We bid adieu to one genuinely good man

With sadness, I read that Johnny Oates died. The former Texas Rangers manager died at the age of 58 from complications of cancer. He was the epitome of a good and decent man and Rangers fans fondly remember the playoff run with Johnny O at the helm. (Those darn Yankees in the way! Now, they are the CFYs. Good riddance.)

ESPN has more, including this quote from Buck: "Gloria [Oates's Wife] said one of their prayers was that he would be in Heaven before Christmas," Showalter said. "I bet there will be a heck of a baseball game up there tomorrow ... no, the day after tomorrow. It will take John time to get organized."

My money is on Johnny's team playing the game exactly as it ought to be...

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Things I want to do on my winter vacation...

So, with a week and a half gone of my three week winter vacation, I wanted to do the following:

• Finish the Getaway (was on 'Disturbance at SoHo' since roughly August): COMPLETED!
• Read Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons: About 40% done so far (very good)
• Start playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: Haven't even cracked the seal yet.
• Experiment with Solaris 10: so-so. sshd isn't installing on b71 for Sparc on my U5. So, that makes it really difficult for me to use. I'm now battling Live Upgrade, but with mixed success.

Other things I didn't plan on doing, but have done:

• Fixing Subversion dump loader race conditions: Committed.
• Keeping mail.apache.org afloat: Bad network driver at fault is best guess, partial fix deployed
• Keeping BDB happy on svn.apache.org: Waved magic ju-ju around, seems up
• Keeping scotch afloat with replacement hard-drive
• Read 'Conversations with Tom Wolfe' (good), 'From Bauhaus To Our House' (okay)
• Playing Max Payne: Almost done (currently on Part III, Chapter 7)

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You know your vacation day is busted when...

You know you are in for a long day when you have to type 'man ufsrestore.'

Gah. My mail system's / drive decided to fail the SMART checks, so I spent the entire afternoon copying the data on the failing drive to a replacement drive I had in my desk drawer (even longer story as to why I had a spare 120GB hard drive in my desk). The failed drive isn't even 9 months old, so I've already setup an RMA with Western Digital for a new drive.

Not what I wanted to be doing today while on 'vacation.'

And, I'm still waiting for email to be delivered from our backup MX...

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