I had high hopes for this week. I was determined to secure some new work, and while waiting on the email exchanges, I’d spend time upgrading software on the new server I’d dropped off a while back. It’s not critical, but the longer I put it off, the more work it’s going to be, and I want to get that done.
I’m doing well with finding new work. I’ve got a couple short-term leads, and a possible longer-term one. Can’t talk about it, natch, but things are looking up on the work front, at least a little.
On the server front, I discovered that I couldn’t ssh in to the new server. So I make a call to the ISP, asking them to reboot it. Hmm. That doesn’t work, either. I made the trip in, and discovered that the day after I’d dropped it off, it had panicked and Bill had rebooted it. As far as we can tell, it never came up again. We tried some basic diagnostics, and the results were pretty depressing. I wasn’t sure when I’d bought the box, but I was pretty sure it was more than a year ago, meaning the warranty was done. Damn.
So I returned home. Dug though the books, and found that I paid for the server in April 2004. It’s less than a year old! Back to the ISP, pick up the server, and off to General Nanosystems, where I bought it.
The tech at General Nano ran through the same diagnostics we did, plus the things we’d planned to try next. Eventually the verdict: the motherboard is fried. Nope, don’t have any in stock. It’ll be four days, probably. Oh well, so I won’t get that done this week, and probably when the box is back, I’ll be too busy to get to it anytime soon. I definitely won’t have time this weekend, what with the party and all.
At least it was nice of life to provide me with a clue on Monday how the week was going to go. I won’t have to slog through each day wondering whether it’ll be a good day or not. From here it looks like a pretty balanced week. For every success, there will be something going wrong to set me back. But on the other side, for everything that goes wrong, it looks like there’ll be something good to keep me from getting too down.
- After reading an article by Dan Gillmor, Cory asks Why do newspapers charge for yesterday’s news? I dunno, but I keep hoping to find some news source that can be my “paper of record”, complete with links that won’t go poof after a couple weeks. [boing boing]
- Meanwhile, over at Flutterby, Dan’s suffering from Apple overload and thought that when I mentioned ibuprofen on Sunday, I was talking about a new Apple product. It made me snort Mountain Dew into my keyboard. [flutterby]
- Kim has a story about Hunting In The Home, sent in by one of his readers:
I’ll let you read the rest of the story, but will mention that at one point our hero compares himself to Bill Murray stalking a gopher. [kim]I called the [Humane] Society and was told that they could come out but it would cost me $80 per hour with no guarantee. After my seizure, I asked if they were kidding me. I then told them that the cost of a .22 round was about 7 cents. They hung up on me.
- Wired says Users Confuse Search Results, Ads, and only 18% of
Internet Searchers
can even tell the difference between a paid result and an actual search result. I’m reminded again of how old-timers got cranky about the September that never ended (which is now more than eleven years ago). [wired] - So there are all these bloggers talking about Nofollow, and now Shelley says she Broke Nofollow. Me, I don’t see the point. Then again, I still don’t have comments around here, and any submisstions to the blog get edited up by me which means that the spam or two per day I see never makes it here for you to see. I guess I’ll need to ponder it if and when I do get around to having comments around here, but I’m thinking that nofollow isn’t the answer. Nor is using google’s redirect. I’m not sure what the solution to comment-spam is, but I just don’t like any of the solutions people have suggested so far. Actually, I suspect that the more solutions there are, the better. More different solutions will make it tougher for the idiots doing comment-spamming to find ways around the solution(s).