Overthinking Things

I can't believe this. I need a new ISP. Shaw was fine at the old place, but here it is sucking far too frequently.

First, any attempts to upload backups chokes my entire Internet connection. I can't do offsite backups of my desktop anymore because of it. Again, this was manually throttled and working fine at the old place. To start, I bought a lower tier of service here, but the higher tier doesn't offer any better upload capacity.

Then, last week sometime, Shaw's routers fucked up routes to half of the IP addresses on my web server. hosting users as far away as Vancouver can't get to their sites, either. The problem self-corrected hours later.

Now, Facebook and Youtube both started having connections dropped for stylesheets, javascripts, and images at random. So I connect through an encrypted SOCKS proxy to my web server in Montreal, and everything loads fine.

What the fuck is Shaw doing? Why do I need a VPN to connect to the web?

UPDATE: Okay, it's my router. Something went wrong with it while I was gone. I had to manually add the default route and assign the IP address received form the DHCP server to the interface in order to get it to work at all yesterday. I just substituted in a little DLink router, and connectiosn work fine now. The router PC is on Ubuntu Hardy Heron, so it's due for a nuke and pave to the new LTS anyway. Maybe I'll just stick with the DLink, and reduce the fan noise in here.

Otherworld was great. We Got Down - to a SCIENCE!

* Ashes lit me on fire. Ho, hum.

I was doing safety for the fire performers before the Man burn. Right before the show, Matt comes up to me and says "The most important part of your fire safety plan is knowing where Ashes is at all times!" I said "I'm way ahead of you, buddy." By that point, he'd already asked me to follow him around that night as his dedicated safety, but i had other commitments.

When Ashes lit up his fire staff during the show, I thought it was going to be the usual home run. Instead, he threw me a heater, high and inside. Suddenly, there's a big flaming stick bouncing //right at me//. It hit me in the bicep before it could twirl into the crowd, and my sweater started burning. Luckily, I was the guy with the wet towel.

I have to say Ashes is the only fire performer I've ever worked with that managed to light //his own safety//.

Dangerous and fun!

* Rangers: the Anti-Flail

I did two ranger shifts for the first time. I'd long been told that I would make a good ranger, and I believed them. The excuses I'd always made always sounded dumb, so I just did it this time.

Nothing happened, really. Peer support Sunday morning (12am-4am) was mildly boring, because you get stuck in a camp, but I managed to stay warm bulldozing half the budget for hot cocoa and chatting with fellow volunteers, and one friend who just liked to hang out and wrote this beautiful thank-you letter to the campsite's owner.

I got to wander around with the lovely Leona during the Sunday morning shift, and that was much more fun. Despite having twice our numbers, this crowd seems a pretty responsible bunch to party with.

I learned how much easier it is to experience more of the event once you have the excuse of being a ranger. I also learned how well-known I'm getting in this community. So many more people know me or have heard of me than I know myself. That feels nice.

* For the first time, I brought art!

With the help of a borrowed projector (thanks Ashes!), a borrowed screen (thanks GDI!), a borrowed laptop (thanks, Sammy!), a borrowed staff (thanks, Ricalope!), my very own Nintendo wiimote (thanks, me!), I showed off a visualization program I'd been working on. The wiimote is taped to the staff, and the laptop picks up the angle data from the staff, and translates it into a virtual staff which is then projected onto the stage. I had various lightsabers and other images (spirals, fire photos, etc.) that rotated in synch with the staff. It was fun to see people come up at random to play with it. Mmmmmmm, tracers....

Not everybody got to see it (I only had about a 2 hour window to show it), but I was happy with it. More than one person asked to see it again Saturday night. I have plenty of ideas of how to expand and improve it. Someday, I might even apply for an art grant.

* What people are for.

After much thought, I think I'm going to accept that the answer to the question "what are people for?" is this: People are an opportunity to feel happy by way of making others happy. I think I'm going to live this more.

I don't think I'm often, if ever, going to find any (or many) people that will be everything I've ever wanted. But that's not what they're for. I've been learning how to get more and more of what I want and need - beyond my wildest dreams - only from things that others have no right to take away from me: me. But there is a uniquely empathic part of the mammalian brain that gets a kick out of giving, and you could do worse than filling it with love in whatever way you're best suited.

I did a lot of that this weekend. By the end of it, everyone felt used, but no one was wasted. I was constantly teetering on the edge of overcommitment, but all around, I had friends looking out for me. One thing emphasized to me recently at a workshop was that if one is to give, one must do it from a state of abundance.

Drugs? Shit, son. I was having too much fun to do drugs. I didn't have time.

A great big thank you hug goes out to everyone who was there, because if you were there, you brought something great to something really, really great.

More of this, please!

Heaven is just a mythical paradise,
designed to fool you into thinking
that paradise is just a myth.

Blossom in whichever direction your sun shines from.

Tweak stirs. Zee reappears, briefly, and explains that Drex had been summoned for another task, and will be returned later. She also says there's an abandoned diner down the road.

The place hasn't been touched in years. It's like they closed up shop one night, and nobody ever came back, not even to break in and ransack the place. The provisions are intact and edible. Apparently it was a pizza joint.

Tzak constructs some necromantic beast of burden out of old discarded bones. Four legs, tied together at the top. Not much. Tweak pumps some power into it, increasing its size and strength. I recognize his methods as my own. "You know the Art of the Shoal?" I ask. Suddenly, he isn't interested in talking about it, and disappears back into the Diner.

Tweak looks a bit funny. He's passably human, with glowing eyes, and a massive physique. He's built like a dwarf, but six feet tall. His odd bits could easily be explained away as mutations or arcane blessings or abilities, who knows (Drex thought I was a mutant at first. Thus the gun in my face). But at this point, I had to consider whether this man was actually one of my kind.

Blessedm'n, dreamspawn, are the hybrid offspring of mortals and those sexual fantasies they encounter their own dreams, who also, somehow, manage to cross into the dreamer's reality just enough to conceive a child. Our morphologies vary vastly, like dream-creatures do. The only thing that binds us together is our intuitive adoption of The Art, an arcane discipline we all possess intuitively.

I suppose I could understand why Tweak would be so reticent to be identified as dream-kin. After the endless bullshit I'd put up with growing up, I wouldn't want to be seen as anything other than normal, either. Tweak was lucky. One can pass for human easily enough without ever-shifting violet skin and silvered horn-bumps on your chrome dome. But I didn't have that luxury. But neither did I have to live in fear.

Or, he could just be a run-of-the-mill mutant (you know, 'normal', as 'mutants' go) with an obscure education. Use of the Art is by no means limited to dreamspawn.

-

The pizza diner is curiously alone on the road. But it's a bit large even for a restaurant. It's embedded in the side of a somewhat larger building. We don't find a way into the larger part from the inside, but there is a loading door around the back, WELDED shut. Tweak busts in the wall with some power, revealing - black shadow, abruptly behind it. The place has been amgically shrouded to prevent sight. Tzak engages a sound based sight power that works well enough. Inside are books. Textbooks on a lot of arcane disciplines! This was (is?) a school. With the ex-mage's help, we haul them out, and divvy them up for study.

We spend the morning salvaging the wrecked vehicles in the parking lot, and manage a wagon of a rusted-out truck, hooked to Tzak and Tweak's bone ox. Tzak learns a bit more about his new staff while trying to use it as a lever: it has a bad attitude.

Before leaving, we pull out more canned provisions from the kitchen, just in case. Originally, i had been reticent to open the freezer, because I honestly did not want to be responsible for unleashing what would doubtless be the stink of hell from a walk-in freezer that hadn't seen the blessing of electricity for several decades. But Tzak, being the more curious sort, was not nearly so prudent. While I was out prepping our pumpkin carriage, and divining the ground for our whereabouts, he opened the freezer, and found it dark, just as the school had been. And cold, like a a freezer should be.

It seems some demon had been imprisoned within a device at the center of the room, and forced to power its heat exchangers for eternity. Tzak began talking to it, and, well... he released it. Don't ask me why. It wasn't my fault; I was outside.

After some fumbling around, Tzak reports from from the dark. "There's some kind of spirit imprisoned in this device. I'm speaking to it telepathically. Its power is keeping the room cold, and it wants out. I think it might be evil."

In a fit of quizzical contempt, I replied only: "...Mom?!"

When Tzak reported on the captive's moral disposition, I had imagined he was mentioning it as a way of voicing his reticence to release it. In retorospect, not only was I wrong, but the OPPOSITE was true. Score two for imprudence.

[I'm skipping the tedious part where Tzak has his life drained by touching the conical device, and where I come in, blind as a bat, and Tzak grabs my arm and feeds MY wounds to it, followed immediately by a healing blessing. repeat for Tweak. OW.]

So here we are, all three of us, bolting madly for the wagon as the side of the building crumbles to dust. Out of the cloud steps the biggest cliche incarnation of evil I've seen since I stopped watching "Nazgul Nation: Revenge of the Ring" on TV.

Only it thanked us, granted us three wishes (one each), bid us a safe journey, and flew off.

"Do genies typically sport leathern wings and sharp teeth?"

I've been thinking about designing web sites that use federated login mechanisms from across the web. These are things like OpenID, OAuth, and Facebook Connect. Both OpenID and Facebook Connect appear to have given way to OAuth, which I think is great, as far as standards are concerned.

The killer app with social networking, besides the ability to broadcast your thoughts one-to-many (or, I suppose that could be considered the killer app of blogging) is the ability to authenticate your audience; the ability to specify who can see your posts, and who can't.

To use the Facebook example, login federation using Facebook Connect means that I can publish posts on my personal website that are only shared with certain other people who are authenticated by Facebook.

But here's what bugs me: in order to share my content privately with someone on Facebook, I also have to share it with Facebook. Period.

I know there's plenty of obscurity to hide behind; Facebook certainly doesn't really care about most of what one might be embarrassed about sharing - or even what one might have a more legitimate fear of sharing: criminal activity, for example. They probably won't even notice the vast majority of the time, if you limit the information you share to your own website, simply sharing it with Facebook-authenticated users, rather than passing it on privately into Facebook's own systems. This is strictly the principle of the thing, I'm concerned with.

But Facebook itself would still have to be trusted, so long as even one Facebook user would have access that anonymous users do not. It would be easy for Facebook to fake the login of any of its users into your website, gaining access to anything that might otherwise remain private.

Or Google. Or Livejournal. Insert social network here.

If I'm going to simply choose, without resort to rational or empirical justification, to believe something, why wouldn't I just create it from whole cloth myself, rather than accepting a pre-packaged dogma cooked up by others?

Am I attempting to convince myself that how widespread the belief is lends rational credibility to the package? Doesn't faith also require the //appearance// of independence from justification?

I think the answer is not so much an appeal to rational credibility based on popularity ("Can millions of people be wrong?") as it is about the motives that the faith serves. Churches are communities; they're social support networks. You swallow the dogma to be included.

By this logic, the burner community isn't a religion, but whatever kind of thing the burner community is, my family's church in Arizona is, also.

[Session 2, 2010-06-10]

I awoke with many, many ideas. There were multitudes of futures, all within the next several hours. I only hoped that I would be able to spend a little while unmolested so that I could test out what I had just learned in my dreams.

Yes. Yes, it worked here, too. Nearly everything I looked at, if I centered myself and concentrated, had several different degrees of freedom. As the sparse, dead grasses beside the road waved in the light pre-dawn breeze, they grew fuzzy and unclear. Upon closer inspection, it turned out that each stalk had split into a number of distinct images of itself, each superimposed on the others, their contrasting fates interfering with one another in my view. Only by intention could I select one to focus upon, and that fate would become the canonical one, as their companions faded from view.

Real possibilities.

Tzak rose from where he had rested, and drew his tall black-furred frame to its feet, and stretched. At least, most versions of him did. As one, faint scenario of him stepped forward slightly, another lay still on the ground, barely visible, while another whispy ghost simply rolled over onto his other side. In moments, each of these faded, leaving his most likely self standing, eyes closed, smelling the morning air, greeting the imminent day.

-

You get beat up in school, here. When you're the only tattooed purple freak in class, it doesn't matter that they teach turning the other cheek. Eventually, I learned how to use the very air around me to protect me from over zealous braggarts. At the time, I had no idea how I did this, nor that everyone else could not do it. Only later, long after such a shield ceased to be a necessity just to get through the week, did I learn this was something all Shoal probably knew how to do at will, in their long dead civilzations. Probably - the history book I'd stolen had been rather shrewd and skeptical in it's assessment of a few conflicting narratives describing Shoal society. And, like them, once word had spread that I was preternaturally difficult to damage in a fight, the violence started to peter out, save for the occasional ambush. I had hoped to learn something new that I couldn't do yet before mom found and incinerated my books.

As a dream-spawn, my body has a will of its own. My skin ranges from a deep violet to royal blue, and is covered with dark black and grey lines and patterns that shift slowly but steadily. I have learned to design and control the patterns on it. With a concentration, I can write and draw patterns with my own body without ink or paint. It's handy to be able to communicate visually. That's why I prefer to have my arms bare, when it isn't too cold.

Another book in that collection that mom had torched had taught me to enscribe arcane spells in print. I'd actually been practicing in a sketchbook, and had quite a collection of different effects before it, too, went up in smoke. So I learned how to imbue enscriptions directly onto my skin, instead. At first it was amusing to watch my mom freak over them, but that got boring soon enough. I started wearing clothes to cover them up, and then I could do whatever I wanted.

At the risk of understatemnt, it had become clear to me that I had taken a dangerous position. Whether that meant that I would be the one exposed to the danger, or that I would be the one exposing it to others was an unsettled question - but I most certainly had a preference.

I hadn't needed them for awhile, but it was time to brush off the old inscription skills and store up some power for emergencies. But the possibilities were distracting me. When I first saw the energy of the air, and began to marshall each discrete fragment, selecting the ones that were exerting themselves in proper diretion relative to my form, //they too// had massive possibility-shadows. Magical energy is positively overwhelming in the enormous number of forms it can take. These possibilities were a bit too much for me to sort out, and, before I knew it, my focus wasn't enough to crystallize the proper scenarios before my Shoal energy leeched away, unformed.

Crap. This was a new wrinkle I'd have to figure out.

-

Drex was gone. He'd chilled out with us the night before, but nobody had so much as noticed his absence until now. Asshole - "Tweak", as he preferred to be known - was still snoozing, and Tzak's zombie made of the mage we'd defeated last night was dutifully staring at where the lights of the city had been the night before, stock still, the bottle of pureed cheescake ulcer dangling from his grip. But the only person I'd actually had even a tenuous connection to, by way of my employer, had disappeared. Given we all were just looking to head back to Victoria, I wouldn't say I was heartbroken, though.

Tzak and I start to talk lore and magic - shop, basically. I told him about Quiddity, stuff I remember from my old books. I ask him about Nekra, his patron, and how one goes about putting healing and necromancy in the same arcane power portfolio. Since I'm always overexerting myself when I re-shuffle my priorities in tense situations (like last night), I ask him if we might try enscribing some of his healing power on me, to squirrel it away for future use. In return, he wants me to take a look at the ex-mage's staff with my new vision of the world.

It's impressive. Though there are no overt ghost possibilities to it physically (it's solid and inanimate), there seem to be faint possibilities within the staff itself, as if it is alive, and has a will of its own. The arcana within it are too busy, and very generic. This thing could help you do... anything. If you can persuade it to cooperate. It seems to require some cajoling.

The conversation turns to more proximate matters. Zee, the ghostly coyote-form that had guided he and Drex to hunt down the mage we punctured (coyote? That should have been my first clue), had appeared last night while I was asleep, and informed us that not only was this mage NOT the mage they'd been tasked with stopping, but he wasn't even a flunkie of his; he was actually the //guardian// of the gate. And we had just buttered our bread with him, and destroyed the gate in the process, supposedly. Once Drex greets a visitor with lead, all other salutations are off.

Oops!

Now, mind you, at this point, I still think Zee is full of shit. At the time we took him down, I found it highly improbable that the fate of my entire home realm would be seriously threatened by someone who couldn't take less punishment than I used to boot into the asses of the scrawny punks in school uniforms that used to prowl my junior high school just for looking at me funny. Twice!

For a moment, I was worried when I heard that this wasn't the mage. But really - if the gates to Quiddity are so valuable, why the hell would they be guarded by someone as pathetic as this dork? I mean, I'd been running scared shitless when he showed up, flew into air and started tossing around fire and brimstone out of nowhere. I had been lead to expect something a bit more titanic than the pot roast I just stuck an electric punch-awl into.

It didn't add up.

Playa Cramp - noun.
That sinking feeling you get when you're reminded of Burning Man when you know you won't be going this year.

http://www.facebook.com/deerexploderbomb?v=wall&story_fbid=123455917690768

The lyrics may be wrong
but the distance
is near
between these sentiments, not long.
Just the range of
a tear.

Remind me of a song,
and suddenly,
my dear,
my whole afternoon is gone.
Or should i say,
it's here.

It takes a village to raze a child.

If you're going to live, live at the end.

I'm back up on the desktop. Instead of fumbling through looking for space on old drives, I just cleared out space for an Ubuntu root partition (16GB) by resizing the server backup partition, which now also contains my ~100GB home directory (yes, that's all). I then just symlinked the /home/ to where it lives there (sort off; All I needed is /home/.ecryptfs for the encrypted filesytem, but details, details). Following my instructions from my last install, it was fast and easy, and here I am. I am even almost done setting up my mail system configuration (claws-mail > IMAP > dbmail > mysql > ecryptfs filesystem = complicated, but FAST!).

During this process, I realized that since my root partitions are so small, they might make decent candidates for one of those super-fast, spendy Solid State Drives. 16GB or 32GB ones are maybe in the $40-$60 range. If I popped my mysql db files on that, and maybe my Firefox profile, that could be pretty snappy.

I also think once I get a replacement drive, I will be lining it up in an LVM RAID with the existing one. I've wanted to do live LVM snapshotting for a long time! Mostly on the web server, though. I'm still using Debian on the server, even though I've wanted to switch to Ubuntu for a while. Virtualizing the server might also be helpful. We used to upgrade server hardware what seemed like every year, but there haven't been any screaming deals to take advantage of in recent months. Oh, well.

Blah blah blah.

Art is the natural end of a species which has already fulfilled its purpose in the evolutionary development cycle. We've given birth and raised our child species: nations, and corporations. They are now in charge. Time to retire, before we die. Because we will.

Our obligations to the great cycle of natural selection are fulfilled. We are now free.

free, like a rolling stone. free, like the falling. free, like the dying. free, like those with nothing left to lose.

free, like the dead.

I moved all of my home directory data, which lived on a separate partition from the Ubuntu Karmic Koala root filesystem on that failing hard drive, onto the web server's backup drive, because there was plenty of room. After updating it with some newer data from my use of it on the laptop, I installed Ubuntu Lucid Lynx (just released at the end of April) back onto a partition on the failing drive, after thoroughly formatting it and running a bad blocks scan to catch any bad sectors. Recovery went so smoothly that last night, I was back up and running on most of my old desktop, except for my email system.

Then, it crashed again. hard. Just like last time. It's unbootable. Nasty. Again, however, my data, being safe on a good drive (to say nothing of being backed up to the laptop), is safe.

It's time to quit testing the damn thing to death and give up. I have to start the installation all over again. Luckily, I documented my steps as I went (as usual, and on the good drive), so this isn't as painful as it could be.

I think I'll just have to dig up one of my old IDE drives; I only need an 8GB partition.

*sigh*

Some words from the author about Knowing Jack:

Knowing Jack is the decided-upon title of the chronicle of a character I am playing in a tabletop roleplaying game (ala Dungeons & Dragons) with some friends. Tayo Wallenburg runs the games every other Thursday night. They're being played within the systems and settings of nWo, a game developed over more than ten years by Ric Jesson (who's also excited to finally be a player, instead of a 'Scene Lord'/Gamemaster) and his many players. I'm working with Ric on deploying a website for the game, to tie together the far-flung resources of the smattering of player blogs, the abandoned rules wiki, the Facehook group, and as a place to distribute releases of rulebooks, supplements, and experimental systems.

The title jumped up at me, and was notable for several interpretable meanings: There is, of course, the play on "you don't know jack", and the pun on the fact that the character's name is Jack. But there's a deeper level. Jack is a diviner - a sorcerer practicing the magical arts of Finding Things Out(tm). This includes things like the future, or the finer points of enchantments, or the names, pursuits, and relationships of people and things in his presence. //Knowing// is what he does intuitively, and so, in the title, knowing is not just a verb applied to the reader, but an //adjective// attached to Jack himself. He is "Knowing Jack". You know - the one smiling and nodding, and winking at you.

Jack is my fourth nWo character. I spent a lot of very enjoyable time designing him from a tactical standpoint, pouring over the available body of rules and trying to squeeze out every last bit of power and potential through my choices of race, martial devotions, skills, cybernetics, and arcane powers. I even spent a couple of sessions grilling Ric over rule systems that weren't clear, and whether ideas of mine would be permissible in a game. This process took me back to games like Steve Jackson's Car Wars, where easily half the fun is in designing vehicles you then take into combat and blow to pieces. To me, this was important because I didn't often have a chance to play with other players, and so having something fun to do on your own was nice. It's rules-lawyering, rather than dramatic storytelling, but both of these have their place as fun things.

From there, the character's backstory flowed, pretty much in the real time in which I posted each piece in the series so far. Only the last posting, "A Killer is Born", and a little bit of the tail end of the previous post, are the result of actual game play; the rest spring directly from my arbitrary, authorial conception of the character's background.

You may have noticed a distinct change of tone and substance to the story at that point. I had planned on playing an overgrown homeless teen runaway (part of Jack's freakishness - and charm - is that he looks 30, but he's actually 13), but the needs of the plot demanded a working stiff. That's why the hiring process for GIS's "operatives" was so squeeaky clean, fast, and painless, but I worked it into Jack's narrative of "leading a charmed life" without too much trouble (and with not a little humor).

You may have also noticed that, as quickly as they flew, the entries also stopped. Games are every two weeks, so there's not much to do about that except wait for the next one. I suppose I could just keep writing backstory vignettes (as I did with the dream sequence at the end of the last post), either as flashbacks, as they relate to in-game events, or for insertion into the existing exposition.

I don't know, quite yet, that I really identify with Jack himself. He's a violent, cocky, smart-assed dickhead. This is unsurprising, given his birth in rules-lawyering and tactical optimization (for a sorcerer, I'm finding he's pretty good in a fight), but this is one of Tayo's first outings running a story, and while I've certainly enjoyed it so far, to be frank, I find the plotting a bit... unsubtle, so far. But I'm getting ahead of myself, for certain. I've only played one session, so far.

A thing to note is that the events of the story, as I write it, are not guaranteed to reflect the actual events of the game itself. As 'Scene Lord' (the rather amusing official title of a gamemaster in nWo parlance), Tayo has the last word on what goes on in the game. As the author of Knowing Jack, I do, within it's pages. I reserve the right to leave boring crap out, embellish for my own amusement and that of my audience, or even to fuck with the minds of other players who may be reading it (you have been warned, heh, heh, heee!). Game-related geekery notes may be sprinkled throughout the text in square brackets, for those interested.

I don't promise that the quality of the writing will be great. I've already noticed that I have problems sticking to tense, although it's definitely going to be a first person perspective. Hell, I don't even promise I'll keep writing the damn thing. This is strictly fun for me, and there will only be as much writing and editing as fun permits. I may bundle it up for printing or web publishing at some point, but if you're only interested in reading Knowing Jack in isolation from my other blog posts, you can follow it at: http://n8o.r30.net/drupal6/tag/knowing-jack . It's syndicated that way, as well, if you're into that.

I hope it amuses you half as much as it will amuse me.

A bill got paid today. A bill for a a promise I made to a friend. And I had enough left over to buy food. There are still other late bills, but we are now working on next month's rent.

My desktop is mostly back. I had enough room on a different backup drive for the server to put all my desktop data on, as well. RAID will wait until xmas. It's been quite a bit of work, but there haven't been any inexplicable problems in getting back and operational with all my data. It appears my browser history was corrupted, but that was it. I still have to setup my email database rig, but I am back on my desktop now. My laptop only overheated once today *cough*.

And yet, i am a bit bewildered. I wasted yesterday, trying to understand how I was crippled by anxiety. More than the usual back and forth of whether I am responsible for how badly I feel, or whether my feelings were external circumstances (a persistent, though vacuous, dichotomy), I was attempting to acknowledge the merits of the possibility that it was how I felt about my circumstances that was more important than the circumstances.

Anxiety, like pain, like joy, like pleasure, are distractions. They focus the attention. Facehooks. Fear and stress break you down, but they get you thinking about how to solve your problems. And they will not let you go until you win.

I was pretty frightened, but I made progress today. I've got a belly full. My relationships are now alright, and my next deadlines are weeks away. If circumstances of the world can do this for me, why can't I do it for myself?

...I'm babbling, tired, and I don't know what my point is.

I really, really, want a bigger buffer of rent paid on THIS place.

too many things happening to me, instead of because of me.

Otherworld registration, website, dpw setup, costumes, structures, groceries, greeting, rangering, info, wiimote light show, fire safety, teardown.

hard drive crash, re-install, recovery, server logjam, framework bugs, shopping cart behind schedule, broke people who owe me money, late on the rent buffer, bills overdue, haven't been outside in two days.

I'm feeling a smidge overcommitted.

I need a chocolate chunk cookie, some milk, and a nap.

It appears some portions of my main desktop hard drive have taken a vacation.

My children, however, are safe.

Well, not literally. It just occurred to me that there are few phrases one can utter that hold the kind of visceral reassurance to human beings that that one does. I use it here, symbolically, to indicate that I haven't lost any data of any but the most trivial value. It may take a few hours to recover (and, given I'm working on my laptop with the last backup of my home directory, which completed just before bedtime Sunday morning, at least I'm still online), but I was planning to upgrade to Ubuntu Lucid anyway. Now I have an excuse. :)

I'm noticing that there were several pro-active decisions on my part that have saved my bacon, here.

Last fall, I set aside a pair of 4-8GB partitions to install Ubuntu releases (Karmic, with one reserved for Lucid) on, and just import my /home/ directory from where it lived on the big Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope partition I had been using. This proved a good idea, because it was the Karmic Koala root mini-partition that corrupted. The drive started throwing read errors over the course of 15 minutes, hanging momentarily as I was trotting out an email, and then never coming back. Booting from Karmic failed entirely, and booting from a rescue CD would not mount or even //check// the partition using fsck without throwing hardware read errors. Nasty. Of course, all of my important data on the big partition, which fsck'ed just fine, thanks.

Even if I'd lost it, I'd still have lost only a day or two of new data, since my laptop had the backup. I posted before (somewhere) about how I am unable to upload my desktop backups to my server over Shaw's connection, but of course, that's just one backup - my laptop is the other one. That's why the mantra is backup, backup, //backup//. Never rely on just one backup. ;)

I did lose my Karmic root/boot partition, with the /etc/ configuration and package lists, but I have also gotten into the habit of documenting all my system installs in a changelog.txt file. When I started doing this, I left the file in /etc/changelog.txt, and included it in a configuration archive which I backed up to my desktop (which then cascaded to the desktop backups), but more recently, Ifigured I should just log it right on my desktop to begin with, instead of leaving it in /etc/ . Go figure: that's what I just lost.

So now I have some decisions to make: Do I raid the larder to replace the drive? Do I check the connections and see if it's something I can fix? Do I risk installing a new Ubuntu system on the Lucid partition? It occurs to me that if had a RAID configuration, recovering from a failure like this would be a lot less work in the future. Do I shift work to my laptop, even though it might overheat a lot?

So much for working on my Wiimote project today...

Remember Parakey? It was designed to be an open-sourced antidote to the cloud, whereby all your data lived on your PC, and was transparently uploaded to all your social networks. There was no need to think about data portability, because you always kept your data with you to begin with. There wasn't much need to think about privacy, because you just had to cut off access by whatever social nets (or users) you didn't like.

Then Facebook bought them. Now, they're dead.

End of story.