Today I ordered a little iTrip FM transmitter for my iPod, so I can listen to it while driving the Jeep.

Like a dork, I bought it from the Apple Store, then later I noticed the self-same item at Amazon.com is a whole dollar cheaper, and more likely to ship sooner.

Doh!

 

I like wine.

I enjoy good wines, wines that cost more than four dollars a bottle. I like an expensive, musty, ashy-tasting cabernet as much as the next girl.

But I drink bottom-shelf crap. Yesterday I bought a bottle of the tackiest “wine” ever: Arbor Mist Blackberry Merlot. And I loved it.

Yes, as a matter of fact I do come from a long line of indentured servants! Snort!

 

Try as I might, I can’t make Iowa Chicks Knitting work. It needs a new home. (It’s still stuck back on the old server that killed Goblinbox.) So I broke down and added a Donate button; hopefully the girls will come through and I’ll be able to move I.C.K. to a new, stable home.

 

Today Outlook 2002 informed me that I was supposed to clean the laundry room and entry way. I did that, sort of, but instead focused on accounting.

This meant I drove to the bank and put money in the hole, and I dropped off bills by hand to those dumbass local companies who either don’t process credit cards or who want me to pay a fee for the priviledge.

I spent two hours opening and processing mail and organizing our February bills. I keep a box a little wider than a standard envelope – it once had tangerines in it – and on each bill I write the due date and amount owed on the front of the envelope and file them by due date, then I make an index card to put in the front of the box with a list of all the bills. (This is for my husband, who sometimes doesn’t understand why I take all his money all the time. It’s worth my time to write up a visual aid. He rarely questions me, but I figure it’s got to get really old handing over your paycheck week after week after week… and I want to be able to show him that I’m paying our substatial bills and not spending his hard-earned dough on crap. Sure I buy my fare share of ebooks, but I doubt I ever spend more than $50 a month on crap just for myself unless I’m on vacation.) In the back of the box is a zippy pouch with the kind of stuff you’d normally keep in a desk: stamps, post-its, return address labels, coupon books for loans, scissors, Sharpies, etc. There’s also a box of envelopes in there. It’s basically a portable desk. Anyway, that’s probably much more than you ever wanted to know about how I, a fairly high-tech chick, processes her bills in a really low-tech way.

Next I balanced my checkbook. IT SUCKED. Remember how my Pocket PC reset itself recently? It took my checking account balance off to lost-data-land when it did that, so I had to print my last two bank statements off the web and figure out what was still uncleared, find a starting balance, and work forward from there. I think I know how much money I have. I’m usually pretty careful with receipts from debit card transactions, but you don’t get receipts from online transactions or from phoning in a payment. I’m going to try to let the account rest as much as possible to let it all shake out. (I hate not being TOTALLY IN BALANCE ALL THE TIME so much that usually when shit like this happens I just open a new account, but I’m getting too lazy even to do that any more. Snort!)

So I’ve done your basic tidying, a little dusting, a once-over of the laundry/entry area my schedule says I was to focus on today, and a bunch of tedious too-much-like-real-work bookwork.

I did NOT, you’ll be proud to learn, put the Jeep in either the pond or the ravine opposite it while driving down our treacherous ice-encrusted driveway this afternoon. I’ve been using the “back” driveway (the Adrian’s driveway) since I got the Jeep back, but today I was feeling adventurous… well, FUCK that! I was in FULL TIME FOUR WHEEL DRIVE and lost control of the vehicle going about 4 mph! That’s just too damned icy for me to think its funny.

It’s also why I’m afraid to check the gauge on the propane tank. I mean, we’re probably running low, but it’s not like it makes any difference what the damned gauge says because there’s no way in hell Double Circle (excuse me, it’s Farmer’s CoOp now) could get one of their duallies up our damned driveway anyway! Last year they refused to deliver one time because they thought the trees lining our driveway would SCRATCH their truck! (True story.)

Yeah, yeah, I know. Ice Melt. LOTS of Ice Melt.

Needless to say, I came in the back drive when I got home from my errands, and just basically slid into my parking space. I’m getting pretty good at it!

 

Due to my exceeding cleverness and the backup he sent me, my dad’s blog is restored to its previous glory. Chaos Leaves Town is up and running once more! (Now with more boxiness!)

 

Since I was blogless at the time, you haven’t read about how my beloved loaded the Jeep onto a trailer barely able to support its weight and ferried it to Haney’s in Libertyville one fine day.

I’ve been without a vehicle for two weeks, but I got the Jeep back today, with the hole in the tire patched and a new thermostat! And do ya know what it cost? Thirty-six bucks, my people! THIRTY SIX BUCKS!

We celebrated the Jeep’s return to the family with a lovely cocktail at the Dew Drop. I left after one since I was driving, and I had to negotiate the sheet of ice we call a driveway in 4WD, but I have wheels again! Hooray!

We had nuked left-overs for dinner. Lasagne, a steak for Brett, and a Caesar salad I whipped up. There are few things in the world finer than half a lasagne in the fridge.

I have wheels! Yay!

 

Things are coming together with my web site, finally, and that makes me feel much relieved. I have horrible guilt about Iowa Chicks Knitting being totally non-functional, but I think I’ll slap up a donations page and see if we can’t raise the $170 needed to move it to a real server and get an upgrade to MT 3.x.

I suppose we don’t really need the MT upgrade, though. I suppose a mere $75 would get us a year’s worth of hosting. I bet the girls could swing that with me.

 

mmmfiber.jpgOur very own Adie has recently rolled out her very own store on eBay, where she sells her luscious, hand-made, extra fabulous (and warm!) scarflettes to just any ol’ body who is smart enough to purchase one.

She sent me a prototype for Xmas, and I wear the hell out of it. I don’t know that I’d ever have purchased one without wearing it first because they look so little, but it’s amazing how much of a difference such a wee bit of scarf around your neck can make to your overall comfort. Adie’s scarflettes are painfully stylish and they really do keep you warm.

Yay, 80! (Visit her blog, Squirrelville.)

 

This is what happened.

An event occurred on enterprise.lisco.com and it broke my MT installation and my DBM database.

Any entry that was rebuilt lost it’s comments. Other comments were lost at random. All of the content for Iowa Chicks Knitting was destroyed; I suspect a user rebuilt the database out of ignorance.

I tried to save I.C.K. by moving it. I’d already registered iowachicksknitting.com and it was ready to go with its own IP on the same server. I installed MT under iowachicksknitting.com and made a few entries and comments. It worked just fine.

I backed up what I could salvage from goblinbox.com.

MT-comments.cgi went absolutely nuts and was using 91.5% of the server’s CPU. I deleted mt-comments.cgi from the offending site: goblinbox.com.

The MT installation over at iowachicksknitting.com quit working, and hasn’t worked since even though I’ve reinstalled it from scratch.

I moved goblinbox.com to some space Keef hooked me up with. I installed MT and iB. Then I had Buzz and Keef finish up the DNS.

The loss of the temp IP I’d used to connect to the new server fucked up MT yet again, so I had to uninstall and reinstall MT for the fifth time in less than a week.

I got so pissed off I downloaded and installed WordPress, but although it’s pretty cute it will let you fatally murder it by changing a setting in the Options, so it’s hardly stable. I went back to massaging MT again.

And it’s working now. I imported what I’d managed to save from the old server. Today I’ve been deleting duplicate imports and adding categories to comments.

Rants 7 is up and running and stable, and even though I imported Rants 6 into it with no errors I don’t know where that data is.

I made some art today and massaged badly-imported data more. In the final analysis, I’ve installed MT six times total. I’ve upgraded, backed up, installed, and imported Ikonboard. I’ve backed up and imported MT entries. I’ve moved tons and tons and tons of files and images. And my site is still full of broken links and missing images, and iowachicksknitting.com is still totally non-functional.

Eventually, goblinbox will again be functional and beautiful, and iowachicksknitting.com will also be up and running. I’ve learned that I am that attached to my site, and I definitely need to be makin’ decent backups, and that if you don’t clean up your server Murphy will damn well do it for you.

 

So I’m at work and you’d think I’d be working, but I’m not. I’ve pretty much been FUCKING WITH MY WEB SITE all day. Sure sure, I’ve processed an assload of emails and interacted with a few coworkers and dispatched some data installs, but mostly I’ve just been fucking with goblinbox.com.

I’ve had this site for so long that I don’t know if I can express how disturbing it is to me when it’s down! I hate it! It’s like knowing your furnace is broken or your plumbing’s blocked, or that something about your home is fucked up enough that it will take a great deal of concentrated effort to get it UN-fucked.

I had to remove and reinstall MT yet again, because after taking away the IP and going back to name-based DNS on a shared-IP server, the database (where the password table is stored) just wouldn’t work. No matter what. I tried deleted the db and making a new one, but that didn’t work. So I ended up deleting the database, removing all traces of MT from the server, reinstalling and reinitializing MT, and importing the entries I’d salvaged off the old server.

After fucking with MT for over an hour, I decided I was pissed at it and installed a copy of WordPress instead, but it actually lets you break it by changing one of the settings through the interface, so while it’s terribly cute it’s hardly a step up from MT.

I also moved about a gig of crap: the galleries folder, my procs folder, tons of other files… strangely enough it took until 4:00 before the network security dude finally complained that I’d set of an FTP traffic alarm in the firewall!

Snort!

My templates are gone, eaten with the rest of my old MT database. I’ll have to rebuild them by hand, and even though I’ve done it a hundred times now it’s still tedious to have to recreate all that work.

Many, many links on the site still don’t work, and won’t until I can find them and fix them. My feedback form doesn’t work because I haven’t had time to install a formmail script or find out if this server has one pre-installed, not to mention edit the form itself.

Rants 7 is up and running but although I imported the Rants 6 content and didn’t get a single error, I don’t know where it is. I posted a request for help at the iB tech boards and hopefully some kind soul will enlighten me about the mysteries of SQL dbs and what they want.

Overall, this has not been the kind of fun geek odyssey that the LAST two server crashes were. I mean, I used to enjoy the learning curve, but there isn’t one any more. It’s grunt work, and it’s tedious. I think I will become Queen of Anally Frequent Backups in my old age so that I won’t suffer another loss of this magnitude again. I guess I shouldn’t be so attached to my content, but honestly there are images and information on this site that I don’t keep anywhere else. I use my blog to look up dates and events all the time. When I wrote my ‘Jefferson County Hospital Tried to Kill Me’ post I wanted and expected it to stay there because the lawyer Brett’s hired to contest the $450 invoice actually told me to write an account of what happened before I forgot!

I’ve been wanting to prune the dead weight off this site for awhile, and this move will certainly accomplish that. But I’m already bummed for stuff I’ve lost and haven’t even discovered yet!