entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

I swore i'd never make the by-now cliché "i'm sorry i haven't been blogging" update to my journal.  I also had a snappy putdown for myself in my mind this morning when i was thinking about writing it, but a day of resetting firewalls and building bookcases and Pilsner Urquell means that i've forgotten my clever phrase.  But never mind that.  The point is, i don't owe you, the reader, anything; this is my fucking journal and i'll write in it when i write in it about whatever it is i'm writing about.  No, wait, that's completely wrong.  If i didn't owe you, the reader, anything, then i should just shutter the whole operation and write my journal on paper in elegant longhand and store it under lock and key (as opposed to under lock with no key, because then i'd never be able to get it out).  Anyway, "Fuck me, fuck you, fuck everyone," as that great patriot Al Jourgensen once said.

I think the World Cup recaps were a little draining, albeit not nearly as draining as actually getting up to watch nearly every early game.  Work has been a busy affair, what with getting familiar, actual tasks, and moving my workspace twice in two months (and top that off with an impending trip to Bangalore).  To compound that, my workspace at home was also disrupted, specifically by a CPU failure.  So not only have i been too busy to sit down and be creative, but when i have sat down, it hasn't been in a place where i felt comfortable.  So all you've gotten from me since the Cup ended has been soccer reports, link dumps, cheap one-liners, and anti-Semitic crap bad sports analogies.

I've had the next part of E&TG sitting on the hard drive of my (now fully operational battle station) workstation, and gods has it been so long since i've worked on the damn story, and i just want to finish the damn thing.

There's lots of detritus and debris in my head of things i wanted to write about.  I know i have some empty wine bottles kicking around the house that are waiting to be written about while the memory of their flavor is still present.  I have to write a book report of Eco's The Name of the Rose for my dad.  I also want to review a couple of movies.  We'll see how it goes, but at least now i can get on with it.  My journal: confessional booth or bathroom stall?  You, the reader: priest or creepy voyeur?  I think i'm done.  Am i done?  Yeah, i'm done.

My Mac experience has quickly turned to shit.

• The M$ Office updater downloaded a huge update and then failed to install it.  I tried again and the result was the same.  Also, the file was nowhere to be found.  I ended up downloading and installing it manually.
• The OS X 10.4.6 update downloaded and failed about a quarter through the installation.  The file was nowhere to be found even though the failure message claimed i could locate it in the Finder.  I tried the updater again and now it hangs during "Checking for updates...", with the progress bar about 25% full.  I downloaded the update manually, but when it says "Select a volume for installation", my hard drive never appears.  It's just blank.
• I downloaded and installed the latest iPod update.  After a reboot, iTunes ran fine.  After another reboot, iTunes crashed when i ran it, and when i reopened it, it ate my library.

Roger Burton West in the Other Place:

Sendmail admins wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever. I'm really awfully glad I use Exim, because I don't work so hard. And then we are much better than the Postfixers and Qm*ilers. Postfix admins are stupid. They all wear green, and Qm*il admins wear khaki. Oh no, I don't want to talk with Qm*il admins. And Exchange admins are still worse. They're too stupid to be able to read or write. Besides they wear black, which is such a beastly colour. I'm so glad I use Exim.

I wanted to ask how often you change your secure passwords, but i'd probably get another bucketload of "LOL NOT TELLIN LOL" answers, so forget it.

MAKING ls AND vim (AND GOD KNOWS WHAT ELSE) SHOW EVERYTHING IN PRETTY COLORS BY DEFAULT IS USELESS IF THE COLORS RENDER TEXT ILLEGIBLE DEPENDING ON ONE'S TERMINAL BACKGROUND AND FOREGROUND COLORS.  YOU ARE STUPID AND UGLY NERDS.

One of the things i requested at my new job was that my corporate-issue laptop be a Mac (partly because i was damned if i was going to get stuck with a stinkin' Dell).  After some wrangling with the CFO, my request was granted, so now i have in my possession a 15" PowerBook with a gig of RAM.  I also have a Kyocera KPC650 EVDO card.  I've installed Camino and Firefox, and i downloaded all 800+MB of the developer tools just so i could have gcc kicking around (which i used to build screen, which i configured and compiled with zero hitches).

I like it.  The display is crisp and things work, once you get used to the idea of trying stuff that you know would have never worked in Windows.  It's a damn sight better to use than the GNOME-RedHat desktop i got (which keyboard [DAMN YOU, DELL!] already triggered both tendinitis and carpal tunnel syndrome in my left arm — after 3 damn days of work!).

In summary, all computers suck, but the Mac seems to suck less.  Huzzah.

So my CD burner has lockjaw, which necessitates the use of a paper clip if i want to open its maw.  And there is not a paper clip in the house to be found.  But wait!  My memory tells me that i saw a paper clip somewhere on the driveway, deep in a crack.  Off i go in my jammies, in the rain, to search for a sodden, sodding paper clip.  And i found it!

Now the drive is having software lockjaw.  Maybe i should go back to bed.

I failed to copy over important files in /etc and /var, which means that i lost all my mail aliases (very bad; mail will bounce, but i'm trying to reconstruct them by sifting through bounces in the mail logs), my DNS zones (bad, but the information was minimal and i reconstructed it from memory), and my mail (bad, although it's only the last three months).  My newsspool is also acting wonky, but that's not important.

Looking back on things, i should have known that the problem was the root drive, since the first errors i saw were related to swap getting weird; i disabled the swap partition and that wasn't the end of the woes (which, really, that's just plain bad troubleshooting; if the drive is going bad, simply not using one section of it isn't going to fix anything).  However, after i did all my shuffling about of files, i hammered the drive by rebuilding the OS, and it withstood it fine.  It suckered me and i'm pissed.

Yes, i know, backups.  Right.

Anyway, everything is well now.  Happy new year, bitches.

Looks like the root hard drive on my server gave up the ghost while i'm in Vegas and 48 hours away from being able to deal with it.  I just didn't have enough time to finish the new box before i left.  Oh, well, at least this lends some finality to the whole goddamned mess.

I must thank erikred for being my volunteer monitoring monkey, as well as elmuchacho for being my hands and eyes.