In which it’s actually my own damn fault.

Apparently I let my computer auto-dial the long distance number to my ISP from 8/21 through 9/10.

This is so unlike me. I mean, I work at an ISP, I know better than to call Fairfield when I can call Douds for free. I only ever dial the Fairfield POP to troubleshoot connectivity problems!

Anyway, long story short: my phone bill, usually less than $30 per month, is $225.45 this month.

Fuck. Me.

In which you can see my hard drives. Seriously.

Look! Here’s part of my desk – my work table, actually – at work.

And that’s five hard drives sitting on it. One’s my back up drive, one’s Buzzdoctor’s drive that I currently have data on, one’s toast, one’s my home drive, and the other is just some random drive I have sitting on my desk.

Okay, yeah, also please note I don’t work tomorrow and my home machine is apart. This means I may not blog or IM or check email. for a few days. Please continue to love me just the way you do.

In which my computer shits the bed and makes me really mad, considering all the crap I’ve been through with my work computer this past month.

Friday night, Brett asked me to get on the ‘net and look up the board track races in Davenport. Having no idea what “board track” races were, I surfed for ‘raceway’ and ‘speedway’ and didn’t find out anything.

In the background, I was importing songs into iTunes – I’d received the CDs and books I’d gotten from Shigeki‘s awesome gift certificate. At some point, my CD-ROM drive stopped responding, and Windows quit, and then it got wonky so I rebooted.

And when Win2kPro came back up, I couldn’t log in. It didn’t accept my password.

So I tried logging in as administrator, and it wouldn’t take that password either. I went to bed.

I spent hours over the rest of the weekend trying to get back in, but I couldn’t. Here at work today I have my home HDD in my bag, and I’m going to pop it into my USB enclosure and see if I can’t back my files up onto my work machine. Then I’ll have to reinstall Windows on the dumb thing and start over.

Snivel, bitch, complain.
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I’ve been using Firefox exclusively, and I hate what IE does when I run it so much that I haven’t been bothering to check my templates for IE backwards-compatibility.

Which means I didn’t even know until just now that several of my WordPress templates render improperly in IE!

Why didn’t anybody tell me! Ack! I feel like the worst webmistress ever. I’ll be running this teal style until I get time to make my other styles work in Internet Exploder.

Since my phone hasn’t been holding a charge for more than three hours at a time, and Brett’s has been rather sketchy in the functioning department for lo these many moons now, we stopped by the kiosk at Walmart in Ottumwa today and got new phones.

It took well over an hour.

You can get Lasik surgery in less time than it takes to re-up your freaking wireless contract, fer chrissakes. Why can’t they scan the box, scan your driver’s license, activate the damn phones and take your money? Why is it that as soon as you select a phone and a plan, the clerk glazes over in a hell of never-ending paperwork? It’s not rocket science, it’s selling phones.

We got LG VX6100 phones, the US Cellular version with no sliding lens cover, and we’re pretty happy with them. They’re cute as hell. They have speaker phone capability, Internet access, and built-in digital cameras. (Brett keeps trying to get me to let him take a picture of my boobs, but I ain’t going for it. No way, no how.)

They didn’t have the proper cable to transfer my phone book from my old phone to my new one, so I’ll have to transfer them all by hand. They could have transferred Brett’s numbers, but he didn’t have his old phone with him so he opted to move his himself rather than drive back to Ottumwa. I had no sympathy for him whatsoever when he whined, “Isn’t there an easier way to do this?”

Brett took a chainsaw to the tree that crushed his old Ford. Now he wants to know if I’ll run the chipper, if he goes to 1-Stop to rent one. Run the chipper? I HAVE STREP THROAT, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD. I’m going to take a nap. He’ll probably have forgotten he even wanted to do it by the time I wake up.

Amma is coming to Mt. Pleasant next week, so people in the satsang have left messages that they need me to do things – edit this web site or that one, fix data in the seva database, be places…. I’d better get my nap in and get my ass to town this evening. Hopefully this chipping scenario will just go away on its own. I’m still tired. From the strep. Yeah, from the strep.
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I’ve migrated my good ol’ blog to WordPress.

Why?

Why not. Seemed like something to do.

Actually, that’s a lie. I did it because WP has more and cooler style templates, and because – unlike MT – it’s free. I’ll probably migrate the whole site to WP since it was so blessedly easy.

Off to play with it to see what it does…

Oh, the original blog still exists here if you should want to view it.

Bold the states I’ve been to, underline the states I’ve lived in and italicize the state I’m in now…

Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C /

Go HERE to have a form generate the HTML for you.
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I moved more stuff today: my brother’s old band’s site, 2012, is now here on the new server. I moved an old WAV file of me singing. I moved some more gallery stuff. I cleaned up a few broken links.

It’ll take awhile before goblinbox.com is fully functional again, but it’s getting closer all the time.

Got another $10 donation for iowachicksknitting.com today, which makes a total so far of $70. I’ll be signing up for hosting tomorrow and beginning to get that little venture back up off the ground. I’ll probably end up paying for the fucking hosting myself in future years, but it’s a cheaper habit than cocaine so who am I to bitch?

I got a box from Amazon.com! FOUR CDS! (Actually, the Mule album had 4 CDs in it, so it was actually seven new CDs!) Boy am I thrilled! I’ve already fed two albums to my iPod; hopefully I’ll have the restraint to drive home with only one earphone in my head, so I can at least hear if a cop tries to pull me over. Snort! I can’t express how very horny I am to get the FM transmitter for the iPod so I can listen to iPodage thru the Jeep stereo.

Speaking of iPod love, I’m going to be interviewed for a lifestyles piece on Iowans and their iPods in the Des Moines Register. How cute is that? I hope I remember to actually read the article this time.

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.

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!