It’s the same (procedure) every year: people start thinking about what to change in the new year, or even worse: what to change with the dawn of the new year’s first day. In most cases, these ideas are scrapped quite quickly. I’m quite sure that you all know what I mean. I don’t like the idea of forcing changes, especially regarding changes in one’s way of living, attitude, or behaviour. Sad but true, people are trying to force other people to change something quite frequently. That doesn’t work with me. Admittedly, that’s not entirely true. It works in the sense that I will most probably react in a way that was not intended by the other person. Kind of bucking the trend. That’s me :)

Airport People: Almost always in a hurry

The last days I (again) thought about a lot of things. On Wednesday, when I walked through and sat around in Bremen’s airport, I watched the people around me. They were walking, talking, hurrying, waiting, greeting, going, chatting, laughing, dreaming, hoping, being wild with excitement, had a thrill of anticipation. These are only some attributes I noticed; the last one might be quite well known for one or two readers. The excitement I actually perceived only with two individuals: a woman that had just arrived from London and a dog that was so excited about the arrival of a couple (I suppose) that he (or she) spun and twisted around him- or herself like mad. It’s really, really interesting to think about the stories that cause such emotional behaviour. Especially airports and rail stations are places where you can observe a broad range of excitements, it’s fascinating. I’m normally quite neutral in the sense that … well, just neutral, you know? :)

Currently, I’m currently on holiday, just doing nothing except things I like. This includes trying to avoid any reachable computer device (except for answering emails or writing blog entries in the evenings). It’s great, I hate computer I have to admit. It’s not possible without them but also not with them. This also implies that there’s enough time to recap what happened the last year. Coming back to the initial topic, I just wanted to say that I never want to be so stupid, so self-destructive, and dump like sometimes in the last years. Would be great if (whoever reads this mostly redundant post) could remind me of that (for now and the upcoming years)! Thanks and have a nice end of the year :)

Yesterday, I unintentionally deleted the (master) ext4 superblock of one of my (virtual) server’s partitions by accidentally executing

pvcreate <device>

Only some seconds later, I realised that I definitively chose the wrong lvm volume. Some more minutes later, I found out that this can be (partly) reverted by letting e2fsck recreate the master superblock by first going through the information stored in one of the backup superblocks. Their locations can be calculated by mke2fs, given the parametrisation is still known. Given, as in most cases no custom values were used, the list of backup superblocks is revealed by running

mke2fs -n <device>

The -n argument makes e2fsck carry out a dry run only. Finally, the master superblock is restored by issuing

e2fsck -p <backup superblock offset> <device>

Some error messages will be displayed and some corrections will be carried out. In the end, however, I got back a fully functional filesystem with all the data … at least it seems so :)

Quite another lame day is almost over. Instead of doing useful things, I browsed through some pictures I took during our Spiekeroog trip in November. Admitteldly, I also played with the idea of replacing my good old (menalto) gallery by a remotely hosted one. Anyway, like by a strange coincidence, while browsing the pictures I came across this ultra-short series of visionary gestures below. I then remembered that I wanted to do a small collage back then but didn’t (as usual) manage to do so until now.

It’s quite simple but still I somehow like it :)

Heute vor genau einem Jahr: Um knapp Viertel vor Acht, am 14. Oktober 2008, fuhr mein Zug. Ich hatte kaum Empfang, wurde über zwei Anrufe per SMS informiert. Hab sofort zurückgerufen.

Dann brach alles zusammen.