… once again condensed into one, because I can’t be assed to spend the effort in doing this over 30 days either.

Day 1 – Your favorite song

王菲 – 红豆
Easiest pick here. I absolutely adore this song, and I can’t see my choice for this ever changing.

Day 2 – Your least favorite song

N/A
I honestly can’t think of any particular song that I hate. But just about any and all Asian rap would fit.

Day 3 – A song that makes you happy

坂本真綾 – a happy ending
Maaya’s amazing voice, from what seems to be a bygone era. I haven’t been impressed by many of her more recent work, but from when she first arrived in the music world through the first half of the new millennium, her songs that I didn’t like were few and far in between.

Day 4 – A song that makes you sad

阿桑 – 寂寞在唱歌
A sad and hauntingly beautiful song, by a singer with a wonderful voice whose time came much too soon. I love this song, but there’s more than a hint of sadness every time I hear it.

Day 5 – A song that reminds you of someone

林俊杰 – 江南
I realize that the category is supposed to be for a song that has meaning due to a memory or something similar… but this is one whose title is the same as the name of a friend. How can it not remind me of her?

Day 6 – A song that reminds you of somewhere

张宇 – 月亮惹的祸
This one is kind of strange… this was a song that I heard somewhere in China and simply fell in love with, and spent nearly a day with my uncle running all over town in 青岛 trying to find a CD that had it. So I’ll always remember that when I hear it.

Day 7 – A song that reminds you of a certain event

U2/Green Day – The Saints Are Coming
Performed at the Superdome for the first Saints home game after Hurricane Katrina, this is what I believe to be the best sports music performance ever. I doubt I’ll ever forget watching it happen (though not live, sadly).

Day 8 – A song that you know all the words to

王菲 – 红豆
My favorite song, so obviously not surprising that I would have the entire lyrics memorized.

Day 9 – A song that you can dance to

Vicky Vale – Dancing
I guess any Electronica song that I like, but this is the first one that comes to mind. And it’s even called Dancing!

Day 10 – A song that makes you fall asleep

KOKIA – ありがとう…
I interpret this more to be a song which I can enjoy listening to as I fall asleep, and this definitely fits the bill. A very lovely and soothing song that I enjoy greatly.

Day 11 – A song from your favorite band

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Under The Bridge
Most of my favorite musicians tend to be solo artists, so this ends up being fairly easy. This is my favorite RHCP song by far.

Day 12 – A song from a band you hate

Anything by Limp Bizkit
I dislike Fred Durst and Limb Bizkit on pretty much every level. And I refuse to actually find any of their “music” to post.

Day 13 – A song that is a guilty pleasure

Backstreet Boys – Show Me the Meaning of Being Lonely
Um… yeah. They’ve certainly had some catchy songs, but this is probably only Backstreet Boys song that I would say I’ve really liked.

Day 14 – A song that no one would expect you to love

Coolio – Gangsta’s Paradise
To say that I’m not a fan of hip-hop and rap would be an understatement. But I absolutely love this song.

Day 15 – A song that describes you

N/A
There are plenty of songs which describe how I feel at a given time or situation, but I don’t think anyone can properly or even remotely accurately be described by any one song.

Day 16 – A song that you used to love but now hate

Nickelback – How You Remind Me
It’s hard to remember, but there was a time when Nickelback actually wasn’t the laughingstock of pop music. I actually really liked this song, which was their first big hit. But then we heard more of their songs, and came to realize that THEY SOUND EXACTLY THE SAME. I mean, who can possibly forget this:

Day 17 – A song that you hear often on the radio

N/A
I haven’t willingly listened to the radio in at least 8 years. And not planning to anytime soon either.

Day 18 – A song that you wish you heard on the radio

N/A
See above.

Day 19 – A song from your favorite album

植松 伸夫 – Tina (from Final Fantasy VI Piano Collections)
I’m not sure I can really say what my favorite album is, but I can definitively say that FFVI is my favorite gaming soundtrack, and this is my favorite gaming song.

Day 20 – A song that you listen to when you’re angry

Will Smith feat. Mary J. Blige – Tell Me Why
I really don’t think my mood ever compels me to listen to one particular song, so I guess I’ll just post something that reflects the emotion.

Day 21 – A song that you listen to when you’re happy

梁詠琪 – 胆小鬼
See above.

Day 22 – A song that you listen to when you’re sad

R.E.M – Losing My Religion
See above.

Day 23 – A song that you want to play at your wedding

宇多田ヒカル – Fly Me To The Moon (In Other Words)
I can think of no other song that would embody the joy of being in love quite like this one. And I rather prefer Hikki’s version to Frank Sinatra’s. =)

Day 24 – A song that you want to play at your funeral

Sarah McLachlan – Angel
Not a very unique choice, I imagine. But the arrangement of this song and her voice singing it are, in a word, perfect.

Day 25 – A song that makes you laugh

Barenaked Ladies – One Week
The song is just… silly.

Day 26 – A song that you can play on an instrument

N/A
I am wholly lacking in musical talent. Even if you were to expand “instrument” to include Guitar Hero and Rock Band… I still wouldn’t be able to answer this.

Day 27 – A song that you wish you could play

植松 伸夫 – Eyes on Me
Isn’t it practically a requirement for every Asian to be able to play this on piano? =D

Day 28 – A song that makes you feel guilty

萧亚轩 – 不配
Not so much a song that makes me feel guilty as one that makes me feel very regretful.

Day 29 – A song from your childhood

歌声与微笑
This is the only Chinese children’s song that I can still remember. And the funny lyrics variations too (请把你的钱包留下)!

Day 30 – Your favorite song at this time last year

ステレオポニー – ツキアカリのミチシルベ
红豆 has been my favorite song for years, but pretty sure this is the song I was addicted to around this time last year.

The single 2TB (1.82TiB) HDD I had for storing mediia/downloads/backups wasn’t cutting it, so I finally decided to go through with turning my old PC into a file server and ordered 2 more of the Samsung SpinPoint F4s (HD204UI). Ever since I came across an article on ZFS, which has been touted as the last word in file systems and has a great built-in software RAID engine, I’d made up my mind that was what I was going with. But unfortunately due to licensing issues, it’s not natively supported in Linux, so I couldn’t use Debian or Ubuntu Server like I would’ve preferred. My choice for OS were OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, FreeBSD, or a distribution based off those (EON, FreeNAS, etc). OpenIndiana is way too new for me to feel comfortable using, so that was never really an option; OpenSolaris has the most mature ZFS support, but the OS itself is effectively dead as an open source product; FreeBSD doesn’t support the most up to date versions of ZFS, but since I’m not planning on using RAID-Z2 or Z3 (yet), it’s not as big a deal – whereas the OS still being updated and supported is. FreeBSD it is.

The first thing I have to say for FreeBSD is that it really makes me appreciate how good of a job Linux distros have done in making the install and configuration process sensible and painless. Sure, Ubuntu is by far the most consumer (or one might say n00b) friendly of them all, but even the GUI-less install for Ubuntu Server can get you up and running with practically everything you need in less than an hour – just anything that’s not already installed is only a few apt-get commands away. By comparison, from when I put in the FreeBSD CD to install for the first time, to when I finally had a working minimal installation (basically FreeBSD with SSH and Samba) took… about 6 hours. This included at least 3 full reinstalls of the OS and 40+ minutes spent on updating ports list and then installing Samba each time by downloading sources for all dependencies from a bunch of FTP servers and compiling them. Installing vim, my *nix editor of choice, took even longer because I didn’t realize gvim was included in the vim port, and thus had to download a ton of GUI dependencies… some of them off Belgian FTP servers at the blazing speed of 60KB/s. So lesson learned – use the vim-lite port if, god forbid, I have to ever do it again. And I have never appreciated APT (or even YUM, which I don’t like nearly as much as) more.

After that, it was time to set up the ZFS RAIDZ pool. At least this part went pretty swimmingly by following the excellent guide by sub.mesa – his FreeBSD install/setup guide is pretty good too, though the site was down when I was doing my install. The only real issue was when I forgot to create filesystems using the zfs create command and just created directories via mkdir in the zpool. Which worked… but then caused the ~50GB of data I’d copied onto it to disappear on the next restart… oops. Also had to recompile Samba to enable AIO, but that was quite painless.

And so, after hours spread out over 2 days… I’ve got a working file server with 3.62TiB of usable space. Performance is unfortunately not quite great – I seem to be limited to about 65MB/s writing to it over my GbE network, compared to the 80+ I was getting when I just had the one HDD shared under Windows 7. It does not appear to be a disk bottleneck, as I was getting the same speeds on the set of 3 old Seagate 7200.10 160GB drives I tested with too. It’s likely a combination of my computer being underpowered (single-core A64 2.4GHz with only 2GB of RAM is rather less than usually recommended for a ZFS file server) and the normal Samba overheard, so I’ll wait until I (most likely) switch over my current Phenom II X3 system for that use, and investigate further if it’s still slow.

In the meantime, I’ll be watching the progress bar as 1.6TB of data (somewhat slowly) makes its way across my network.

First movie I’ve seen in theatres in quite a while. It’s honestly a little ridiculous how just the first half of the book 7 movie is two and a half hours long, but it didn’t really feel like it dragged on too much. It’s still a very faithful adaptation of the source material, and it’s still a fun ride to see the events unfold visually.

And it’s damned near unfair how absolutely beautiful Emma Watson has grown to be as each subsequent movie has been made. I fear that she will likely forever be associated with this role above all else, but hopefully she has a great career beyond being Hermione.

And I think I may have to re-read the entire series of books one more time before the final film’s release. I kind of wish they were available for the Kindle, so I wouldn’t have to dig up my hardcover collection that’s buried in a box somewhere.

Now I can NOT update this from my iPhone as well as from a browser!

Also, new watch: