = yes
read only = yes
guest ok = yes
write list = sara

[sab]
comment = sabnzb space
path = /raid/data/sab
browseable = no
read only = yes
guest ok = no
read list = sara
write list = sara
These may not be exactly right, but they seem to work for me. Notably, [unsorted] is a dump directory. Guest is allowed to write to it, to allow housemates who I don’t trust to organise things properly to leave things for me to assimilate into the media collection. [media] is readonly for guest accounts (i.e. they are allowed to read it, and access what’s there, but they can’t mess anything up). [files] and [sab] are shares only for me, they don’t appear in a network browser and only I have access to write.

Lastly, whichever account you’ve specified as having access, you need to give it a samba password.
$ smbpasswd -a sara
New SMB password:
Retype new SMB password:
Added user sara.
This only works for user accounts which exist on the host machine.

Step five: Problems after Reboot

Having got this far, I turned off the machine to connect my second pair of hard disks. On booting the machine up, the raid device /dev/md1 was nowhere to be seen but I could see that /dev/sdb and /dev/sdc still existed.

I tried to manually start the raid array first of all :-
$ sudo mdadm -A /dev/md1 /dev/sdb /dev/sdc
[sudo] password for sara:
mdadm: cannot open device /dev/sdb: Device or resource busy
mdadm: /dev/sdb has no superblock - assembly aborted
Obviously wasn’t successful.

So, I wanted to check that the disks still knew they were meant to be part of an array :-
$ sudo mdadm --query /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb: is not an md array
/dev/sdb: device 0 in 2 device undetected raid10 /dev/md1. Use mdadm --examine for more detail.
$ sudo mdadm --query /dev/sdc
/dev/sdc: is not an md array
/dev/sdc: device 1 in 2 device undetected raid10 /dev/.tmp.md1. Use mdadm --examine for more detail.
This made me breathe a little easier.

In the end, the solution was to create a mdadm config file. And it turns out it comes with a nice little script to generate just that :-
$ /usr/share/mdadm/mkconf>/etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

A reboot showed this had worked quite nicely.

Step Six: Adding more disks

I connected up my new disks, and I checked again in dmesg that they were being seen. I then double checked using mdadm that the disks i was about to raid, weren’t the previous disks being detected in a different order.
$ mdadm --query /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb: is not an md array
/dev/sdb: device 0 in 2 device active raid10 /dev/md1. Use mdadm --examine for more detail.
$ sudo mdadm --query /dev/sdc
/dev/sdc: is not an md array
/dev/sdc: device 1 in 2 device active raid10 /dev/md1. Use mdadm --examine for more detail.
$ sudo mdadm --query /dev/sdd
/dev/sdd: is not an md array
$ sudo mdadm --query /dev/sde
/dev/sde: is not an md array

This quelled my paranoia, so I went on to create the array :-
$ mdadm -v --create /dev/md2 --level=raid10 --raid-devices=2 /dev/sdd /dev/sde

And as before, add it to lvm :-
$ pvcreate /dev/md2
$ vgextend vg-server1 /dev/md2
This extends the volume group from earlier to now include this new hardware.

I unmounted the current shares I want to extend:-
$ umount /raid/data
Incidentally, smbstatus will tell you who/where is connected to the samba shares if you need to know.

$ lvextend /dev/vg-server1/lv-data /dev/md2
This extends the volume itself to include the maximum space available on the new disk.

Now, to grow the filesystem. The scary bit. XFS can only grow when mounted, so I remounted the share. Then grow the fs by referring to the mount point.
$ xfs_growfs /raid/data

Phew. I then ran lvscan to look at my volumes and their sizes :-
$ lvscan
ACTIVE '/dev/vg-server1/lv-mythrecordings' [500.00 GB] inherit
ACTIVE '/dev/vg-server1/lv-data' [2.24 TB] inherit
Success!

Step seven: A few tips on making myth frontends work with a remote backend

You need to make sure that myth-backend is set to refer to it’s external address, not localhost or 127.0.0.1. This is because when frontends connect, the backend tells them that address to talk to for video.
Also, don’t be foolish enough to try using MDNS (i.e Bonjour) for this. I had my external address set to ‘computername.local’ which works perfectly for every communication I would normally do. Unfortunately, it caused the official myth-frontend for OSX to fail to connect to the backend 9 times out of 10.

I found XBMC to be much, much nicer and more sensible. In order to add myth to it, you need to create a new source like this
myth://mythtv:YOURPASSWORD@mythbackend-pc
Make sure the password is the one from the myth-backend config, it is randomly generated.

Lastly, I got XBMC connected, it would show me the programme guide, and see a list of recorded programmes, as well as a list of live channels. Everything looked great, but when I tried to play any video it would either do nothing, or give me an error telling me ‘playback failed’ and asking me to check the logs.

Solution? Edit /etc/hosts, and add the fileserver by hand. Madness.

The End
I hope maybe this will help someone out there, it isn’t a perfect method and I’m sure I’ve done things in ways which could be improved, but it works and I am happy with it. I’d suggest if anyone has questions, I’m not the first person to turn to, I’ll only google for the answers!

Best present this year was a car, yes you heard me correctly, someone gave me a car for Christmas and it is glorious. And yes that is left over snow, unbelievable all round.

Unfortunately the car also coincided with a good friend moving away to California :- you can’t pack a car into your hand luggage unfortunately. Regardless, I don’t think the car was worth the disappearance of the friend, but the Internet is a marvellous tool so I have no doubt we’ll remain in good contact. I’m even willing to investigate this new fangled ‘Skype’ thing all the cool kids have been raving about. I don’t really do *talking* to people.

And so now it is new years. I’m not normally one for big celebrations on new years, I think back to the years of Heather, Alex and myself driving about listening to music, finding vantage points to watch fireworks, and then retreating to watch Bill Bailey dvds in Alex’s living room. I enjoyed those years a lot, but unfortunately Heather was busy this year. I was invited, but the event was spending the evening in Manchester city centre, moving from pub to club, meeting up with various people. I really didn’t fancy it, I don’t like going out in Manchester at the best of times let alone new years eve.

So instead I retreated to Lancaster, bringing with me my new fileserver! I’d built it at my parents’ house but sadly they don’t have any monitors, their TV was too old to have an HDMI port and even if I’d overcome that hurdle, there’s no way I could realistically download a linux install disc over 3G. Upon turning it on here the first issue was that it wouldn’t output anything to a monitor. After some panicking, and disassembly, and finally stooping to reading the manual I discovered that in the 8 years its been since I last built a PC in anger, things have changed. You have to run separate power to the CPU, else everything goes tits up. Never have I been so relieved to hear post beeps.

There’s a lot more to be said about the fileserver project, but I’ll save that for a future blog entry. I’m trying to document what I did as I am a moron, and I don’t remember anything. Blogging it seemed as good a way as any.

So in conclusion, it is 2010. A new year, a new start, that’s what people say. I’ve never held much stock by resolutions, or life changing decisions happening just because the calendar rolled over, but its sort of nice to feel like everything is getting a new beginning. This year didn’t end well, 2009 certainly contained some of the most miserable events of my life so far, but ignoring that I think the good has outweighed the bad. Hopefully at the end of 2010 I’ll be able to say the same.

I guess that’s some kind of irony, missing the meeting you were worrying about because you were worrying about it. Anyway, turned out to be okay, I had a separate meeting later in the day, sadly missing my second supervisor, but we’ve arranged some things for me to be doing over Christmas. Everything feels better now. I had some more fail when I got into the office, pouring orangina all over my desk, laptop and monitor. I now have a sticky escape key. Thankfully the adage of bad luck coming in threes doesn’t seem to have held true.. yet. I’ve just spent the rest of the day with a lack of sleep headache, which I should be rectifying now by sleeping, but I felt like writing something. Blogging is kind of addictive when you get into it.

Watched ‘Taken’ this evening, film about Liam Neeson’s daughter being kidnapped by people traffickers. It was.. alright I suppose. Entertaining enough, but the premise didn’t seem to make sense. I understand he’s seen a lot of terrible things in the world, but kids go on holiday all the time, he didn’t need to have an irrational fear of his daughter going to Paris. And then the horrible something that did happen seemed so unlikely, why would they get picked up by people traffickers from the airport, why would people traffickers take obviously rich and well connected young Americans? Surely that’s just asking for trouble. Maybe I’m over thinking this…

It did make me want to watch Love Actually though (Liam Neeson is in it..), I know it makes me a big ol’ girl, but I really do love that film. I actually paid real money for the soundtrack yesterday, as I realised I’d lost my copy, it makes me feel happy for some reason, not entirely sure why. Doesn’t evoke any particular memories. Which is probably a good thing at the moment to be honest.

Tomorrow is the Christmas Meal for Computing and I’m looking forward to it, me and Faisal are going to watch the lecturers in their natural habitat, propping up the bar. More than anything I am excited about the guild meetup on Saturday. I hope there is enough room for everyone in the house, Friday is going to be a day of shopping and tidying up I feel.

So this evening we were all set up with 10 raiders to into Ulduar on the raid lock we’ve been keeping alive since 3.2 hit. It’s been working quite well for us, being a small one-night-per-week raiding guild, starting from scratch in an instance every week was taking its toll. Keeping the lock alive allowed us to see new content without feeling like we were missing out on ever reaching the end. (on the other side of this, the fact we got to the point where we could clear Naxxramas in one evening before any of this hit still makes me stupidly proud). Anyway, we logged on and prepared, and found that 3.3 hitting last week wiped out our saved raid lock. Cue lots of sighing.

As it happened, it may have been something for the best. We were able to pick ourselves up and head to the new Onyxia. I’d never seen this encounter before, I encouraged the rest of the guild to give it a try when I had to miss a raiding session a couple of weeks ago and they’d had a bit of fun and wiped a lot. Coming back this time, we were pretty quickly into our stride and we got her on the second attempt

Onyxia's Lair

Since we had so much time left, we decided to head into Trial of the Crusader. We’d attempted the first boss there once before and not had much success, but I’d now consider ourselves wiser and better geared. We wanted to give the place a try also because the second boss happened to be the subject of this week’s weekly raid quest, and five emblems of frost were very appealing, but we didn’t actually hold much hope for downing boss one. As it happened we were on a streak of luck. We managed to get Northrend Beasts on attempt 2, and Lord Jaxx first time! The second boss was mostly a healing intensive fight; I like encounters where I hold the real power

So all in all it was an awesome night, we had a first time raider with us who’s gear was … lacking, and he was managing ~3000 dps! Almost everyone present got to take away some decent purple pixels, including me (some new legs), and hopefully it’ll have rejuvenated everyone’s interest in raiding – well those who haven’t already been re-suckered in by the 3.3 badge/dungeon finder changes. A really good way to end the year’s raiding!

Should I be worried that something in a virtual world has inspired me to write such a gleeful blog entry? Hmmmm.

Step one was moving to Gallery3, it’s still in beta but at the final stage of beta testing so I decided I’d make the leap. The install process is a lot smoother than previous versions, inspired I’d guess by Wordpress. All in all it quite simple, and I found that the directory structure Gallery2 had used meant it’s been very simple to import all of my old albums. the only issue I’m noticing so far is a lack of decent themes, and some issues with the javascript configuration menus. Some of that could be the browser I’m using (Google Chrome) however. I’m using the ‘darkness‘ theme, and it’s not bad, in fact if the menu issues are Gallery rather than the theme I’d say it’s pretty damn fine, but I think once I’ve finished adding my content I’ll be making some manual tweaks to the CSS.

Other than some teething trouble it’s been a fairly pain free process, which is very different from my previous memories of getting Gallery to work. Seems like a well written, and timely update.