Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"If your friends list was a collection of jocks and sorority girls that might have been cryptic. Since you have one of the largest collection of geeks anywhere it qualifies as plain english." -- psychojediboy (to silmaril), 2005-07-13

Yesterday I never did make it out of the house. Today I'm feeling better than I did when I woke up yesterday, but no better than most of yesterday afternoon, so I'm rearranging my plans. I'll do research (and maybe force myself to make phone calls) for the out-of-the-house tasks and try to conserve my strength for rehearsal tonight, then plan on going out and doing things Thursday or Friday. We'll see. Last night I was pretty migrainey by the time I would have had to leave for rehearsal if last night were tonight; I'm hoping my body cooperates better now that today is actually today. Not that the way that sentence came out is all that encouraging.

A Win98 box that worked just fine but I considered unuseable anyhow because it couldn't mount shares from my fileserver is now a fully-fledged participant in my LAN. *whew* All the web sites I found about how to make Win98 and Samba cooperate (a problem I was sure I'd had to solve at some point in the past already but couldn't remember the details of) failed to help me. They said to either enable encrypted passwords in the configuration file on my server (already done -- I think I had to do that when I added the WinNT machine a long time ago) or to disable encrypted passwords in the registry on the client machine (a: made Win98 very unhappy at first; b: didn't help -- so I put it back). Finally I got the bright idea that maybe this machine that wasn't asking me for a password wasn't actually a single-user config after all, and just had a default user to log in as. So I asked Google about Win98 passwords (wanted to be safe before I hit the "log off" button), and discovered that all I had to do was delete any *.pwl file I found in C:\WINDOWS ... Did that, rebooted, logged in as "dglenn" and told it a new password, and gee, all of a sudden "Map Network Drive" works Just Fine. The four volumes I wanted from my file server are all visible, it took my Samba password, the wallpaper has been set to some freaky clouds I got with my cell phone on the way home from Pennsic, and this machine is ready to contribute its resources to my various projects. Or be one more place to lose track of web pages I opened and got distracted from ...

I'm two weeks behind on my LiveJournal reading except for a few spot-checks here and there. I'm also working on a script to make it easier for me to catch up when I get behind.

A few nights ago the power went out for a few minutes. Just long enough to crash everything and leave me facing the longer-than-it-ought-to-be process of restarting my network. Machines want to come up in a certain order, and some of them have rather lengthy fsck runs, and on one of them I need to start some tasks under 'chroot' and for some reason it's unhappy if I try to do that from the console so I need to have another box running to telnet to it from ... and an even larger factor is that a whole lot of parts of this that really should be automated have been sitting on my to-do list for two years and I still haven't gotten around to taking care of that. (Putting the main disk for the file server into a box that will actually boot from it will help. When the machine it had been in died, I made it the second disk in a computer that wouldn't boot it. So that's where 'chroot' comes in: "chroot /mnt/bigdisk login root" and then start the various daemons there. Getting it into a box where it can be the boot drive will mean several steps no longer needing to be done by hand.)

During the process of restarting things, I found the KVM switch (a recent addition) extremely helpful. Now that I've used one in my own computer room, I really want an eight-port one. (I know, not likely to arrive as a hand-me-down; I'm lucky to have the two-port switch.) I've had two other two-port KVM switches lying around for ages, but have never managed to get the cables I need for them. (Why are they so expensive?) The one I'm using can be activated by special keystrokes, as well as by the switch on the unit itself, and it has a mode in which it will alternate between the two computers every few seconds. I could see that being very useful in a larger switch hooked up to five or six servers.

Parking restrictions for street cleaning here are 11:30 to 15:30. I went and moved the car just before then, and just as I completed my U-turn, the street sweeper swooped past ... and 11:19. Okay, the driver wants to make up time and finish early, I guess, but if he's coming by before everyone's moved their cars out of the way -- and thus not making a pass when the curb lane is clear -- doesn't it defeat the purpose of the signs and the parking tickets and all that?

It's not just the trees, of course, that change colour. The ivy-covered wall of the house behind mine is quite striking, with a big dark red splotch accompanied by yellow, orange, and green stripes. The grapes in my back yard are a cute colour; not yet ripe. I thought they ripened (and transformed overnight into bird poop) earlier in the year than this -- maybe I've misremembered, maybe the weather has confused the vine, maybe this is an extra crop. Not sure.

Today's being a yo-yo day, but with less extreme fatigue-swings than the last couple. Getting things done in small bites; trying not to bite off too much at a time.

A shortage in my house: electrical cords for computers. For a while I've been raiding cords from machines on the repair pile, but as I get more computers running I'm out of spares. If any of my friends has a surplus that they keep tripping over and need to get out of the way ...? I'm also under-supplied with working VGA monitors, but those are more of a "wait for someone to upgrade" item than a "see whether anybody has a bunch of spares" thing. (I've also got about four Ethernet cables too few, but seeing as I have a crimp tool, at least eight conectifiers, and a fair quantity of Cat5 on hand, that's one shortage I can rectify on my own later. Or maybe I can trade Ethernet cables for power cords?)

Goofed off briefly with ( a silly quiz -- gee, I'm a geek, who'd-a thunk? )

Found the check I lost earlier ... only to realize that "earlier" was months earlier, and the small print says "not valid after 90 days". Not an insurmountable problem, just a minor annoyance to deal with. It would seem a lot more significant on some day when it was the last straw or something. Anyhow: whoops.

In the most recent package of malta I bought, one of the (glass) bottles was dented. I mean, it looks just like a dented tin can would look if it were a bottle, except that it really is a bottle. (Oy, my writing skills today. Feh.) This amuses me. In my current state I cannot tell whether my degree of amusement is in keeping with the degree of silliness of the dented bottle, but I'm pretty darned amused.

(Gee, look at that -- while looking for a link for folks who might be unfamiliar with one of my favourite soft drinks, I also stumbled across a recipe. Can this possibly make up for getting someone hooked on it who lives in a place where the stuff isn't sold?)

Estimated probability of my actually getting to rehearsal tonight: about 60%. Don't hold your breath, but do wish me luck.