Kevin DeGraaf’s Blog

This post is a rant, and I have no qualms about such. It may seem strange to post blow-by-blow details of a family quarrel for all the Web to see, but I need the catharsis. Deal with it.

Those of you who know Lisa are aware that she is level-headed, open-minded and rational. For this, I am deeply grateful. Unfortunately, the apple fell pretty far from the tree.

She recently requested that her parents turn over her passport, which is stored in their safe. The immediate impetus is that we will be in Sault Ste. Marie on our upcoming vacation, and we might decide to visit Canada. Beyond that, however, Lisa is an adult and has the right to make decisions regarding the management of her personal paperwork.

Therefore, perhaps naively, neither of us anticipated any problems with this straightforward request. To make a long story short, her mother threw a fit; she has, thus far, refused to provide the passport or any satisfactory reason for hoarding it.

I had to suppress quite a bit of rage as I wrote the following email:

Can you please explain why you are rejecting Lisa’s request for her
passport? What possible use could you have for it?

If the issue is the cost you incurred (application fees, photo fees,
etc.), I will be glad to reimburse you.

If the issue is safe-keeping, rest assured that I have offered the use
of my bank safety-deposit box, and Lisa is very comfortable storing it
there.

If the issue is a concern that we are planning to leave the country,
rest assured that, aside from the occasional short trips to Canada, we
have no plans along these lines. (And even if we did, that’s our business.)

Lisa is an adult, and I’d appreciate it if you treated her accordingly.

Thank you.

This is the same mother (a term I’m using lightly) who has told Lisa, to her face, “I am not proud of the young lady you’re becoming” and “heaven forbid you have kids — some people should not reproduce”.

I was really hoping to have an amicable relationship with Lisa’s parents.  It saddens me deeply that we’ve been forced into the position of considering a complete estrangement in order to protect ourselves from a steady stream of insulting and irrational behavior.

This gem from Xen is the most obtuse, unhelpful error message I’ve seen in quite a while:

Error: Device 768 (vbd) could not be connected. Hotplug scripts not working.

One of the top Google results for this text is a PDF file of the official Xen 3.1 Release Notes. According to these notes, you should check whether your CPU load is abnormally high, and configure Xen such that the host domain (dom0) is assigned fewer CPU cores.

When that didn’t work, I continued Googling. It turns out that this is the error message produced by Xen when you configure a guest OS image to use a non-existent device (block device, LVM logical volume, loopback file, etc.) as a virtual disk.

Compare the aforementioned error message to the following suggestion:

Error: invalid device /dev/vg0/blah specified in /etc/xen/foo.cfg, line X.

I guess that would have been far too easy.

Only three more work days until Vacation 2007!

As is our family’s tradition, we’re staying in Cedarville, MI (map, weather, site). Lisa and I are driving up on Friday (after celebrating her 21st birthday on Thursday).

Look for updates, pictures, etc. on this blog.