Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Lately it seems I have a lot of problems for a few different reasons. Sometimes they just arrive in clusters. Other times they cascade, so a small problem triggers a larger problem which sets off a catastrophic one. And sometimes a small new problem will cause an existing problem to become worse. Anyhow, a wee glitch in the timetable Tuesday resulted in my not managing to arrange a ride to pick up my mother's van until tonight, which meant I missed a performance. But now I've got the van, and it has enough gas in it to get me to my two other gigs this weekend.

First, I noticed that the streetlights on Lombard for a couple blocks in either direction are dark. Many houses are too, but many houses along here are vacant, so that's not a surprise. The power was on in my house and several others. This may or may not be relevant later on.

Getting to Bowie involved a side trip -- nothing I can complain about, since the driver was doing me a huge favour, but it was still the first thing that made the night seem long ... leaving my mother's house, I went to grab some groceries, being out of chocolate, milk, potatoes, and a few other important things, and low on several others. Well I'm never in Bowie that late on a Saturday, so I'd never noticed that the 24-hour grocery I tried to go to wasn't 24-hour on the weekends. I decided to punt on proper groceries and just pick up the Most Urgent items at a Seven-Eleven. It had handwritten signs on the doors saying it was closed. The next Seven-Eleven was open, but I made the mistake of trying to buy airtime for my prepaid cell phone. I asked for the smalled dollar-value I could buy, and I made a point of saying, "That's wireless, not long-distance, right?" as the cashier generated the card. What I got was a long-distance card. Then she tried to tell me the same kind of card is used for both. They're not -- she didn't understand what I was asking for. Someone else had to help, and it took a while before they figured out that the least airtime I could buy was several times as much as the least long-distance I could buy, and that was more than I can afford right now (so on Monday, my phone won't work again -- I've got a few weekend-only minutes left).

I proceeded back up to Baltimore, hit my credit union's ATM to deposit the check from Mom that'll make it possible to pay either my car insurance or my electric bill this month, then went to buy gas so I won't have to make an extra stop on the way to my first gig in the morning. As the "miles to empty" readout on the dashboard hit zero, I pulled into the cheap gas station that's near a post office ('cause I had to make sure an overdue bill got into the mailstream as early as possible Monday), and it was closed. That station never closes. But just to add to my surreall "everything's closed" night, it was closed. I did make it to another gas station. Then I finally made it home.

But hey, I did take a picture of Perrine sitting at the front door, staring through the security door, waiting for me.

And then I went to check my mail and noticed the "login" screensaver on Boygeorge (WinNT) and the BIOS boot error (complaining about a Plug-and-don't-play-well-with-others device) on Rupaul (Win95). In addition to my irritation that all the web pages I'd left open to get back to later to read the rest of, or to put into a "link sausage" entry, or to quote from, were all *poof* gone (Opera's "resume browsing where I left off last time" will get many of them back, but a bunch will fail to load), along with, I presume, all the ones in iCab on the Mac (I haven't checked the bedroom yet), there was my displeasure at the prospect of reprogramming the television and VCRs, resetting clocks, and wondering which shows hadn't gotten taped ... and my utter dread at the thought of rebooting my LAN.

You see, there are a few bits of bringing up my network that don't automate terribly well, and others I've never gotten around to automating, and some where one computer isn't happy until two others are running. So "flip the switch and everything comes up" doesn't quite work in my house. But it gets worse.

I don't reboot my servers very often. Usually once a year, when I get home from Pennsic, but this year I left them running during War so I could telnet in from there. (This turned out to matter when I wanted to print a tune I'd composed, and Mystic Mail (the Pennsic ISP) didn't have any music-editing software, so I telnetted home, entered the tune in ABC notation using 'vi', ran 'abc2ps' and 'ps2pdf', ftp'd the PDF to my web site, and printed it from there on a Mystic Mail machine. So there I was at a camping event, and I had typeset sheet music to pass around less than 24 hours after composing the tune. But I digress.)

Where was I? Oh yeah, rebooting my LAN. Well I didn't shut it down this year, so it's been a long time since I've had to remember how to bring it back up again ... and I'm still trying to remember all the steps. Or what I would've named the file with the notes in it if I remembered to make notes last time. I'm ssitting downstairs in the server room logged in to Eon (Linux machine with the modem in it) to telnet to my ISP to post this, after which I'll check to see whether Richards (Linux, fileserver) has finished running fsck so I can mount the Big Disk and restart NFS so that the other machines can finish booting. Oh, and Samba and Netatalk so the Windows boxes and Carlos (MacOS 9) can see the shared directories when they boot. All of this would be in boot scripts, except that the system with the big drive in it won't boot the version of Linux on the big drive, so it boots an earlier version from another disk and then I restart the daemons from a chroot'ed shell. Yes, I am aware of how screwed up that is; there've just always been more urgent things to do when I've had the time to try to fix it.

After I make the LAN happy, I see what I can do with what's left of my shirts so I'll have something to wear with my kilt at the second gig.

Oh, and Perrine did something amazingly cute while was fifty feet away from my camera. Hmph!