I saw this message yesterday, but honestly could not for the life of me recall volunteering for this I did recall volunteering JMatthews for it, but then I went back and saw this message, which I must have overlooked.

As the oldest member who has been actively crunching and welcoming members in the team thread/forum, Gay US team member "Boy" should have the honor of having to be our new captain.
...
Ok. Boy gets to try out the captain chair. If he don't like it, he can give it to J.

Well, I'll offer J the seat again, as even though I may be the 'oldest' (?) member, J has been instrumental in pulling us up in the rankings... and more importantly, it would make it more likely he will stay with the team, and won't be tempted away by any others...

Okay then, as Captain, I now have three options that I have the ability to change for the team.

1. Team Name: I think any changes to this would mess up the links to the stat boxes, so unless people were interested in doing a "Gay World Team (formerly Gay US)" name to be more international, there would not be much purpose in this needing to be changed.

2. Team Description: Currently says "Team for US gay members of the World Community Grid." Just about says it all, but suggestions are always welcome. For example, we could include the standard "Gay, Lesbian, Bi-sexual, Transgender" language, or something else more diverse.

3. Link to team home page: The web page seems to be filled with mostly spam messages, and not moderated at this time. I guess it is better than nothing, and maybe if a few more members become active in posting, we might consider a more comprehensive website, if someone wanted to volunteer for the project.

Anyways, that's my first act as Captain, so feel free to provide any feedback on the team items above. Incidentally, at this time, I am not going to make any changes to my signature, although I did contemplate adding an image of Cartman, with the phrase 'Respect Mah Authoritah!'

Captain or not... I'm still not calling you "Sir".

- J

...and he's been doing it since at least Nov '05

The only thing I can think of that is really bad is the crappy team home page at yahoo groups. I'm not even sure we need one since only four or five of us even post here.

The part I like best is that now we know who can change that stuff.


J. Ever lost two drives in a five drive RAID Level 5 array at the same time? Happened to me last Wed and took out my accounting SQL database!

Oops. Sorry to hear about that. Sounds like you needed RAID6. Actually, RAID is my (work) life. I've had a lot of drives fail over the years, but that's because I'm highly abusive towards my hardware. My jobbie job job is storage. I do things to hardware that should never be done in a production environment, and in fact I TRY to get things to fail.

And... personally... it's rare I don't use at least a RAID 1 on the systems I actually use for things. I've been working with storage since '97, and I've come to distrust magnetic heads the size of the head of a pin that float on a cushion of air that is less than the diameter of a human hair while a platter with MY DATA spins underneath it at... 7,200, 10,000, or 15,000 RPM. Yeaaaahhh.... drives DO fail. Drives WILL fail.

Back in the good old days of Ultra SCSI, I had a drive die on me in a non-RAID config. I kinda needed something on it, sooo... it appeared to be an electronic problem, not a motor or head problem... so I just swapped circuit boards on it with an identical drive I had. I got my data off with no problem. Ahh.. the good old days.

Then again... back in 1997 I got to play (work) with a system with ~3.5 TB of storage on it. That was with 48 Fibre Channel storage boxes using 384 Ultra SCSI 1.6'' high 9.1 GB drives. It took up about 7 racks of space. A few weeks ago I had 15 TB of storage on a cart... in 500 GB SATA-II drives. I had 1 TB in SAS drives, and about 1/2 a TB in Ultra320 SCSI drives on that cart too. All of that would fit in a 1 rack with a lot of room to spare.

But, you've reminded me. Gotta make sure my guys have backed up a few of our systems.... like our SQL DB.

-j