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!
——–

My GOD it pisses me off that I can’t run iTunes on my work machine and take advantage of the big fat pipe to download my purchases! Geez, it’s enough to make a girl seriously think about using the grocery money to buy herself a damn laptop! THE WHOLE REASON I WORK HERE IS FOR THE SHORT HOP TO THE BACKBONE!!!

My coworker Buzz and I are in the office at the same time for the first time since I got my iPod mini. So I said, “Do you wanna see my Christmas present already?” And the poor bastard said, “Yes.”

…and ten minutes later, head shaking slowly back and forth, he intoned, “You shouldn’t have shown this to me,” and he’s surfing for 30Gb iPods now. LOL!

mmm@home says:
I just dorked out on the iPod form factor – so fucking cute
J.P. says:
the only place i could realy listen to one is in my truck… cuz i don’t walk around much
mmm@home says:
I walk around listening to the thing all the time
mmm@home says:
doing dishes
mmm@home says:
buying groceries
mmm@home says:
when assholes at Best Buy come up to you, you can just tap your iPod and smile vacuously and wander off without having to say, “No, just looking” fifty fucking times
mmm@home says:
I hate annoying salespeople
mmm@home says:
🙂
J.P. says:
haha!!
Continue reading Chattin' with my Bro →

I have one! I have one! OH MY GOD I have one! And it’s blue, and it’s wonderful, and Mr. Brett gave it to me because he’s totally superior in every way, and I love it!

It’s my brand new Apple iPod mini, and YES IT IS every bit as tiny and geeky and cute as you’re thinking it is! Oh joy and happiness! I’m in heaven!

(Yes, we realize you’re supposed to wait until Christmas to open gifts, but hell – we’re both over 30 and we don’t care. Whee!)

I started getting popups on my work machine last week. Today I dug thru Add/Remove Programs and found a little monster called “Web Savings from Ebates.”

I typed it into Google.

At Remove WebSavings I got a nifty tool to remove the damned parasite. The tool’s running now; I’ve got 37 instances in the registry, 147 suspicious cookies, and I’m only 10% of the way through the scan. (The software only identifies problems; you have to buy it to get it to auto-remove ’em for you. But with a list you can do it manually.)

Argh.

Working in the Internet industry as I do, I’m pretty dang savvy about downloading and/or installing stuff on my machines… and even wracking my brain I don’t know how this baby got installed. Honestly. Those spyware folks are some clever bastards.

I accidentally joined the Science Fiction Book Club today. Ooops! It’s Elizabeth Moon‘s fault, if you must know. I went to Webscriptions to see what else of hers they sold, ended up at her Baen bibliography, then at her personal site, and from there followed a link to the SFBC. Suffice it to say I’m really enjoying Heris Serrano. Sigh.

Tim’s not in today, so I’m rather swamped with stuff to do. I’ve been doing other stuff all day and really need to dive into my DSL db now.

Next week I’ll be here (at LISCO) every day, covering Tim’s vacation. The week after that: AMMA!!! First in Mount Pleasant, then in Chicago. (I am so ready to see Her.) I expect to be inhumanly busy in Mt. P, sitting at the Seva Desk with the wonderful and unflappable miss Christina – who has done essentially all the work of seva assignation this year. The trip to Chicago will be with the ever-lovely misses Tahmi and Anna, and we’ll be staying in the program hotel, always my favorite solution. I am ever so very ready for my annual Amma trip. Sigh.

As for my physical health, lately I’ve been feeling just utterly exhausted. My heart skips beats all the time or beats rapidly, which makes me even more tired. I miss taking my supplements, and have discovered that finding a doctor not suffering from rectal/cranial inversion re thyroidism is harder than one would naturally expect. I doubt I’ll find one and get an appointment before I’m off in Amma world for a week.

Last but not least, I did reverse DNS this morning for a customer who hosts two domains on his own server over a LISCO DSL (ie using LISCO IP addresses). This miraculous feat of competence apparently impressed the hell out of the customer’s network guy, who told the wife of one of my co-worker’s that I was stunningly competent because not only did I know what he was talking about (reverse lookup) but I actually did edit and reload the db within the 10 minutes I’d promised him. Yay, me! (It is so nice to get the occasional attagirl just for doing one’s job.) (I won’t mention that it had been so long I actually had to look up how to do it in my notes. Heh.)

Anyway, off to work. Ciao, lovies!

Once upon a time, my blog was running on an app called OpenJournal. The scripts lived in the cgi-bin, and the output of the scripts was written to html in a directory called oj.

Then I started using another blog system, blogger.com, and saved my new blog documents to goblinbox.com/blog. I don’t think I’ve looked in the /oj directory since then.

But I looked today, because I wanted to remind myself of what OJ’s features are, as I might install it for a client. Lo and behold – there’s a little love note there for me: http://www.goblinbox.com/oj/.

Someone with either my login or root renamed the existing index.htm into index-old.htm, and then created a nice “}f3n1x{ forever” page in its place.

This happened on February 23 of this year.

Fortunately, if anything on the server was actually damaged, it wasn’t in my domain. Whew. Bless the funny but non-damaging hacker.

It’s so weird… it’s like someone coming in your house while you’re sleeping and stealing your TV. I’m so spooked out!

So kudos to Mr./Ms. Phoenix for visiting but being a conscientious guest and not totally fucking up my entire non-backed-up web site. I hope you enjoyed your visit to one of LISCO’s oh-so-hackworthy Cobalt boxen.