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.