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!
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!
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!
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’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!
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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
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.
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!!!
In a fit of foresight and organization, I went outside this afternoon to disinter the Jeep from its icy cocoon.
I haven’t driven it since the ice storm(s) and snow, so it was basically frozen to the ground and entombed in ice with a blanket of snow.
I had to kick the handle several times before I could get the door open. I started it up, put the defrost on full blast, and then went into the shed and plugged in the compressor.
I went inside and shifted laundry from one machine to the other. Then I put on a pair of jeans.
I went back outside and filled the Jeep’s flat tire with air, then unplugged the comressor and tossed the air hose back into the shed.
I moved the car about ten feet, and I even had to do it in 4WD: back, then forward again about a foot to the right of where it had been frozen to the ground. I did this for no good reason other than it seemed seemly to unstick it from the icy puddles it had been sitting in.
I took our old blue plastic-bristled utility broom and went to attack the Jeep. I swept snow off of it, scratched huge chunks of ice off of it. At some point I was removing old snow so vigourously that I broke the old broom handle in half. “Damn!” I exclaimed, surprized at my herculean effort, then matter-of-factly used the pointy end to scrape ice off of the windshield wipers. I inspected all the windows and door handles for ice. The Jeep was clean and in working order.
Finally, satisfied that I’d work-prepped my car and wouldn’t have to do much more in the morning other than turn it on, I turned it off and headed for the house.
I heard a splattering sound. It sounded like a race horse peeing. I turned back from the door and squatted so I could see under the Jeep, and damn if it wasn’t just busily pouring a few gallons of antifreeze right on the ground.
THAT’LL teach me to try and have an organized morning.