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!
Whew.
After many, many hours of slogging around, the box is back up. There’s content, pictures, and some of the links even work. I think things might just be looking up, finally!
For now:
I just had the most remarkable cup of coffee:
I have a stove-top espresso maker, and in its filter basket I placed some finely ground Starbucks dark roast and an equal amount of this amazing South Indian coffee called Bhoomi that I bought at an Amma auction of a dollar. (It’s been living in my freezer in a zip-loc baggie for months.)
As the expresso was brewing, I heated a cup of Radiance Dairy whole milk with a modest amount of sugar and a few cardamom seeds.
I added the brewed espresso to the milk and frothed it with a wire whip, then poured it into a cup.
OMG, people. Caffienated delight, I’m telling you!
——–
For a dog, Bindu acts a lot like a cat.
And for a cat, Buz acts a lot like a dog.
Bindu likes to nap in sunbeams and groom other animals. Buz likes to jump into a pile of playing retrievers and punch them on the snouts and run away.
Brett and I had a very involved conversation the other morning about which one was the dat, and which one was the cog. Personally, I think Bindu’s the dat. But Brett’s still deciding.
Right now, all four animals are asleep on the daybed here in my office. One of them just farted Eewh!
——–
I’ve got a working blog again! (Finally.) I can’t express how terribly interesting my life was while I couldn’t actually report on it!
I know I shouldn’t be posting anything until I import (what I salvaged of) my old entries, but fuck it. I want to blog.
So it was Keef who hooked me up with some hosting for goblinbox. I installed MT with MY FUCKING SEEE-QUEL AS THE BACKEND, THANK YOU VERY MUCH and promptly built myself a blog.
I have to figure out how to move Rants this weekend, and then I guess I’ll do DNS when that’s working.
The current (er, old) goblinbox.com’s MT installation is utterly, totally hashed. I had to delete both mt.cgi and mt-comments.cgi off the box because they were using 91.5% of the server’s processor!
NINETY-ONE POINT FIVE PERCENT, I said. OF THE SERVER’S PROCESSOR.
Right now, in the background while I’m blogging, I’m trying to FTP into the old server but my FTP client keeps reporting it “can’t establish a data socket.” Fuck! So I rebooted Enterprise, of course, because I have admin access and I can do that shit remotely, but that didn’t help. Which means I can’t GET ONTO MY OLD SERVER to get my freaking templates off, let alone get the content I have stored there.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
To make it all the more shitty and horrible, the MT installation I installed yesterday under iowachicksknitting.com (another domain on the same server) isn’t working now, either.
It was working yesterday afternoon, but it ain’t working now.
And I can’t FTP in but can only SSH, which is fine for CHMODing things but useless for trying to FTP stuff on and off the fucking server!
In a nutshell: enterprise.lisco.com is toast, as all Cobalt RAQ servers are, and I’ll be lucky if I can save anything. Hopefully Rants, LONG LIVE RANTS THE SIXTH, will survive until I can move it. I have backups from last Thursday at the very least, but none of my skins for it.
Thank God this is just a personal site and not a real site. Of course, if it were a “real” site there would be copious backups and RAID and shit. Honestly, I’m not really pissed about losing content per se, I’m mostly pissed because I’ve done this so many times before. This will be the third time I’ve moved goblinbox.com.
It’s not called “Rants 6” just because I felt like naming it Rants 6. It’s called Rants 6 because there are five – actually six – dead boards behind it, and most of them are dead because the Cobalt server they were on fucked up somehow. (In all fairness, a couple of them were FrontPage boards and that was MY fault. But they ran fine until whatever Cobalt they were on decided to restart some obscure function and then the boards reset their numbering scheme to zero and started appending new posts to existing ones… and there was NO WAY TO FIX IT.)
I moved from Atlantis to Discovery to Enterprise, always running away from servers that were somehow not working properly. I’ve had it. Seriously. THAT’S why I’m so agro: because a girl should be able to leave her site on her web server and not expect the thing TO BE EATEN. LOL!
——–
Apparently my installation of Movable Type has suffered it’s first truly major glitch since I started using it: all my comments are gone. No idea why. Maybe I’ve been hacked. *shrug*
People keep telling me to upgrade to the newest version of MT, but they don’t understand how many blogs and users I’ve got – I’d have to buy the corporate version and I just haven’t had a hundred bucks to throw at goblinbox.com lately. But with the comments problems I guess I may have to, just for peace of mind.
I’ve spent much of the past several hours at Apple Discussions – iTunes for Windows digging through the posts for info on how to make my downloading life easier. The FAQs I read today imply that iPods can’t happily sync with two copies of iTunes, so I guess downloading purchased material at work will always mean I have to bring the files home and import them before I can get them on the damn iPod.
Earlier today, I bought about 10 random tracks from iTunes – mostly old R&B/soul and jazz stuff I used to have on vinyl way back in the day and couldn’t not buy the minute I saw it: Tell Me Something Good (Rufus & Chaka Khan), I’ll Be Around (The Spinners), Skylark (George Benson), It’s Your Thing (The Isley Brothers), You’re Still A Young Man (Tower Of Power). And so on.
Anyway. It’s icy out, so my phone line’s pissed off and I’m connected at 26.4 Kbps. It takes a LONG damn time to download an entire song at 26.4 Kbps. The reason I’m trolling the boards at Apple is simply so that that I’m sitting here and I know the instant I get disconnected.
Sigh.
Brett and Joe are downstairs playing GTA and saying foul things to each other. (They talk SO dirty to each other, it’s all penis stuff I try not to listen to. If I didn’t know for an Absolute Fact that they both like girls I’d seriously wonder! I mean, really, how much can you talk about someone else’s dick? I don’t believe I’ve ever threatened to smack a girlfriend’s… nether region… with a flyswatter during the course of normal Sunday afternoon banter!) They’re drinking Budweisers and Joe’s been eating the leftover holiday fudge from a tupperware in the fridge.
Around noon, I made those red headed boys some breakfast. Steak and eggs. No biggie, eh? Apparently I created a culinary MASTERPIECE and had the great satisfaction and joy of listening to them both moan and carry on about HOW FUCKING GOOD this STEAK IS!!! for about ten minutes. (I sauteed, over high heat, a whole sliced onion in butter, then threw in two steaks covered in salt & pepper and slapped a lid on. Later I turned the steaks. Finally I threw in a quarter cup of cheap-ass salted cooking wine and let the liquid boil off, and served this miracle of dead flesh with hash browns and eggs sunnyside up.) You’d think I was the goddess of breakfast steaks! They BOTH offered me a bite so I’d know what I’d made them!
How fucking cute is that? Seriously. Dude.
Ooh, Skylark is almost downloaded. I should be able to listen to it, oh, FORTY MINUTES or so. *rolling eyes*
I think I’m gonna abandon my watch on the ol’ dial-up connection and go see what there is to make those boys for dinner.
——–
This almost makes me wanna switch… to Apple.
Not that I would. (All my warez are for PC.) But damn that’s a cute little bugger, ain’t it? And at “only” $499 it’s an “entry level priced” Mac designed to pique the interest of die-hard PC users like myself.
Not that I’m die-hard: I know my way around a Mac. I’ve used them off and on over the years and they do have their points… they’re actually cute as hell. I mean, Windows has basically looked the same since 98 came out; sure, XP has a bit of a cute factor, but I hate XP because it sucks. So. Hmm.
Damn that cute little Mac mini, anyway. *grumble
Last night we went to bed early. (If that’s not a euphemism for “got laid,” I don’t know what is!) I was asleep by eight, probably.
I woke up at midnight, thirsty as hell.
Stella had somehow gotten shut in the future living room and her whining had woken Brett up half an hour after I’d settled myself before the fire with a cheesy book and a bottle full of water. I let her out, confused at how she’d even gotten in there – the door was closed and latched and there was a box in front of it – and Brett went back to sleep.
I read more and quaffed my water. You know you’re dehydrated when you can drink 32 ounces of water before you have to pee. But at least I’d felt thirsty!
I’ve been trying really hard to drink enough water every day. It’s taken a couple of months, but now I actually get thirsty again, for the first time in a couple of years, I think.
Apparently when you’re chronically dehydrated, your thirst reflex stops working. You wander along simply not realizing you’re desperately thirsty, and your body spends all its time in a drought, trying to make do.
I’ve also rediscovered something I used to know but had forgotten: if you get up and have a glass of water first thing in the morning, it really gets the elimination cycle rolling for the day. The horrific constipation is gone since the miscarriage (thank God), but I’ve never been what you’d call terribly regular.
We all need much more water than we typically drink. Being dehydrated can contribute to all kinds of chronic pain and other malfunctions.
What surprizes me most, I guess, is how much water I had to drink and for how long before I started to get thirsty for water again! I used to be so good at staying hydrated, and somehow I just… quit doing it. I got to the point where I never really wanted water, and would suck down an obligatory glass or two every now and then, but I’d actually gotten to the point where I no longer preferred it to other beverages! What the hell was I thinking?!
——–
This place – MP3Search.Ru – Great MP3 Music Archive! – sells songs for a dime each – some albums are a dollar apiece. Can this possibly be legal? I’m curious, but ya gotta give ’em $20 at a time. Hmm.
