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An emergency vet West of the Ashley

Previously if you had an after hours pet emergency, you could go to one of two emergency vet clinics: one in North Charleston on West Montague Ave and another over in Mt. Pleasant on Pine Hollow Rd (just off 17 near Dragoon Rd). That left people living West of the Ashley with a bit of a drive to get to either of those clinics. Based on previous experience, that trip to the emergency vet can seem like a really long one even when you’re not that far away.

Now there’s a much closer option for people living West of the Ashley, located at the Charleston Veterinary Referral Center just off the Glenn McConnell Parkway at Shelby Ray Ct.

Having an emergency vet out there should make it much easier for WA pet owners.

Update: I made a Google Map of the emergency vet clinics in the area.
http://goo.gl/maps/btNg

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SysRq really does something

During today’s hardware testing, I learned that the SysRq button actually does stuff!
The appropriate combination of key presses can send signals to the Linux kernel to make it do things, particularly in the event of crashes or freezes.

The magic SysRq key is a key combination understood by the Linux kernel, which allows the user to perform various low level commands regardless of the system’s state. It is often used to recover from freezes, or to reboot a computer without corrupting the filesystem.

The option to enable this needs to be set when the kernel is compiled and then also enabled. On my Fedora 14, it appears to be disabled by default (/proc/sys/kernel/sysrq is 0). When I have a bit of time, I’ll try enabling it to see if it works.

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Computer testing

CSCLUG is getting involved in setting up another computer lab and today was hardware testing day for the first batch of what looked like a zillion computers.

This was only half of the bunch. There are apparently more on the way.

Stacks of computers

Each of the computers was given a quick check to see how operational it was. Machines with missing bits (typically RAM) were set aside. We ran Memtest and tested to see if they would PXE boot off the network.

Testing the computers

We made it through about half the stack of machines and ended up with somewhere around 24 out of 33 usable machines with nearly 50 more to test.

A batch of usable machines

Working computers and spare bits

We ended up with a bunch of machines that haven’t been tested yet because they have no memory. If anybody has sticks of memory for Dell GX 270s and GX 280s (DDR 333 or better) that are cluttering up your drawers, we can put them to good use!

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Term paper hell

In both my classes this semester (Tissue Engineering and Drug Delivery), I’m being asked to write term papers in the form of research proposals (NIH style) in subject areas that I know absolutely nothing about other than what I’ve learned so far in class.

I have a week and a half to write them.

So. Hosed.

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Tungsten T3 retirement party

Looks like my T3 will be retiring sooner than I thought.

It’s probably not a good sign when it gives me a low battery warning while it’s sitting on the cradle.

Guess it’s time for the retirement party.