Wayne D's Blog

It was a busy week this week, Argos home opener and the long weekend. Sunday night we went to Richmond Green to see the fireworks, I tried taking some pictures with my digital camera and was convinced yet again that if I want to shoot in low light I really need to get a tripod. It just seems like so much work to drag the thing around. I took some pictures after the Argonauts game Thursday night including the illuminated CN Tower and the balls floating on the pool outside Roy Thompson Hall. They remind me of the old TV show The Prisoner.

Canada.com has finally decided that I live in Canada, the only problem is that Global TV has taken all of the shows I might want to watch off of their website. I originally ended up there when I wanted to check out The Jane Show after I caught a bit of one episode but it's no longer there. All they have on the site other than news shows is Deal or No Deal, The Best Years and 1 vs 100. Sigh.

I'm heading off for a six day canoe trip near Temagami in a few days. I have to buy a knapsack in preparation for the trip. The big question I have now is which sleeping bag to take. Last summer in Killarney I used a lightweight backpacker sleeping bag and it was fine. I used the same sleeping bag two weeks ago near Parry Sound and suffered from cold feet the first night when the temperature dropped below 10. The second night was fine when it was a little warmer but after sitting out at Richmond Green last night in a sweater and jacket wishing that I had brought my gloves I'm questioning whether it might not be prudent to invest in something a little heavier. The other problem with the lightweight bag is that it's not very wide and is quite tight around my shoulder when it's zipped up all the way. That's good for keeping the heat in but not so good when you want to roll over.

A few weeks ago we got a number of Blackberry's at work. I've been carrying one of them around and have become addicted to the Crackberry. While hanging around at the park last night waiting for the fireworks I browsed the web and updated my Facebook status. The kids were off playing on the bouncy castles and I would have been in the beer garden if it hadn't been so darned cold. Though I understand intellectually that global warming is bad my resolve becomes weaker when shivering on a July 1st night or shovelling a couple of feet of snow in January.

It's hard to blog on a holiday weekend, the time off makes me so mellow that I find it hard to get righteously indignant about any topic enough to make an entertaining blog posting.

Click on a picture to see my Flickr photostream.

This one is for my sister in law.

This one is my favourites.

Remember the prisoner?

We are now the proud owners of a Wii. Right now two of the kids are behind me playing Wii tennis. I stopped at EB Games at Vaughan Mills to buy a second Wii remote on the way home after getting the game and found that even though they didn't have any remotes they did have Wii's. Isn't that always the way, things are scarce until you find one. I ended up buying a game that came bundled with a remote, I figured the $15 extra it cost was probably worth it.

I heard an accident the other day. I was driving up to a stop light and heard a thunk sound, I looked into my rear view mirror and saw two women getting out of their SUV's. I don't know how they managed to collide since the line of traffic they were in was almost stopped. I would hazard a guess that a cell phone was involved. The next day I saw a guy pull right up behind a car stopped at a light with it's four way flashers on. Evidently he didn't realise that we were all bailing out of that lane for a good reason and that a broken down car was perhaps why the traffic was moving too slowly. Again I suspect some type of external distraction was involved.

Almost time for my emusic.com account to reset. I haven't decided what to download next month. This month it was Monique Marvez's Built for Comfort, she is one funny lady. My other selections were Gomez's How We Operate and Loreena McKennitt's Elemental. I don't remember why I chose either of them but I'm sure Gomez was a good choice, the jury is still out on Elemental.

Centos 5 has released a plus kernel that has Firewire support, and it works. Yeah!

Boy am I tired today. Yesterday was both Argos Fan Day at the University of Toronto Mississauga campus and my cousin's 25th wedding anniversary in Elmwood Ontario. The director of the Argonotes decided that it would be a good idea for us to get together for at least one rehearsal so we booked the Mist theatre as a rehearsal space. The only problem was that we had to be there at 10:00 a.m. to get the practise in before the start of Fan Day. Coupled with the long trek out to Mississauga it meant getting up early on a Saturday morning. The main purpose of the rehearsal was to try out some new music for inclusion in our repertoire. We had decided to try to do some recording so it was necessary to get there a little bit early to get the microphones set up and hook the mixer up to the Macbook we were using to record the session. I've decided that my next computer will be a Mac, I just haven't decided which model to get yet. I've used Audacity to do recording before, this time we were using Garage Band which looked like a a nice package.

During our rehearsal/recording session I had to try to put out a metaphorical work fire that had flared up as approached the turn in for U of T Mississauga. It eventually involved three people and meant that I didn't get a good picture of the Argo's cheerleaders on field routine. After meeting up with my family, having a burger and playing a few tunes at Fan Day it was back in the care for the ride home. Pictures for the day are on my Flickr. A quick change and it was back in the car for the two and a half hour trip to Elmwood. There was square dancing, drinks, food. The kids played in the park outside the community centre until it got dark. Then it was back in the car for the trip home. We pulled into the driveway at two thirty and I collapsed into bed. I had stupidly decided to call a meeting of Inspyre for this morning after church which meant that we had to drag ourselves out of bed and off to church.

Why might we Wii? In the middle of the rehearsal my wife called to say that one of my collegues had called to say that he was in a store and they had ten Wii's. He had called to see if he wanted him to buy one for us. I haven't heard back from him yet, but I may now be the proud owner of a Wii.

In an effort to aid my Linux compatriats I occasioanlly post the answers to problems I have run across. Last week we had a power failure and our LDAP server which doesn't have a UPS came back up slapd wouldn't start. LDAP logging is turned off by default because the default logging is quite verbose and creates large log files. To turn logging on add the line:
local4.* /var/log/ldap.log to /etc/syslog.conf and restart syslogd
when I did that I saw
May 31 17:39:20 server slapd[4817]: @(#) $OpenLDAP: slapd 2.2.13 (Aug 13 2006 01:27:00) $ buildcentos@build-i386:/hom
e/buildcentos/rpmbuild/BUILD/openldap-2.2.13/openldap-2.2.13/build-servers/servers/slapd
May 31 17:39:20 server slapd[4817]: bdb_initialize: Sleepycat Software: Berkeley DB 4.2.52: (December 3, 2003)
May 31 17:39:20 server slapd[4817]: bdb_initialize: Sleepycat Software: Berkeley DB 4.2.52: (December 3, 2003)
May 31 17:39:20 server slapd[4817]: bdb_db_init: Initializing BDB database

the slapd database wasn't initializing.
To fix this I had to run db_recover in /var/lib/ldap (after stopping slapd). Make sure you run db_recover as the user who owns the database otherwise you will get premission denied errors when you try to start slapd. If you run it as root you will have to change the owner from root back to the appropriate user for your system. On my Centos 4.4 system the owner is ldap.

Our new UPS comes tomorrow.