Vincent The Dragon

Making beef stew in the crock pot.
Started with cubed round steak seasoned with salt, pepper, tyme, garlic powder, crushed bay leaves and some rosemary pan fried in a little olive oil.
Reduced drippings with tomato sauce.
In goes diced turnip, potato, carrots, Worcestershire, Tabasco, the reduced tomato sauce and a can of crushed tomato that have been blended, 2 cans of water.
Slow simmered for awhile.
In goes diced bokchoy and leek and low heat simmer.
ENJOY !

AT&T has done diddly squat in infrastructure updates around here.
So we switched to a T-Mobile 5g cellular hot spot.

Well the latest issue is HAL7 decided to die...
We have been noticing that it was randomly rebooting or going into a reboot cycle.
Thought it was a software issue and was digging into that but then it decided to turn off and not come back on...Meep!

HAL7 is older hardware, being an HP Proliant ML350 G6.
Come to find out my raid array was not being backed up either and the raid itself can't just be plugged into something else and recovered that way.
Online research suggested it was the power supply back plane distribution board. I can't find anything visually out of place like a leaky capacitor and were were about to give up hope.
Found ONE article online that shows soldering on a switch and manually forcing the power supplies to turn on. Currently its back up and running and we have completed a manual backup of the data.

I may pull the board back out and replace caps, we will see.
Usually older server hardware parts can be found online for pretty cheap but not this one. We can find it, but its in the $200 range.

Lesson learned is to verify your backup solution.

not been much of anything interesting to post about.
work, eat, sleep, poop, repeat...
just the same struggle of trying to keep the bills paid and the bellies full...gets old

I have not felt much like posting anything, but here is the latest.

The only saving grace was that we were able to take advantage of the Memorial Day sales.
*sigh*

He passed away tonight in my arms. Rest well kitten, I hope to see you again some day.

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So, Mr. Princes fur has been in need of some attention due to him being old and having hyperthyroid - which means his poops are not solid, frequent, and sometimes wet.

I have been working on some of his tangles from time to time but it was time for time to take a bath. He used to love baths when he was a baby but not anymore. I got most of his fur clean and clipped out several clumps but one was being a pain and he was being wiggly...anyway, i cut him tried to clip it out. Took a nice chunk of furskin out. We managed to get him to the vet today as a drop off/work in. They were going to try just tranking him to shave his belly and work on the spot. Probably will need a stitch to bring the fur skin together and allow it to heal. It's more of a risk putting him fully under being 18 years old, though he is healthy otherwise. The cut is on his inner thy

Right now all I know is that they are keeping him overnight as he is really drunk, I don't yet know what the outcome of the wound is, nor if they had to fully put him under.
I'll know more tomorrow.

I don't get the chance to buy stuff for my self often.
Been saving up the money and have ordered the new Zelda Tears of the Kingdom edition nintendo switch.
Good luck getting my attention once it come in.

Doing some cleaning and organisation and we came across this guy.
Brand new in the box, it's a nice one too. Very smooth movement.

Anyway...Most people can get one side of a cube solved without much headache.
There are a few ways to solve these things but the easiest to do for normal people is to solve one side, then the next row down. After that comes pacing the last faces corner blocks and finally rotating them to the correct orientation. It can all be distilled down into algorithms. There are tons of different ones if you look around online. There are even simple ones that if repeated over and over, the cube will solve itself. Realistically you only need a few to solve it. There is the Moving a cube left and down, moving a cuber right and down, rotate a cube in place. Things get a little tricky for the last layer but again there is only a few move sets to use.

I can get mostly done with the second phase on my own but then i need to use some of these structured algorithms to finish it. I'm sure with work it would be pretty easy to memorize the move sets.
Cube Solve Is a good place to look.

Now for those speed solvers..man that just takes a different type of brain, they are able to visualize all the faces AND how the algorithm effects each piece AND intermix the algorithms together to move multiple pieces in different directions.

So..like we are trying to eat healthier.
We have all lost some weight.
Here is tonight's meal.
...Perhaps not the best health wise but it's not so bad. Only use halve the ramen and none of it's salt..i mean flavor...packet.
Lets see, we got bokchoy slices, some leak slices and some of the leaves, carrot, green bean, garlic, 'bella mushrooms, celery, a few pot stickers from a box and some really thinly sliced beef round that i soaked in various hotish sauces for a while before tossing into the boiling veggy broth.
On the side we have some leftover wild rice from yesterday's chicken butter curry, a few pickled veggies and pickled jalapenos.

I have been lax in posting as I feel I do not have the time and should rather do more important things like the endless amounts of housework or the never short 'to-do' list.

William is off in Dallas. He is a finalist and now competing in nationals for Bearded Lady which is a type of Drag Queen. It's been an expensive thing but we can't not do it as it may be a once in a lifetime experience for him.

James is off with friends so I have the house to myself tonight.

My firepit / BBQ thing that I love just shit the bed.

Mr. Prince is now 18 years old and has been having a time of it. Lots of poop and diarrhea and he is down to 4 pounds. I raised him by hand since he was 2 days old so I am very attached to him.
https://vincentthedragon.com/index.php/prince?blog=5
Blood work shows he has hyperthyroidism and I just picked up his new prescription food and pills. He ate the food like a wolf today but we will see if he keeps eating it.
I hope he does, I'd miss the guy terribly.

Yep, it's today.
I'm 50 now.
that is all.

We snagged these at the local big boxmart store we all hate. They were on sale but then also rang up at like $100 less that the sell price.
31.5 inches of curved big ass monitor running 1920x1080 refreshing at up to 240Hz
...yes, my desk is a mess right now.

The home server, HAL5 is old...very old..and also out of drive space.

I snagged an old server we decommissioned from work. It's a Dell PowerEdge T420.
I worked on the SAS drive plane that was always giving us a random drive disconnect, replaced the dead drives and ordered 4 additional drive trays to fill its 8 bays.
I started with windows so it would be easier to upgrade the various bios's in the system as the people we had manage the server never updated a damn thing....
It would load Linux from a boot dvd and would go through all the motions of install but the wonky Dell iDrac/Lifecycle controller refused to let it boot from the install....EUFI/TPM/Secureboot ...they are all mostly a pain in the ass trying to get them to play nice with OS re-loads or changing the OS. All the research I found that seemed useful all pointed to me having to update the iDrac which I did...but...something went wrong somewhere as upon reboot iDrac is dead.

No indicator light, no front panel controller and Bios states Lifecycle Controller is disabled and nothing I can seem to find or do will bring it back to life.
iDrac is a dead stick, there maaaayyyybe might have been a way to force load the firmware file IF the server had the iDrac SD/remote card slot adapter populated AND if the system had the proper license to even use that part but it does not.

The system WILL still boot to an error you must F1 past and I still can't get Linux to load...all in all HAL6 is dead before he fully came to life...now I need another solution to replace my aging and full home server....