Since I started taking Tri-Rail to work again, I have a big-ass commute–and I have the dubious distinction of having the longest commute in my office. If my office were playing Settelers of Cataan, I would so have the Longest Commute card–and the accompanying two points.

My commute

Total distance traveled: 54.1 miles.

The first half–A to B–is on Palm-Tran Route 40. I used to take Palm Tran route 62 to the Lake Worth Tri-Rail station, but the route was very crowded, and very stop-and-go. And the worst of it: the last bus left the Lake Worth station at 6:30pm, which meant that if I had to stay late at work, I was stranded. Eventually I started driving to the Lake Worth station, but that schlep back and forth from one end of Lake Worth Road to the other–a route lousy with traffic lights every few feet–got to be too much of a pain-in-the-ass and about summertime I stopped taking Tri-Rail altogether and drove the Turnpike to work.

However, a new development came along that made me revisit my commute: Palm Tran, in cooperation with the City of Wellington, built a 140-space Park & Ride behind Fresh Market on 441 and the Mall at Wellington Green. I got an e-mail about its opening in November, and decided to check it out. Turns out that Route 40 is limited-stop service from the Mall at Wellington Green (and the new Park & Ride) to the West Palm Beach Intermodal Transit Station (a.k.a the West Palm Beach Amtrak and Tri-Rail station).

There’s only one problem with commuting to work on Route 40:

Palm Tran route 40 rush-hour schedule

Look at how many westbound 40 buses serve the afternoon rush hour: One. One bus? Are you kidding me? That means if I take P634 from Cypress Creek, which leaves the station at a pretty reasonable 5:24 in the afternoon, I arrive at WPB-ITS at 6:15 (assuming the train is on time, a dangerous assumption nowadays) and have to wait an hour for the 7:15 Westbound 40–which would put me back at the Wellington Park & Ride at 8:10pm. Total commute time: a staggering 2 hours and 46 minutes.

No thank you.

Maybe adding one more on-the-half-hour westbound 40 bus will help: It’d have to leave WPB-ITS at 6:45pm, which isn’t really a big enough window for Tri-Rail P636, which is often ten or more minutes behind schedule.

If I want a reasonable commute time, my only option, really, is P632–which, because it departs Cypress Creek at 4:54pm. I have to leave work at 4:40pm to catch. And If I miss it, I’m screwed.

Maybe I’m too picky. Maybe I just want instant gratification. Maybe I should just be thankful that I commute in South Florida, and not New York or Chicago, where public transit is ten times as crowded, it snows, and hour-long layovers for connecting transit are commonplace.

Well, I must not be the only one, because here it is almost June–and the Wellington Park & Ride? Empty. A beautiful, nicely manicured, empty boondoggle. It sits empty every day, because nobody in Wellington with a car is interested in getting home fifteen minutes into prime-time.

I’m a highly experienced Windows guru with the chops to back it up. But now I find myself having to install, configure, and manage CentOS–all without the slightest idea how to do even the most basic system administration tasks in Linux, like managing users and groups, and managing drive partitions–or even what each partition is supposed to do. Under the covers, Linux is so fundamentally different from any other OS I’ve ever used (and I know a few others besides Windows), that I find myself forced to take my vast experience and throw it away and start from scratch, because it is almost completely irrelevant under Linux. There is very little (outside of my knowledge of TCP/IP) that I can apply from the Windows world to the Linux world.

What really, really bothers me about Linux is that none of the fucking Linux hippies I encounter, on the Internet or in person, has a fucking STRAIGHT ANSWER FOR ANYTHING!!! All I want to know is how to install GIMP under CentOS. Under Windows, it’s a breeze; click-click and you’re done.

I’ve googled the question: “Install GIMP under CentOS 5″ and I get 20,000 different answers from 20,000 different “experts.” And exactly none of them descripe a simple “click-click” install, which is what a total n00b like me needs.

I have a bunch of Linux people here in my office (and a friend or two) who resentfully turn up their noses at everything Microsoft and swear on their dead grandma’s graves that Linux is the greatest thing to ever be invented in the history of Earth, better even than the wheel or fire. Well, I got news for you Tofu-eating Linux hippies: Windows doesn’t make me RECOMPILE THE FUCKING KERNEL to install a simple graphics editor! These guys scratch their heads in squnty-eyed wonder why end-users aren’t flocking in droves to Linux. If the Goddamn learning curve wasn’t VERTICAL, I’m sure you’d get more users.

God help me when I try to install Asterisk and use this thing as a phone switch.

I can’t sleep. Again.

Normally when I can’t sleep, I pull Lorelei out of the garage and take her for a lap around Palm Beach County. Only this time, I wandered a bit farther south: I ended up on Ft. Lauderdale Beach, a place where I used to frequent all the time–of course, I lived down there at the time, and didn’t have to drive a motorcycle 50 miles to get there.

Somehow, though, I always end up there when I’m feeling blue and need a bit of “me” time. Tonight definitely qualified as one of those nights.

I ended up at a hole-in-the-wall dive bar just off Sunrise and A-1-A called The Famous Parrot. It didn’t look particularly famous, but I was thirsty, and so I had a Jack & Coke and, less blue, I was on my way.

I figured that as long as I’m not sleeping, and I’m in the neighborhood, I ought to stop by the office and check on a 40gb file file transfer from Denver (where my company’s parent company is) that I kicked off over the weekend(!). To my great surprise, it still hasn’t completed yet–some 72 hours after I started it–but at least it hasn’t stopped.

Knock wood. It still has 56 minutes to go…

I reckon I could’ve just as easily checked on it from home. But I was already here, and figured I’d stop on by for a couple of Pita chips and a Coke before I headed for home.

Oh happy day! It’s 75, sunny, and the bright azure sky has not a single cloud!

It was almost worth slogging through yet another South Florida sumer just to get to this beautiful day.

And here I am stuck in my office without a window.

Bleargh.

I think I’m gonna move into the lab.

I tried to tough it out. I really did.

They’re installing new carpeting in our offices, and the adhesive they’re using had given me the most ginormous headache I’d had in a long time. It’s still full-on string, even though I left the office at 1 and took a couple of Naproxin Sodium in an attempt to banish it.

I was feeling so rotten that I ended up getting to my show about a half hour late. I’m so ready to call it quits on the Thursday show–it’s at a smokers’ bar and I’m sick to death of smelling like an ashtray afterwards.

I’m trying to upgrade the SSD on my 2nd-line manager’s ThinkPad X300 to the recently-released Lenovo 128gb SSD.

SSDs are neat; In theory, they’re direct replacements for hard drives–except for the fact that they have no moving parts whatsoever; they’re essentially big honking memory cards. This means that they’re extremely rugged and just about impervious to being dropped because there are no spinning platters to disrupt. They’re also quite a bit faster in terms of disk access inasmuch as there’s no arm dragging physical heads back and forth across the aforementioned spinning platters. And because there are no electric motors or magnetic actuators that are spinning platters or moving arms, they are remarkably miserly when it comes to power consumption.

However, it seems that the standard rules of upgrading them don’t apply. On a typical laptop, a tech would use a piece of software like Norton Ghost to move, bit-by-bit, the stuff from the old drive to the new drive.

Well, that doesn’t seem to work with the X300.

The X300 takes a 1.8″ micro-hard drive (typical laptop drives are 2.5″), and have a different connector than typical hard drives, even though they speak the same language as typical hard drives. The new 128gb SSD came with a clever little adapter that allows it to be plugged into a conventional hard-drive cable, and so using this arrangement, I ghosted the data from the old SSD to the new one.

The new 128gb SSD, however, would not boot when inserted into the X300. Bummer.

After trying every trick in my rather extensive arsenal, I’m now using my method-of-last-resort:

1. I’m installing Windows XP from scratch on the 128gb SSD whilst it’s in the X300.
2. Then I’ll swap SSDs, put the old one back in, boot Windows, and use NTBACKUP (Windows’ built-in backup utility) to dump the files and system state to my network file server.
3. Lastly, I’ll put in the fresh 128gb SSD, boot it’s “virgin” Windows installation, and do a full restore from my server.

That is the least-attractive method because so many things can go wrong. There’s no guarantee that restoring the system state from the old SSD won’t screw up the boot mechanisms on the new one, and if it can’t be repaired, I’ve just blown several hours worth of work.

I’ll just have to take my chances.

UPDATE: Backing up the old SSD using NTBACKUP. It says it’s going to take almost four hours.

Ugh.

UPDATE 2: it worked like a champ!

This has been an amazing morning. And I don’t mean ‘amazing’ in the good way. I mean ‘amazing in that I’m amazed that so much could go awry in a single morning–and it’s only just lunchtime.

• I thought it’d be a nice morning to ride Lorelei to work, so I stopped at the gas station a mile or so from my house to fuel up and fill my tires. I left the key in the ignition when I filled the tires (a sweaty, dirty job in itself), and killed the three-year-old battery.
  • A nice gentleman tried to give me a jump, but my puny little pathetic jumper cables were not up to the task.
  • I walked the mile or so home and got my truck and portable jump-starter, and Lorelei started right up. I pulled her into a large parking lot, where I’ll go collect her later this evening.
  • I ended up getting to the office around 11:00am. Wow, that’s late.
• Once at the office, I was informed that because of an inspection happening on Thursday, all the low-voltage wiring (e.g. network, alarm, and the like) has to be completely off the ceiling grid–y’know, the grid that all the ceiling tiles hang from.
  • Our offices are over ten years old, and still have shit in the ceiling from the old BlueBehemoth days (read: a metric assload of Token-Ring) . Even if it’s not connected to anything, it still has to be tie-wrapped off the ceiling grid, or cut out.
  • It is incredibly hot, sweaty, physical work, going up and down and up and down on the ladder.
• My second-line manager’s ThinkPad X300 is giving me screaming purple fits. I’m trying to double the size of the hard drive, but it simply will not cooperate.
  • The X300 is equipped with a 64gb solid-state hard drive. It’s really slick, as it has no moving parts. But, at 64gb, it’s pretty puny by today’s standards.
  • The 64gb drive has a micro-SATA interface, which means it’s different from all the equipment I would normally use to copy one hard drive to another. The replacement drive conveniently came with a standard SATA-to-micro SATA interface. However, it’s not recognized by my external SATA USB drive reader under Windows XP.
  • I used GHOST to make a copy of the machine’s data, and transferred it to the new drive–this time, directly plugged into my bench machine’s planar (motherboard, for those of you who are not BlueBehemoth initiates). When I inserted the new drive into the X300, it would not boot.
  • booted the X300 with the Windows XP cd, thinking I’d use the Recovery Console to write a new MBR (master boot record) and boot sector to the disk. Windows XP would not recognize the new disk in the X300.
  • I plugged the new disk into the bench machine’s planar again and booted it with the Windows XP cd. It recognized it this time, and using the recovery console, was able to write a new MBR and boot sector to the disk. But once again, on reinserting it back into the X300, it refused to boot.
    • I’m beginning to suspect that this drive isn’t compatible with this machine, and is only compatible with the X301. A call to Lenovo ought to tell me for sure.
    • If it is indeed incompatible, I’ll have to return the drive to PC Connections, from whence it came.

Whew. What a morning.

With the offices at my job under construction, my particular office is the hardest-hit. There’s air conditioning ductwork in the walls near my office, and every day I come in and find ceiling-droppings all over my desk and such.

But I come back from vacation to find that they’ve taken down all my pictures, posters, and such, and gouged huge marks into the walls with their ladders–not to mention that they’ve taken down half the ceiling tiles and left them. There’s ceiling debris everywhere.

This is a nuisance. I’m really looking forward to the office construction being completed–as I’m sure most of the folks here are.