I was fortunate

My parents were willing, and able, to pay for me to go to college, even though I spent four years doing what would certainly appear from the outside (and often from the inside) to be drinking and goofing off.

I’ll ruminate on what I learned in college, and how differently I would approach it now, some other time. Right now, I’m here to note that the interest rate of student loans has been raised _35%_.

I don’t know how much the government spends on student loans, it’s true. I would be surprised if it’s more than a billion dollars a year (remember, all domestic programs except Social Security and Medicare are *dwarfed* by military spending in this country), and I can’t think of a better investment than making it easier for people to make the choice to go to college.

Yet, when the time comes to try to rein in the budget deficits created by tax cuts that go overwhelmingly to the very rich (like the 72 billion dollars that the super-wealthy stand to reap by elimination of the estate tax, which is “paid by only .3% of all estates”:http://www.citizen.org/documents/EstateTaxFinal.pdf, or a projected 6300 estates out of 2.3 million in 2006), the Republican government decides that people who are not wealthy trying to get an education are the ones should have their lives made harder.

Many years ago (though the paper I reference is dated 2004, I seem to remember reading a draft of it quite some time earlier), “Phil Agre”:http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/ suggested that to understand the agenda of the Republican party, “one needed to think about what conservatism was”:http://polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/pagre/conservatism.html–and he suggested that “the true goal of conservatism is to establish an aristocracy, which is a social and psychological condition of inequality”.

Making it harder for people without wealth to send their kids to college will certainly help fullfill that goal, and it’s shameful that it’s happening in this country.

Chicken *and* eggs. And Orzo.

While I was working up in DC, Alex–my primary partner in crime–and I would often go to a greek restaurant a on Pennsylvania Avenue a couple of blocks down from the Senate buildings. I don’t remember the name. It was not particularly distinguished in any way.

Their spanikopita were kind of scary–they looked more like burritos, if you can somehow imagine that–but the had good gyros, and Alex introduced me to avgolemono soup: the restaurant made one that was just wonderful, especially as October wore on and the days started to get colder.

Anne and I stumbled across some wheat-free orzo a while ago, and I decided to grab it Just In Case. And then I had to find a recipe. I cruised the net a bit, and came up with a few options, and then hacked around a little bit to arrive at this:

* 6C chicken broth
* 1/2C uncooked orzo
* 3 eggs
* 1/4C lemon juice
* 1C shredded chicken

# Bring the broth to boil in a saucepan.
# Add the orzo, cover and simmer until the orzo is al dente. Remove from the heat.
# In a bowl beat the eggs until fluffy, then beat in the lemon juice.
# Temper the eggs by slowly adding a cup of the heated broth to the eggs while beating vigorously.
# Reincorporate egg mixture into soup
# Add shredded chicken

Gypped, kinda

So, I had “earlier”:/2006/04/omg-wtf-holy-shit.html commented on the premiere of Ben & Jerry’s “Black & Tan Ice Cream”:http://www.benjerry.com/our_products/flavor_details.cfm?product_id=180 with some shock.

Though I was uncertain of the palatability of a stout-based ice cream, I am mildly disappointed to report that there is, in fact, no beer in this ice cream at all. _Cream stout_ is apparently just a bit of clever marketing to refer to the most horrifyingly rich–mind you, not a bad thing–sweet cream ice cream they’ve ever done.

So: good ice cream, no beer. I shouldn’t be sad, but I kind of am.

So, I had occasion to rebuild a 3ware RAID array under Linux

And as I had a damned hard time getting it to go, I’m noting what I did here so that it might benifit myself and others. This is using the 9.3.0.X version of the 3ware CLI software–though it says that it’s for the 9500 series of controllers, it’s really for any kernel after 2.6.10: the 9500 controllers introduced a new way of talking to the controller, and the driver for the 7/8000 series was retrofitted with it.

So, you had a drive fail, and you pulled it and swapped it, now you want to get things rebuilding so you feel nice and safe again.

So, all the action here is going to be within the tw_cli interface, which you start with something like:

bc. william:~# ./tw_cli
//william>

*If you hot-swapped the drive*, you will first need to get the system to rescan and notice the new drive. If you cold swapped the drive, the act of restarting the machine will get it to rescan. To do this, you would use a command like:

bc. //william> rescan
Rescanning controller /c0 for units and drives …Done.
Found the following unit(s): [/c0/u1].
Found the following drive(s): [none].

So then you might look at the status of your system:

bc.. //william> /c0 show

Unit UnitType Status %Cmpl Stripe Size(GB) Cache AVerify IgnECC
—————————————————-
u0 RAID-1 DEGRADED – – 74.5294 ON – –
u1 JBOD OK – – 74.5304 ON – –

Port Status Unit Size Blocks Serial
——————————————
p0 OK u0 74.53 GB 156301488 3JV92V3H
p1 OK u1 74.53 GB 156301488 3JV8XXVK

p. So, you’ve got your degraded RAID-1 unit, and *fook!*, the stupid controller thinks you want ot use the second drive as a separate unit. What are you to do?

First, you need to delete the spurious unit. Needless to say, type carefully, and double-check everything here:

bc. //william/c0> /c0/u1 del noscan
Deleting /c0/u1 will cause the data on the unit permanently loss.
Do you want to continue ? Y|N [N]: y
Deleting unit c0/u1 …Done.
Now you’ll see something like:

bc.. //william> /c0 show

Unit UnitType Status %Cmpl Stripe Size(GB) Cache AVerify IgnECC
—————————————————-
u0 RAID-1 DEGRADED – – 74.5294 ON – –

Port Status Unit Size Blocks Serial
——————————————
p0 OK u0 74.53 GB 156301488 3JV92V3H
p1 OK – 74.53 GB 156301488 3JV8XXVK

p. Now you need to recreate that unit as a spare:

bc.. //william> /c0 add type=spare disk=1
Creating new unit on controller /c0 … Done. The new unit is /c0/u1.

//william> /c0 show

Unit UnitType Status %Cmpl Stripe Size(GB) Cache AVerify IgnECC
—————————————————-
u0 RAID-1 DEGRADED – – 74.5294 ON – –
u1 SPARE OK – – 74.5304 – – –

Port Status Unit Size Blocks Serial
——————————————
p0 OK u0 74.53 GB 156301488 3JV92V3H
p1 OK u1 74.53 GB 156301488 3JV8XXVK

p. Once that’s done, you can tell it to attach that spare unit to your degraded RAID and start rebuilding:

bc. //william> /c0/u0 start rebuild disk=1
Sending rebuild start request to /c0/u0 on 1 disk(s) [1] … Done.

And, after a while, you will see something like:

bc.. //william> /c0 show

Unit UnitType Status %Cmpl Stripe Size(GB) Cache AVerify IgnECC
—————————————————-
u0 RAID-1 REBUILDING 27 – 74.5294 ON – –

Port Status Unit Size Blocks Serial
——————————————
p0 OK u0 74.53 GB 156301488 3JV92V3H
p1 DEGRADED u0 74.53 GB 156301488 3JV8XXVK

p. Dry, boring, technical, and presented without a warranty, but I sincerely hope it helps you in rebuilding your drive.