Today we rode our bikes to school. This was the first time this (calendar) year, and the weather made riding irresistible.

Lucas decided he was going to ride his new big bike (16″ wheels) instead of the Trail-A-Bike with me. We left a little early, just in case. We didn’t need to. Not only did Lucas keep up just fine, but Kayla couldn’t catch him. One whiff of her catching up and off he zoomed. After riding back home (2 mile round trip), we had to travel 8 blocks out of our way, because it has been too long since we biked past the church.

Two weeks ago, he picked out his own books from the library, and is able to read half of them. He starts kindergarten in the fall. He is more than ready.

This week I had two disks fail. The first was the cheapest to fix, as it was in my 27″ iMac. I took the entire machine to the Apple Store and picked it up the next day. The failed disk was covered under AppleCare, restoring my data from Time Machine backups was effortless, and my total cost was $4 in gas and 1 hour of time.

The other failed disk was in my file server. The server had a mirrored pair of 1.5TB disks and a mirrored pair of 1.0TB disks. One of the latter exhibited pre-fail symptoms so I ordered a pair of 3TB disks to replace both pairs.

I removed one disk from each existing pair, inserted my new disks, created the new zpool, and then remembered why I like ZFS so much. Here are the commands required to initialize the new disks and copy everything to the new array:

zpool create zmirror3 mirror ada1 ada2
zfs snapshot -r tank@now
zfs send -Rv tank@now | zfs receive -Fvu zmirror3

That’s it. There’s a little housekeeping, like setting ‘zfs set mountpoint=none’ to prevent conflicts and cleaning up the snapshots, but that’s really it. By using ‘zfs send -R’, all the zfs pool and volume meta data gets transferred too. It seems too good to be true. Below are the verbose messages that are enabled with the -v flags included above.


receiving full stream of tank@now into zmirror3@now
receiving full stream of tank/root@now into zmirror3/root@now
received 1.31GB stream in 20 seconds (67.2MB/sec)
receiving full stream of tank/usr@now into zmirror3/usr@now
received 1007GB stream in 8625 seconds (120MB/sec)
receiving full stream of tank/snapshots@now into zmirror3/snapshots@now
received 456GB stream in 7487 seconds (62.4MB/sec)
receiving full stream of tank/swap@now into zmirror3/swap@now
received 34.6MB stream in 4 seconds (8.66MB/sec)
receiving full stream of tank/var@now into zmirror3/var@now
received 1.10GB stream in 34 seconds (33.2MB/sec)
storage#


Here is a simple paradigm (from a comment BenE posted) for quantifying how much a person needs to retire successfully*:

Divide your life into three thirty year periods. During our first 30 years, we have limited means for savings. During the next 30 years, we work and save. We spend the last 30 years retired, spending our savings.

To spend as much in retirement as we did during our working years, we must save half of our income during our 30 working years so that we may spend that half during our 30 years of retirement.

Read that again. Pause and reflect on that.

Afterword

There’s plenty of factors that influence how much one must save. This paradigm excludes them so that the raw scale of savings can be easily grasped. Some of the most notable factors that can influence how much it is necessary to save include:

• Start saving early
• Postpone retirement
• Social Security income
• drastic reductions in living standards
• Be born to rich parents/win lottery
• Die early
• Retire at the beginning of a long bull market.

* Successful retirement is defined as not outliving ones nest egg, or as not having to eat Alpo in ones golden years (William Bernstein).

I just published v2.12 of NicTool. The announcement is posted in the NicTool community forums.

On Sunday afternoons (with the family) and wrapping up on Monday, I plan our meals for the week. Once completed, I post the menu on the fridge. With the menu established, it’s easy to update our shopping list and always get exactly what we need.

What I lacked was a good method for keeping track of recipes. How would I find that amazing recipe for Brazilian Black Beans? Which strawberry cake recipe did I use for Kayla’s last birthday? Which of the 3 blueberry pie recipes from the summer of 2011 did we like the most?

I created a spreadsheet to help me answer those questions. After cooking each recipe, I record our family rating of the recipe in the cookbook margin and/or on the menu. As part of meal planning, I update our spreadsheet with the previous weeks recipe names, sources, dates of preparation, and ratings. Now I have a list with every recipe we’ve eaten. I can sort by date, source, or rating, as well as searching.

After a multi-year hiatus, I have resumed my quest to to cook my way through every recipe in Joy of Cooking. Notable things I’ve learned in the past few weeks:

• I like tomato sauce. This greatly surprised me, as I’ve had no special affinity towards foods with tomato sauce. What I learned is that I don’t dislike tomato sauce, I dislike Prego, Ragu, and other ‘canned’ tomato sauces. When made fresh from raw ingredients, I like tomato sauce. I really like it.
• I learned how to make a good puffed pastry. The secret is persistence. Just like with making bread, accept that the first few times will end in disappointment. So start with something like an apple turnover, so even a disappointing result is good.
• (My) kids don’t like soups. It don’t recall liking them much as a kid either, so I shouldn’t be surprised. But I’ve found a greater affinity towards them in my middle years.
• Kids love, love, love familiarity. I’ve made a dozen types of pancakes and several were excellent. But they still prefer “my” whole wheat banana buttermilk pancakes.