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August 26, 2003
Cleanliness is next to...
Cleanliness is next to ... well, being an athiest, I can't exactly say godliness, now can I? :P
I've been gradually reducing the clutter in my living space significantly and I have to say that it's been well worth the pain of throwing sentimental stuff out. Sure it's fun to reminisce of times past but really what does that accomplish. Life lessons aren't stored in my old high school music collection on tape (I haven't owned a tape player since... well, High School nearly 14 years ago).
And it just goes on from there. Wholesale tossing of cd jewelboxes I never got around to using, disks for games that won't even run on modern operating systems, and piles of old clothes that were made sometime around the turn of the 8th century. BC.
There is actually something very therapeutic about dumping all this junk. First of all, it's getting rid of havens of dust, mold and other fun allergens. Second, it's getting me off my computers for some minor exercise. And third, it's helping me realize the ultimate point of one of the other golden rules: He who dies with the most toys, still dies. Collecting all sorts of crap that one doesn't look at for 10 years accomplishes about the same as buying a book and never reading it. So don't buy that book.
There is a little twist in this whole religious experience, however. I threw out the gigantic box that my TV came in--the TV that I've had for 9.5 years. Within two weeks, my TV has started its death throes. Of course the logcial explanation is that we've recently had a few fits of power outages (where my damn UPSes scream at me in the middle of the night to come and turn them off) that have been primarily responsible for the descent of my device. But it's still fun to think that with it's original packaging gone, my TV doesn't want to live anymore.
Posted at 08:05 AM | Rants and Opinions | Comments (0)
August 06, 2003
Server Disaster
There's nothing quite like one's net connection going down to kill project development. Of course, this also brings new ferver to getting stuff done as well.
One of my web servers at work, an antiquated server really, decided to take itself down and a few subnets with it. Everyone who came in to work and turned on their machine in three different subnets all were greeted with "that IP address is already being used by another machine." Fun. :P One of the techs said that it very well could have been the 3Com card in the machine. He'd dealt with other 3Com cards wiping out networks when they went bad.
Or the machine could have been hacked. We couldn't find any trace of such after a rather extensive search. Maybe we just weren't looking in the right places.
Anyway, I've been rebuilding stuff from that server and putting out related fires. I was in the gradual process of phasing out that server anyway, but I didn't want to do it all at once.
And to top this all off, every time I type the word disaster, I keep typing distaster. Of all words to spell incorrectly, I guess that's a good one, eh? :)
Posted at 06:30 PM | Life and Work | Comments (0)