The Time Sink

Okay! Let's try last week again. ...only without the jury stuff and maybe with a more normal schedule at home (simple insanity rather than the enhanced variety). That could work <g>!

...and yeah, I realize I am way the heck behind on the tech projects and some of the other stuff. My patchwork quilt of connectivity is holding together, but is due to start unraveling once the temps here hit normal: I just cannot see the dialup router handling the summer heat in the garage. That means Freesco on a webpad ASAP.

...and then there are two kids' machines that I've never quite gotten around to: they've been distracted enough by their console games that I've caught a break; but they're starting to win too many of those games and the PCs are calling once again.

...and I need to get Daniel at least partially networked into the system once his school laptop shows up. That should be fun. XP... <shudder>

I'm hanging out the shingle: Fortunes told while you roast (see Monday). I just missed the component. Shelley called a little while before I was ready to head home and said she couldn't pull a Net connection. WT? So we trouble shot some and ended up tabling it until I got home. ...but when I went to look at things, she seemed to have lost the network. ...only the blinky lights all work. WT? Great, maybe the NIC's hosed. ...but first time to check the hub out in the garage.

Hmmm. Light's are on... Why isn't anyone home? Hmmm... Uh-oh. Better yet, why are things so warm near the server? ...maybe because the power supply fan has died? Oh, yeah, the first 'hot' day and things are failing right and left. Joy.

Short version: Shelley's down with some sort of connectivity issue. ...one not resolved with a new NIC. The server's HDDs are being migrated to an external HDD when things are cool enough to fire up the server (external fan. ...and I'm very glad I add a pusher fan to each box I build; that's what saved things out there.)

Well, to update the scores, Shelley's machine 1, Dan 0 (although I did no work on it last night); Server 1, Dan 1. ...and we'll call life in general a draw <g>.

I managed to pull the web stuff (something like twelve sites) over to the external drive; that lets me post and such. I also pulled a gig or so of pics over; that was more worrisome to lose. ...and I got most of the download directory over, but I know I'm going to have to check that one closely. I still have one backup directory that I'd like to grab, but it can wait until the weekend.

I'd like to get that machine up and do a clean pull of all the master files to the second spindle on the Linux box and proceed from there. Time will tell...

Say it with me now, "It's the cable!" Have any of us (the geeks out there) not read or wrote or advised of that at some point? Heh. Well, I'd checked this and that, but I hadn't been back to Shelley's machine since Monday. ...but an answer from John Dominik led me to check out the pingery of it all. ...and since the machine happily pinged away at 'localhost' and its own IP, I wandered back out to the garage to check the blinky lights...

...and that's when it struck me. That one blinky light shouldn't be. Yeah, the 100 link should be steady. WT??? Okay, a recrimp was definitely in order. Sure enough, a steady light! 'K, back to the box and deal with whatever I'd messed up in my thrashing about the other night (oh, just the gateway IP, no big thing really...). Short version; the Optimist is back on line and ready to post. Well, except for jobs the next two days...

I took the night off last night. ...or at least part of it, there was still homework to do <g>: Shelley is ready for the post graduate work on how to setup her own shot, and Brad needed some help with his language lesson. ...but other than that, I bladed after I got home, watched the last quarter of a very good Kings basketball game, read the newspaper and caught up on email.

Things on the list for this evening include another round of touch up on the website I'm finishing up for a friend, some Linux madness and playing around in a server's control panel.

Whew, finally catching a break after a busy day. Heck, I haven't even been over to the blog yet! ...and there's a post or two waiting to happen over there! ...but there's a new blog about ready to fire off (maybe later this evening), a new portal under development after a successful PHP-Nuke installation, another site redo in the hopper and some gallery software to try now that I have another sandbox to play in.

Umm... Isn't the rule something like "Weekends are supposed to be relaxing"? This one has been anything but...

On the other hand, several things did get started, worked on, or completed. ...but I think I'm going to have to tell you about them next week!

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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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