We recently came back from three dive trips to the Solomon islands for a total of 30 days of diving. The second trip was a wetpixel trip organized by Eric Cheng. Julie and I are moderators of wetpixel, so it was really nice to meet Eric and several other wetpixel people again. We’ve had the tripreport of the wetpixel trip online for a while, but I just put the other 2 reports online.

• Trip 1, with 11 people.
• Trip 2, the wetpixel trip
• Trip 3, with only 7 people

Recently our cat that we had for 12 years died after a very short, and very unexpected sickbed. From one day to the next you lose a dear companion. In the few months after, we noticed a difference in behavior from our remaining cat. He became even more introverted, scared, and wouldnt play anymore. In our minds this was because he was a follower, he would always follow our other cat and do what he did.

For the last few weeks we’ve been looking for another cat, and this weekend we found her. We visited a local shelter a few times, and on our last visit we found a very sweet, very calm female cat. We were a bit afraid of the reaction of our other cat, but things went extremely well. It’s now been 4 days and they are already cuddling on the couch. Our cat also has been playing again, chasing toys around the house as he used to. It’s amazing how his personally has switched around again.

We’ve still not named her. We like geeky names, that can still pass as somewhat normal. Our previous cat was called Cisco, and our current cat is Samba. Julie had a cat named Pearl. So..if anyone can think of a cat name that’s both geeky, but still passable for normal, let us know!

(edit: we picked the name Ruby, which is a programming language)

Yesterday a very helpful Dell employee came to my house to replace my XPS700 motherboard with an XPS720. This was a free upgrade that Dell started to provide XPS700 owners with a better upgrade path for additional hardware. I also ordered a Quad Core CPU with it, which came with a 25% discount. Pretty cool deal.

After about an hour, the guy leaves, and it looks like I have a working system again. That is, until after another hour or so I notice a new hard disk I didnt have before. I immediately knew what happened. He had rebooted the machine without configuring the raid controller on the new board. My boot disk is actually a raid1/mirror and you need to tell the new raid controller that. Instead, it booted with 2 separate identical drives. Ofcourse, after the initial boot these 2 drives can no longer be seen as identical and I was unable to recreate the raid1 volume.

So you think.. no problem. I take the C drive and make that the first drive in a new raid1 volume. That worked. Now I had a degraded raid 1 volume which was missing its second drive. Good, i have the second drive, so now I can add the second drive and tell the raid controller to rebuild the raid volume. Right? Wrong! More »

Julie won a second place in the Underwater Art section of the new contest by Australasia Scuba Diver magazine. She won a nice liveaboard price with an image of a pipe fish shot in Indonesia.