Weekend update, midweek edition
Sep. 19th, 2007 09:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwexThat I'm not posting an update until Wednesday should give you a whiff of a clue what the past few days have been like. I think this was "punch drwex in the face, repeatedly" weekend and nobody bothered to warn me.
The weekend started early Saturday with Pygment calling to tell me her mother had passed. As some of you know, the knowing and expecting doesn't make it less. I cried for a bit then sent out an email from my home machine, hovir. Immediately afterward the machine went belly-up for the last time.
It had served well for many years, originally constructed by PCs For Anyone back in 2001. Lately it had developed some kind of failure (I suspected the graphics card) that caused it to lock up and need power cycling. Multiple power cycles per week was too much for the poor old disk, which stated its displeasure by emitting sad clicking sounds and failing to boot.
For the record, Saturday early AM is not an ideal time to try and find Linux support and assistance. In fact, finding it any time is harder than you'd think. One of the odd things about this experience is that I had such a hard time finding professional Linux support people and half the ones I did find told me they were already overcommitted. You'd think if there was that much demand then more people would get into the business and advertise themselves.
Being without my mail server normally makes me twitchy. Knowing that everyone who got the announcement was going to try to reply to a dead email box and that I had no email list with which to coordinate the coming week's activities made me even more crazy.
Blessedly, friends came to my rescue. The kids were taken out and entertained marvelously so they weren't in my hair and I wasn't getting more frazzled.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ariesd arrived with a ready-to-load machine and a SUSE DVD and we started to rebuild the machine. We even managed, with the help of friends from the Media Lab to recover the data from the old hard disk.
Permit me to digress a moment here to rant about how imbecilic and unforgivable it is for people to write man pages that are JUST WRONG. Unix weenies like to prattle about RTFM but bucko when I copy and paste an example from the man page it sure as hell ought not to cause the program to barf. You want to know why Linux sucks and people won't use it? It's because of stupid shit like this. Making it harder and more obscure isn't cool. Really. We should have gotten over this 15+ years ago.
The computer project ate up most of Saturday and part of Sunday. I did manage to host a small game in there and the players did manage to get out of town, finally. Considering my mental state it's probably good we didn't try anything more taxing. Unfortunately, losing all my planned child-free time over the weekend meant I didn't Get Stuff Done(tm).
I mailed my boss to tell him I wasn't going to be in on Monday and after dropping off the kids I set out to make things happen for the household. Shopping, laundry, dishes, cleaning. Unfortunately, about 15 minutes into that plan I got a final punch in the face, this one pretty literal.
I thought it was a bad allergy attack, but it may have been a fast-moving head cold. Nose explosion, severe sinus pain, stabbing that went all the way through my jaw into my teeth, and a persistent 2Hz hum inside my skull. I doped myself up on every med I could think of and kept moving. I got about 1/4th of my list accomplished - not exactly the homecoming I had planned for Pygment but at least nothing had collapsed and sunk into the swamp.
May you each, and all whom you love, be inscribed in the book of life for a happy, peaceful, and healthy year.
The weekend started early Saturday with Pygment calling to tell me her mother had passed. As some of you know, the knowing and expecting doesn't make it less. I cried for a bit then sent out an email from my home machine, hovir. Immediately afterward the machine went belly-up for the last time.
It had served well for many years, originally constructed by PCs For Anyone back in 2001. Lately it had developed some kind of failure (I suspected the graphics card) that caused it to lock up and need power cycling. Multiple power cycles per week was too much for the poor old disk, which stated its displeasure by emitting sad clicking sounds and failing to boot.
For the record, Saturday early AM is not an ideal time to try and find Linux support and assistance. In fact, finding it any time is harder than you'd think. One of the odd things about this experience is that I had such a hard time finding professional Linux support people and half the ones I did find told me they were already overcommitted. You'd think if there was that much demand then more people would get into the business and advertise themselves.
Being without my mail server normally makes me twitchy. Knowing that everyone who got the announcement was going to try to reply to a dead email box and that I had no email list with which to coordinate the coming week's activities made me even more crazy.
Blessedly, friends came to my rescue. The kids were taken out and entertained marvelously so they weren't in my hair and I wasn't getting more frazzled.
ariesd arrived with a ready-to-load machine and a SUSE DVD and we started to rebuild the machine. We even managed, with the help of friends from the Media Lab to recover the data from the old hard disk.Permit me to digress a moment here to rant about how imbecilic and unforgivable it is for people to write man pages that are JUST WRONG. Unix weenies like to prattle about RTFM but bucko when I copy and paste an example from the man page it sure as hell ought not to cause the program to barf. You want to know why Linux sucks and people won't use it? It's because of stupid shit like this. Making it harder and more obscure isn't cool. Really. We should have gotten over this 15+ years ago.
The computer project ate up most of Saturday and part of Sunday. I did manage to host a small game in there and the players did manage to get out of town, finally. Considering my mental state it's probably good we didn't try anything more taxing. Unfortunately, losing all my planned child-free time over the weekend meant I didn't Get Stuff Done(tm).
I mailed my boss to tell him I wasn't going to be in on Monday and after dropping off the kids I set out to make things happen for the household. Shopping, laundry, dishes, cleaning. Unfortunately, about 15 minutes into that plan I got a final punch in the face, this one pretty literal.
I thought it was a bad allergy attack, but it may have been a fast-moving head cold. Nose explosion, severe sinus pain, stabbing that went all the way through my jaw into my teeth, and a persistent 2Hz hum inside my skull. I doped myself up on every med I could think of and kept moving. I got about 1/4th of my list accomplished - not exactly the homecoming I had planned for Pygment but at least nothing had collapsed and sunk into the swamp.
May you each, and all whom you love, be inscribed in the book of life for a happy, peaceful, and healthy year.
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Barn door, horse, etc.
Date: 2007-09-19 02:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-19 02:36 pm (UTC)Hugsnuggles for the both of you, whenever convenient throughout the day, in spirit...
Re: Barn door, horse, etc.
Date: 2007-09-19 04:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-19 04:10 pm (UTC)Re: Barn door, horse, etc.
Date: 2007-09-19 06:05 pm (UTC)Re: Barn door, horse, etc.
Date: 2007-09-19 07:18 pm (UTC)Re: Barn door, horse, etc.
Date: 2007-09-19 07:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-19 10:49 pm (UTC)My sincere condolences for your loss. If there's anything I can do, please let me know.
-Jill/Ulfric
no subject
Date: 2007-09-20 12:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-21 11:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-21 01:10 pm (UTC)Re: Barn door, horse, etc.
Date: 2007-09-26 04:20 pm (UTC)Re: Barn door, horse, etc.
Date: 2007-09-26 05:23 pm (UTC)I'd love to get some attention on it in the next couple days but if it needs to wait for the weekend then so be it.
Re: Barn door, horse, etc.
Date: 2007-09-26 11:54 pm (UTC)Hmm, I seem to have
So. Mah address. Let me show you it: silver@phoenyx.net