Have you heard of this movie? The Changeling

This is a strange but true story of a woman in LA (played by Angelina Jolie) who’s son disappears. The police return her son to her only to eventually discover that the replacement son was an impostor. The impostor in this case with my Dad’s half-brother, Arthur J. Hutchins.

My Dad didn’t even know about Arthur until he was around 11 years old. I remember him telling me that he found out that he had a half-brother from a neighbor. Apparently he was delivering newspapers one day and a woman on his route asked him how his brother Arthur was doing and it all kind of came to light after that.

I had no idea this movie was about Arthur and I never knew him obviously. Still it was a strange thing to have someone from your family in the news and to have reporters calling you and your family asking for family photos and stories.

Once you hear the story though the feelings turn from excitement to sadness when you realize what a terrible thing Arthur did to Christine Collins.

Welcome to 2009! I hope it is a good year for all of you who are reading this. 2008 was a year of ups and downs for me. That is true of all years of course.

After a year like I had last year you can’t help but reflect when the time comes to change the calendar. I guess I wouldn’t change any of the things I did or actions I took in the last year. I’m sure someone wiser than me would have or could have handled the problems that life threw at me better than I did. But I think I handled each situation the best I could. I tried my hardest to do the right thing and to use good judgment when I was making the important decisions.

Having said that I can see where there are things I need to do better this year.

First off I need to mend some fences with my family. I feel like last year was hard on some of my familial relationships. I don’t have tons of family and to be down right honest I am not terribly close to the family I do have. But that makes the relationships that I do have all the more important.

Second, I need to work on my health. I hate New Years resolutions, so I won’t call this one of those, but let’s get serious. You have to start somewhere! So I am resolving to try to redouble my efforts to take good care of myself. This is not just my physical health, but also my mental health. Without divulging too many embarrassing personal details I will say this - in August I did some things in this area that I probably should have done 10 years ago and I feel really good about it.

Third, I want to keep going to school. The place I work is very generous with it’s education benefit, so I decided (in August) to take a class at a local community college and it was a ton of fun. And I got an “A” in the class. Admittedly it was an easy class, but I hadn’t taken any classes since I was in High School and that was nearly 20 years ago! I was always an avid reader (especially for a boy) and a very curious person. I was surrounded with very intelligent and curious adults as a kid, but schooling was always at the bottom of my priorities. So going back to school was something that was (and is) important to me. I am going to try my hardest to keep it up this year. Plus I met some really nice people in my classes and had a blast.

Fourth, and the last thing I will talk about in this post is that I want to widen my circle of friends. Over the last few years I have felt that I have allowed my life and my social contacts to shrink. I regret this because I have always had the nicest people around me. I have always been blessed with a group of friends and acquaintances who were just the best. I hope that in the coming year I can renew some old friendships and if I am lucky make some new ones.

So those are the things that I am thinking about as the new year begins. I hope that all of you who read this have a healthy and prosperous New Year.

Here is a simple script I wrote to monitor the CPU usage on a single process. I had a server with an issue with NFS. The rpc.statd was using 20 - 30 % of a CPU and while I was figuring out the root cause I wanted to keep an eye on it so I knew when it was wigging out. As you can see I have it in debug mode now.

#!/usr/bin/ksh
LOGFILE=/home/username/rpcmon.log
HOSTNAME=`hostname`
set -xv
rm ${LOGFILE}

function logg {
the_date=$(date +”%D %r”)
echo “${the_date} ${1}” >> ${LOGFILE}
}

logg “Beginning check of cpu percent on rpc.statd”

ps -elf -o pcpu -o comm | grep -v grep | grep statd | while read PCPU COMMAND
do
if [[ "$PCPU" -lt 2.9 ]];then
echo $PCPU is less than 3.0 percent of CPU >>$LOGFILE
else [[ "$PCPU" -gt 3.0 ]]
echo $PCPU is greater than 3.0 percent of CPU >>$LOGFILE
echo $PCPU is greater than 3.0 percent of CPU on $HOSTNAME | mail -s “Percent CPU on “$HOSTNAME”" username@domain.com
fi
echo The CPU percent for $COMMAND = $PCPU >>$LOGFILE
done
logg “Completed check of cpu percent on rpc.stat”

The United States of America has elected a new President. Barack Obama!

I want my country back, and I want the despicable campaign of hate, fear, lies, and division run by John McCain and personified by Sarah Palin to be repudiated by a massive Obama win. We can make this happen. The polls all say we’re going to make this happen . . . but I remember 2000 and I remember 2004, and even though the polls say that we vastly outnumber the people who tragically support John McCain, we’ve got to get to the polls and make sure our votes count.

So.
Make sure you get out and vote tomorrow, especially you younger people. You guys are overwhelmingly Democratic (yay!) but you’re also notoriously unreliable (boo!) so if you think you’re going to be in line for a long time and you’re going to get bored, bring a book, bring a DS, bring a PSP, bring a deck of cards, bring your cellphone and liveblog or Twitter the whole thing . . . just don’t get out of line and don’t leave without voting!

Everyone else, if you think it’s not worth waiting a few hours (or several hours) to cast an important vote in a close state, I have two words and one initial for you: George W. Bush.
Also, voter suppression is a terrible fact of life all over our country, and the ACLU has prepared a great resource for all 50 states, with printable sheets you can take with you to know your voting rights wherever you are

.

The Voting Rights Project of the ACLU is dedicated to providing citizens with information and assistance in exercising their right to vote! We are urging citizens to ACT this election year. For more information or to voice a voting rights complaint, call 1-877-523-2792

IBMs hold music is the music they play over the Public Address system in Hell. One word: saxophone

Now God, I know we have had our differences in the past, but I would like to take this opportunity to apologize from the heart and ask for a favor.

Please God, let Barack Obama win this election. Please. Pretty please with sugar on top. I don’t know if I can take another 4 years of war, deficit spending and far right-wing partisonship.

I am completely serious and if I ever have a kid I will raise him or her to think you are quite spiffy and worthy of praise.

Your pal,

Matt